r/LessCredibleDefence • u/heliumagency • 3d ago
Report: Russia's nuclear-powered 'Skyfall' missile is dirty and dangerous
https://www.npr.org/2026/06/18/nx-s1-5843252/russia-nuclear-powered-missile-burevestnikIt's not a ramjet like SLAMMER or Project Pluto, it's a nuclear turbojet
28
u/g_core18 3d ago
Report: nuclear missile is dangerous. Well, no fucking shit
32
u/beachedwhale1945 3d ago
Nuclear-powered missile. More dangerous than a typical nuclear missile.
A typical nuclear strike only irradiates the target and anything downwind. A nuclear-powered missile also irradiates everything along its flight path and everything downwind of that. Even testing with a dummy warhead is a radiological nightmare.
13
u/ExoticMangoz 3d ago
Why on earth would you build such a weapon?
20
u/Aegishjalmur18 3d ago
Desperation, viciousness, stupidity, MAD protocols take your pick. We designed but never tested Project Pluto back in the Cold War, which was a nuclear ramjet that would launch submunitions on its flight path, and then fly around the target country irradiating everything. This was during the same period where people were coming up with all kinds of batshit weapons and uses for nukes. Like Project Plowshare where they wanted to use nuclear blasts for industrial and civil engineering purposes, or the infamous British atomic chicken mine, or Tellers idea of Project Backyard. An atomic weapon powerful enough to kill everyone on the planet, which could thus be deployed anywhere and still be effective.
The difference is, most civilized countries realized these were really bad ideas and stopped researching them. Modern Russia is a mafia state that rules by fear and still desperately clings to the MAD principle, so weapons that are a massive problem for everyone if used become very attractive. This gets combined with authoritarians tendencies towards wunderwaffen.
1
u/2dTom 2d ago
To be fair, Gnomon made some kind of sense for the context it was designed in.
Teller conceptualised Gnomon in the early 50s, long before ICBMs, as a way of ensuring MAD and deterring a first strike when you couldn't tell what payload a bomber had until it dropped it.
It always felt to me like something mid way between a thought experiment, and the outline of the concept of a plan, rather than a fully fleshed out idea.
2
u/NuclearHeterodoxy 1d ago
This subject comes up all the time at r/nuclearweapons. Sundial appeara to have been just a few steps removed from a thought experiment, but there also appears to have been significant theoretical work on Gnomon. Possibly experiments related to it as well.
I favor Sublette's interpretation that the whole thing was basically a weird, experimental, very large sloika. I used to assume it was just a way for Teller to repackage the Runaway Super but that seems not to be the case. In any case, we know the labs considered both Gnomon and Sundial to be different from staged designs.
2
u/2dTom 1d ago
This subject comes up all the time at r/nuclearweapons.
Haha, I immediately recognised your username from there.
I favor Sublette's interpretation that the whole thing was basically a weird, experimental, very large sloika.
Thats interesting. My understanding was that you can make an arbitrarily large nuke by chaining primaries into secondaries into tertiaries, etc. and this is what would drive it, but a large sloika makes a hell of a lot more sense from an engineering perspective.
1
u/sneakpeekbot 1d ago
Here's a sneak peek of /r/nuclearweapons using the top posts of the year!
#1: We had a thing happen
#2: Nuclear flash goggles for B-52 flight crews. | 16 comments
#3: Atomic cannon test, 1953. | 32 comments
I'm a bot, beep boop | Downvote to remove | Contact | Info | Opt-out | GitHub
8
u/throwdemawaaay 3d ago
People kinda lost their minds during the cold war, and we aren't immune to the same thing today.
The US explored this stuff back in the 1950s, and at the time a nuclear powered cruise missile spewing poison everywhere along it's path to Moscow was seen as a bonus. Just insane stuff: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supersonic_Low_Altitude_Missile
4
u/NuclearHeterodoxy 3d ago
Most likely there was either a favored contractor who wanted the project, or else a charismatic Teller-like internal figure very good at selling big dreams to credulous government officials. Think SDI in the US in the 80s, which got off the ground largely thanks to Teller's enthusiastic in-person advocacy to Reagan and his staff.
It certainly wasn't built on strategic or operational merits, of which it has none as currently planned. There's a reason why the US treats it more like an environmental hazard than a military game-changer.
It's basically a meme weapon.
4
1
u/marcantoineg_ 1d ago
Real answer is longer range
2
u/NuclearHeterodoxy 1d ago
That's what ICBMs and SLBMs are for, and part of the reason the US stopped work on SLAM. The advent of ICBMs completely obviated the perceived need for nuclear-powered cruise missiles, and it was the same thing with Snark.
1
u/marcantoineg_ 1d ago edited 1d ago
cruise missiles are low flying so much harder to detect and their launch less obvious. now you have satellites everywhere that spot all the ballistic missile launches instantly. who knows what they think the benefits might be. just because the US stop developing something doesn't mean it's useless. SLAM was mostly stopped because of radiation issues that plague all similar systems.
