
U.S. Officials Suspect New Nuclear Missile in Explosion That Killed 7 Russians - samsolomon
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/12/world/europe/russia-nuclear-accident-putin.html
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IfOnlyYouKnew
So how exactly does a "Nuclear-Propelled cruise missile" work? I would have
assumed the weight of any nuclear reactor to make any such contraption
impossible? Is this a conventional nuclear reactor producing electricity to
run an electric motor, or is there some other scheme I haven't heard of?

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wcoenen
It's a lightweight nuclear reactor that heats up air for propulsion.

US project from the fifties:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Pluto](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Pluto)

Current russian project:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9M730_Burevestnik](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9M730_Burevestnik)

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dTal
It boggles me that any country in the 21st century would attempt to build such
a horrifyingly irresponsible machine, geopolitics be damned.

This thing is basically a dirty bomb on an unstoppable cruise missile. Any
reactor powerful enough to drive a thing like that is going to make a _big_
radioactive mess wherever it lands. There's no safe way to test it, either -
you can use a dummy warhead, but you can't use a dummy reactor.

Also, clearly such a thing must be air-cooled, which means the moment you have
a launch failure, you have a meltdown on your hands (dollars to doughnuts
something like that happened here). Just _developing_ such a thing is going to
cause a huge raft of nuclear incidents.

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tdxgx
Nuclear planes have already been built and tested. The problem is the
shielding to keep the pilots from dying is too heavy. A cruise missile gets
rid of the need for that.

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dTal
Even if that were true, which as far as I can tell it isn't (both Soviet and
US nuclear aircraft programs were canceled before any powered prototypes were
made), aircraft at least are not meant to crash. All cruise missiles crash.
Deliberately pulverizing a fueled-up nuclear reactor is not a nice thing to
do.

In fact, according to Wikipedia, the risk of crashing and making a mess was a
factor in the cancellation of both programs.

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bb611
Its job is to deliver a fission warhead without being intercepted by current
or future antimissile defences, the dirty bomb inside is comparatively
unimportant.

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viraptor
So what's the motivation for those more advanced weapons? I thought we're
already at MAD and the amount of current rockets would not be stopped by any
existing system. (I.e. at least a small portion would get though) This would
make developing anything more a waste of resources/time. Is that not correct
anymore?

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nullwasamistake
Tinfoily, but perhaps US anti missile systems are more effective than were
lead to believe.

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kart23
Its not tinfoil. ICBMs are nearly impossible to stop, and the systems designed
to shoot them down only have like a ~50% chance of working.

