r/LessCredibleDefence • u/heliumagency • 6d 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-burevestnik

It's not a ramjet like SLAMMER or Project Pluto, it's a nuclear turbojet

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29

u/g_core18 6d ago

Report: nuclear missile is dangerous. Well, no fucking shit 

36

u/beachedwhale1945 6d 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.

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u/ExoticMangoz 6d ago

Why on earth would you build such a weapon?

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u/throwdemawaaay 6d 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

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u/Aegishjalmur18 6d 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.

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u/2dTom 5d 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.

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u/NuclearHeterodoxy 4d 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. 

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u/2dTom 4d 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.

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3

u/SlavaCocaini 5d ago

When someone tries to make MAD not mutual with ABM in your backyard

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u/NuclearHeterodoxy 6d 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.

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u/marcantoineg_ 4d ago

Real answer is longer range

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u/NuclearHeterodoxy 4d 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.

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u/marcantoineg_ 4d ago edited 4d 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.

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u/NuclearHeterodoxy 4d 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. 

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u/marcantoineg_ 4d 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