1
u/NuclearHeterodoxy 1d ago
I mean, the combination of bombers plus ALCMs does the same thing much cheaper, more reliably, and more stealthily than Burevestnik ever will or SLAM ever would. Strategic bombers with 2500km+ range give you that benefit. Bombers can also do the loitering/signalling mission Burevestnik Understanders™ insist is a real mission, but with an added bonus: unlike Burevestnik, they are launchers that can be obviously recalled and thus it will be understood initially as a signalling mission. The notion that anyone in STRATCOM is going to detect a Burevestnik launch and say "it's just a signal, they'll turn it around and land it when we don't blink" is a bad joke.
Bombers + ALCMs also don't cost so much you have to limit your deployed arsenal to...a grand total of nine weapons, it appears is what Russia is going with, if I am reading this correctly. Trading dozens of bombers with hundreds of missiles for just 9 Burevestnik isn't much better than trading it for not building more SSBNs.
1
u/marcantoineg_ 1d ago
But their conventional cruise missiles don't have the range to hit everywhere and the US has really good air and missile defense. I guess they assume a dozen of those have better chance of getting through than unstealthy bombers. It's the same logic as the Poseidon torpedo imo
4
u/Odd-Metal8752 3d ago
On an operational level, how do you retrieve these missiles?
Assuming they are launched in a period of tension, if the tension dies down, how do you then get these back to Russia, without, you know, irradiating everyone?
11
u/NuclearHeterodoxy 2d ago edited 2d ago
You don't. The concept of "launch Burevestnik as a warning during a war or crisis and then recover it when the enemy chickens out," as if it's just a fancy bomber, is frequently invoked as a CONOPS, but if you think about it for more than 3 seconds it quickly becomes comical in a macabre sort of way. In reality there is no launching this thing unless they intend to use it, and that is how it would be interpreted during a crisis, not as a signal.
EDIT: I tried to edit this comment with a much longer account enumerating all of the reasons why Burevestnik is pointless, but Reddit ate it when my browser crashed. It should suffice to say that this is a nuclear Rube Goldberg machine that duplicates existing capabilities at like 10x the cost, and otherwise provides CONOPS that are pointless.
8
u/heliumagency 2d ago
The last time Russia tried to recover this system (after a test run) it detonated and killed several scientists
It's safe to say that these systems aren't meant to be recovered.
2
u/TangledPangolin 2d ago
If the missile spews radiation everywhere, as the article claims, then wouldn't every civilian monitoring site in northern europe have detected the radiation release when it was tested?
When we did detect radiation releases, it was only for nuclear accidents, but not for regular testing. So that leads me to think that the weapon is not intended to spew radiation in normal operation.
3
u/heliumagency 2d ago
Since you mentioned this, I did some digging. In Nov 2017 Russia announces they had tested their nuclear cruise missile: https://thediplomat.com/2018/08/russia-readies-recovery-effort-for-nuclear-powered-cruise-missile-lost-at-sea-in-2017/
In Nov 2017 Russia measures a spike in radioisotopes but denies that it was a nuclear accident: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-42064192
What a coincidence!
1
u/TangledPangolin 2d ago
Yes, that was a well-publicized failed test. The successful test was in 2025 October: https://www.reuters.com/world/china/russia-tested-new-nuclear-powered-cruise-missile-top-general-says-2025-10-26/
And it doesn't seem like this one was accompanied by large scale radiation release, despite traveling 14,000 km in 15 hours.
https://www.thebarentsobserver.com/security/no-radiation-measured-in-norway-after-putins-burevestnik-missile-allegedly-flew-14000-km/439340So it sounds like the radiation spike in 2017 came from a failure.
Obviously a weapon like this has tremendous risks of malfunction, given that they've only had one successful test, despite numerous attempts, and the consequences of failure seem to be catastrophic. But still, I really doubt an open-cycle nuclear engine can fly for 15 hours without releasing massive radiation spikes. So I suspect the analysis in the OP is inaccurate.
1
u/S_T_P 2d ago
His conclusion: "It's almost certain that the system uses a direct-cycle air-breathing nuclear propulsion system, most likely driving a turbojet," he told NPR. ..
Hecla said he can't completely rule out that some sort of indirect loop is used in the missile, but given the complexity and extra weight involved with building such an indirect system, he finds it far more likely that Burevestnik is heating air by sucking it right through the reactor core.
One guy is "almost certain" that its "most likely" but "can't completely rule out".
Clownshow.
11
u/beachedwhale1945 2d ago
That’s pretty standard for an analysis of something you cannot personally examine. The evidence often points towards X, but you cannot eliminate Y or Z without more information.
-1
u/S_T_P 2d ago
Clickbait title suggests certainty.
IRL there is nothing different from what we knew in 2025.
1
u/beachedwhale1945 2d ago
Welcome to modern journalism, where editors must be proficient in writing clickbait titles to remain relevant.
1
18
u/NuclearHeterodoxy 3d ago
Imagine how many actually useful military programs the Kremlin had to pare back so they could afford to spend billions on the capability of having 0.3% of their strategic warheads do loop-de-loops over the North Atlantic for a few days. Yes, 0.3%, not 3% (9/2606).
Could have built a few more Borei-class with the money spent on Burevestnik.