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

This is how a nuclear-powered cruise missile works

By Dan Vergano edited by Lee Billings

Mysteries surround Russian President Vladimir Putin’s announcement Sunday that his country had successfully tested a nuclear-powered cruise missile. But there is an answer to the main question this raises in the public: what is a nuclear-powered cruise missile?

Announced in 2018 as part of a package of new weapons intended to defeat U.S. defenses, the Russian missile’s official designation is 9M730 Burevestnik (Russian for “storm petrel,” a seabird known for its long, low flights in search of prey). In recent remarks, Putin called the Burevestnik missile “a unique weapon that no other country possesses,” and Russian Armed Forces Chief of Staff Valery Gerasimov claimed it flew some 8,700 miles over 15 hours during its Oct. 21 test flight. Jeffrey Lewis, an expert on nuclear nonproliferation at Middlebury College, described it to New York Times like “a little flying Chernobyl”.

Cruise missiles are essentially a flying jet engine armed with a warhead; some can fly at low altitude to evade radar detection and air defenses. They need a boost, either via rocket launch or high-speed aircraft launch, to get air flowing through an inlet to turn their engine. As they fly, they compress this incoming air, mixing it with fuel and burning the mixture to produce thrust. America’s latest long-range cruise missile, the nuclear-armed AGM-181, could travel more than 1,500 miles at subsonic speeds using a conventional jet engine.

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A nuclear-powered cruise missile replaces this jet engine with a nuclear reactor, which heats incoming air to produce thrust without needing to burn fuel, thereby greatly increasing the duration of its flight. The concept itself is not new: in the 1960s, the United States developed its own nuclear-powered missile, called Project Pluto, before abandoning the project as too risky to be worth it. In the case of the Burevestnik, the reactor offers “unlimited” range, Putin said, even though the missile still flies at subsonic speeds.

Flying a nuclear-powered missile is much harder to do than to say, leading experts such as Cheryl Rofer, a former chemist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, to doubt the so-called breakthrough. Nuclear reactors are heavy and hot – lacking aerodynamic qualities – and complex, making them potentially more accident-prone than conventional jet engines. For example, to handle very high operating temperatures, the Burevestnik missile reactor may have a more fragile and breakable ceramic construction. Cooling the missile during flight could require inflating its reactor to accommodate boreholes for air circulation. In addition to being unwieldy, such an “open” reactor would also expel dangerous, highly radioactive particles during its flight.

A thinner, more complex “closed” reactor would insert a heavy heat exchanger between the reactor and the airflow, eliminating traces of radioactive exhaust. But that would add more weight and yet another thing to brake in flight.

Reactors can be sentient beasts in general, and the specific operational challenges of mating a reactor with a cruise missile are particularly complex, 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, gusts of wind, birds and other atmospheric surprises during low-altitude flight could alter the air entering the cruise missile, thereby 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 radiological catastrophe, a capability that is also likely to add weight and hurt performance.

“I suspect that…if we are to take [the Russians] “They managed to get the reactor design right, which for me was the biggest technical hurdle to delivery,” says Spedding.

At present, observers around the world are still waiting for any sign of airborne radioactive escape from the test flight, which was reportedly carried out over the remote Novaya Zemlya archipelago in northern Russia. This signal could help experts determine what type of design the missile uses, if it actually flew. “We’re 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 US National Academy of Sciences.

Meanwhile, another big mystery surrounding Burevestnik is why Russia is pursuing this technology. In 2018, Putin boasted in a speech to the Russian parliament that the Burevestnik’s unlimited range would allow it to evade missile defenses and reach the continental United States; an accompanying animation depicted the missile hitting Florida near US President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home.

Trump proposed a “Golden Dome” space-based missile defense system to defeat Russian intercontinental ballistic missiles earlier this year. It remains very unclear whether Golden Dome can work as intended or counter an ability like Burevestnik’s.

But Golden Dome wouldn’t necessarily be necessary to deal with Burevestnik, Spedding says. The subsonic speed of the missile means that once detected, it should be no better than existing cruise missiles in 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 explains, making it a limited-use weapon for surprise attacks, potentially triggering World War III.

“You now have a very expensive toy that you probably won’t use, that costs a lot of money, and that if you did use you would probably lose before it reached its target,” he adds. “As far as this missile being a bad idea goes, it really ranks among the worst of them.”

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