Russia’s Burevestnik Nuclear-Powered Missile Is a Very Bad Idea

Here’s How a Nuclear-Powered Cruise Missile Works

By Dan Vergano edited by Lee Billings

Mysteries surround Russian president Vladimir Putin’s announcement on Sunday that his nation had successfully test-flown a nuclear-powered cruise missile. But there is an answer to the chief question it has prompted among the public: What exactly is a nuclear-powered cruise missile anyway?

Announced in 2018 as part of a package of new weapons that are meant to overcome U.S. defenses, Russia’s missile’s official designation is 9M730 Burevestnik (Russian for “storm petrel,” a seabird known for its long, low flights in search of prey). In his recent remarks, Putin called the Burevestnik missile “a unique weapon that no other country possesses,” and chief of the general staff of Russia’s armed forces Valery Gerasimov claimed it flew some 8,700 miles for 15 hours during its October 21 test flight. Jeffrey Lewis, a nuclear nonproliferation expert at Middlebury College, described it to the New York Times as “a tiny flying Chernobyl.”

Cruise missiles are essentially a flying jet engine that is armed with a warhead; some can fly at low altitudes to escape radar detection and air defenses. They require a boost, either via rocket launch or release from a high-speed aircraft, to get air flowing through an inlet to spin up their engine. As they fly, they compress that incoming air, mixing it with fuel and burning the mixture to produce thrust. The U.S.’s latest long-range cruise missile, the nuclear-armed AGM-181, reportedly can fly more than 1,500 miles at subsonic speeds using a conventional 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 produce thrust without the need for combusting fuel, thus greatly increasing how long it can fly. The concept itself isn’t new: in the 1960s the U.S. pursued a nuclear-powered missile of its own, dubbed Project Pluto, before abandoning the project as too risky to be worthwhile. In the case of Burevestnik, the reactor provides “unlimited” range, Putin said, though the missile still flies at subsonic speeds.

Flying a nuclear-powered missile is much harder to do than it is to announce, leading experts such as former Los Alamos National Laboratory chemist Cheryl Rofer to doubt the alleged breakthrough. Nuclear reactors are heavy and hot—neither aerodynamically convenient qualities—as well as complex, potentially making them more prone to mishaps than conventional jet engines. For example, to manage very high operating temperatures, the Burevestnik missile’s reactor may have a brittle, more breakable ceramic construction. Cooling the missile during flight could require bulking up its reactor to accommodate boreholes for airflow. Besides being unwieldy, such an “open” reactor would also expel hazardous highly radioactive particles as it flew.

A slimmer, more complex “closed” reactor would insert a heavy heat exchanger between the reactor and the airflow, eliminating the radioactive exhaust trail. But that would add more weight—and one more thing to break in flight.

Reactors can be sensitive beasts in general, and the specific operational challenges of mating one with a cruise missile are especially fraught, says technology risk researcher Chris Spedding, who wrote a 2023 analysis of the Burevestnik missile for the British American Security Information Council (BASIC), a U.K.-based nuclear security think tank. Rain, wind gusts, birds and other atmospheric surprises during low-altitude flight might alter the inflowing air to the cruise missile, degrading the reactor. In 2019 an explosion during a test of the missile’s reactor killed at least seven people and sent atmospheric radiation soaring near the test site in northern Russia.

Another testing challenge is that the missile must land with its reactor intact during testing to avoid a radiologic disaster, a capability that is likely to also add weight and hurt performance.

“I suspect that—if we are to take [the Russians] at their word—they’ve managed to nail the reactor design, which, for me, was the main technical barrier to delivery,” Spedding says.

Presently, observers worldwide are still waiting for any sign of airborne radioactive exhaust from the test flight, which was reportedly conducted over Russia’s remote northern archipelago of Novaya Zemlya. That signal might help experts determine what sort of design the missile uses, if it truly flew. “We are all curious, but we haven’t heard a lot of facts,” says Stanford University’s Persis Drell, chair of the Committee on International Security and Arms Control at the U.S. National Academy of Sciences.

Meanwhile another big mystery about Burevestnik is why Russia is pursuing the technology. In 2018 Putin boasted in a speech to the Russian parliament that Burevestnik’s unlimited range would allow it to evade missile defenses and reach the continental U.S.; an accompanying animation depicted the missile striking Florida near the Mar-a-Lago home of U.S. president Donald Trump.

Trump proposed a “Golden Dome” spaceborne missile-defense system to defeat Russian intercontinental ballistic missiles earlier this year. Whether Golden Dome can work as planned or counter a capability like that of Burevestnik remains very unclear.

But Golden Dome wouldn’t necessarily be required at all to deal with Burevestnik, Spedding says. The missile’s subsonic speed means that, once detected, it should be no better than existing cruise missiles at avoiding being shot down. And the longer it flies, the easier it should be to find and eliminate. This would make it vulnerable to conventional air defenses, Spedding says, rendering it a limited-use weapon for surprise attacks—ones that would likely trigger World War III.

“So now you’ve got a very expensive toy that you probably won’t use, that costs a lot, that, if you did use, you’d probably lose before it struck its target,” he adds. “On the subject of this missile being a bad idea, it really is up there with the worst of them.”

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