Russia’s Burevestnik Nuclear-Powered Missile Is a Very Unhealthy Concept

Right here’s How a Nuclear-Powered Cruise Missile Works

By Dan Vergano edited by Lee Billings

Mysteries encompass Russian president Vladimir Putin’s announcement on Sunday that his nation had efficiently test-flown a nuclear-powered cruise missile. However there’s a solution to the chief query it has prompted among the many public: What precisely is a nuclear-powered cruise missile anyway?

Introduced in 2018 as a part of a package deal of recent weapons that are supposed to overcome U.S. defenses, Russia’s missile’s official designation is 9M730 Burevestnik (Russian for “storm petrel,” a seabird identified for its lengthy, low flights seeking prey). In his latest remarks, Putin referred to as the Burevestnik missile “a novel weapon that no different nation possesses,” and chief of the final employees of Russia’s armed forces Valery Gerasimov claimed it flew some 8,700 miles for 15 hours throughout its October 21 check flight. Jeffrey Lewis, a nuclear nonproliferation knowledgeable at Middlebury Faculty, described it to the New York Instances as “a tiny flying Chernobyl.”

Cruise missiles are primarily a flying jet engine that’s armed with a warhead; some can fly at low altitudes to flee radar detection and air defenses. They require a lift, both by way of rocket launch or launch from a high-speed plane, to get air flowing by way of an inlet to spin up their engine. As they fly, they compress that incoming air, mixing it with gasoline and burning the combination to provide thrust. The U.S.’s newest long-range cruise missile, the nuclear-armed AGM-181, reportedly can fly greater than 1,500 miles at subsonic speeds utilizing a standard jet engine.

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A nuclear-powered cruise missile replaces that jet engine with a nuclear reactor, which heats the incoming air to provide thrust with out the necessity for combusting gasoline, thus enormously rising how lengthy it will probably fly. The idea itself isn’t new: within the Sixties the U.S. pursued a nuclear-powered missile of its personal, dubbed Undertaking Pluto, earlier than abandoning the venture as too dangerous to be worthwhile. Within the case of Burevestnik, the reactor gives “limitless” vary, Putin mentioned, although the missile nonetheless flies at subsonic speeds.

Flying a nuclear-powered missile is far more durable to do than it’s to announce, main specialists similar to former Los Alamos Nationwide Laboratory chemist Cheryl Rofer to doubt the alleged breakthrough. Nuclear reactors are heavy and sizzling—neither aerodynamically handy qualities—in addition to advanced, probably making them extra vulnerable to mishaps than standard jet engines. For instance, to handle very excessive working temperatures, the Burevestnik missile’s reactor could have a brittle, extra breakable ceramic building. Cooling the missile throughout flight might require bulking up its reactor to accommodate boreholes for airflow. Moreover being unwieldy, such an “open” reactor would additionally expel hazardous extremely radioactive particles because it flew.

A slimmer, extra advanced “closed” reactor would insert a heavy warmth exchanger between the reactor and the airflow, eliminating the radioactive exhaust path. However that might add extra weight—and another factor to interrupt in flight.

Reactors will be delicate beasts generally, and the precise operational challenges of mating one with a cruise missile are particularly fraught, says expertise danger researcher Chris Spedding, who wrote a 2023 evaluation of the Burevestnik missile for the British American Safety Data Council (BASIC), a U.Ok.-based nuclear safety assume tank. Rain, wind gusts, birds and different atmospheric surprises throughout low-altitude flight may alter the inflowing air to the cruise missile, degrading the reactor. In 2019 an explosion throughout a check of the missile’s reactor killed at the least seven folks and despatched atmospheric radiation hovering close to the check web site in northern Russia.

One other testing problem is that the missile should land with its reactor intact throughout testing to keep away from a radiologic catastrophe, a functionality that’s prone to additionally add weight and harm efficiency.

“I believe that—if we’re to take [the Russians] at their phrase—they’ve managed to nail the reactor design, which, for me, was the principle technical barrier to supply,” Spedding says.

Presently, observers worldwide are nonetheless ready for any signal of airborne radioactive exhaust from the check flight, which was reportedly performed over Russia’s distant northern archipelago of Novaya Zemlya. That sign may assist specialists decide what kind of design the missile makes use of, if it actually flew. “We’re all curious, however we haven’t heard lots of details,” says Stanford College’s Persis Drell, chair of the Committee on Worldwide Safety and Arms Management on the U.S. Nationwide Academy of Sciences.

In the meantime one other huge thriller about Burevestnik is why Russia is pursuing the expertise. In 2018 Putin boasted in a speech to the Russian parliament that Burevestnik’s limitless vary would enable it to evade missile defenses and attain the continental U.S.; an accompanying animation depicted the missile placing Florida close to the Mar-a-Lago dwelling of U.S. president Donald Trump.

Trump proposed a “Golden Dome” spaceborne missile-defense system to defeat Russian intercontinental ballistic missiles earlier this 12 months. Whether or not Golden Dome can work as deliberate or counter a functionality like that of Burevestnik stays very unclear.

However Golden Dome wouldn’t essentially be required in any respect to cope with Burevestnik, Spedding says. The missile’s subsonic pace implies that, as soon as detected, it needs to be no higher than current cruise missiles at avoiding being shot down. And the longer it flies, the better it needs to be to seek out and get rid of. This is able to make it susceptible to traditional air defenses, Spedding says, rendering it a limited-use weapon for shock assaults—ones that might probably set off World Battle III.

“So now you’ve obtained a really costly toy that you simply most likely received’t use, that prices loads, that, for those who did use, you’d most likely lose earlier than it struck its goal,” he provides. “As regards to this missile being a nasty thought, it truly is up there with the worst of them.”

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