Putin’s nuclear torpedo and Project Pluto | Hacker News Reader

Putin’s nuclear torpedo and Project Pluto

scottlocklin.wordpress.com

104 pointscronjobber40 comments

> 65,000 lbs, 80 feet long, with the terrifying code name, SLAM (Supersonic, Low Altitude Missile), or … “project Pluto.” This thing was perilously close to being built. They tested the engines at full scale and full power at Jackass Flats, and the guidance system was good enough they used essentially the same thing in the Tomahawk cruise missile.

For those who wish to read more about it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Pluto

And for those who want to see a very interesting kind of doomsday in which this superweapon is used:

http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/colderwar.htm

A most enjoyable short story.

Nuclear powered cruise missiles also feature in Missile Gap by the same author - ICBMs not being able to work for interesting reasons.

* Waves

As someone who was a teenager in the late 70s and early 80s both A Colder War and Missile Gap appeal to my morbid fear of, and powerful fascination with, all things nuclear warish :-)

I'm about your age, then. (Born 1964, was 25 when the Berlin Wall came down: where I grew up, lived, went to school, and attended university was never more than 10km from a WarPac strategic nuclear target.)

Out of interest, were you writing perl in Edinburgh about '95? Because I have a very vague suspicion we may have met!

Yes. (At fma Ltd, who had Demon Internet's web support business until early 1997.)

> Soviet Navy sunk this idea, in part because it only had a range of 25 miles (meaning it was basically a suicide mission), but also, according to Sakharov’s autobiography, some grizzled old Admiral put it “we are Navy; we don’t make war on civilian populations…”
If it was for coastal destruction why not drop it to the bottom and then swim away and let it denotate in safety.
But in general why even bother, why not launch the 20M warhead as an ICBM and detonate above the target zone. Wouldn't water just dissipate the energy and waste it? This sounds like science fiction more than anything. Kind of like how we trolled Soviet Union with Star Wars.
BTW: Nuclear torpedos existed since at least late 50s and almost started WWIII around the Cuban Missile Crisis times. There was even a hero who saved the world related to it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasili_Arkhipov.

> Wouldn't water just dissipate the energy and waste it?
Right there in the article:
"The idea is, if you build a big enough bomb and blow it off in coastal waters, it will create a 1000 foot high nuclear tidal wave that will physically wipe out coastal cities and Naval installations, as well as pollute them with radioactive fallout."
"Worse still: blowing up a 1-100 megaton device in coastal mud will make lots of nasty fallout. Sodium-24 (from the salt in the water) is deadly."

> it will create a 1000 foot high nuclear tidal wave that will physically wipe out coastal cities and Naval installations, as well as pollute them with radioactive fallout."
That sounds unrealistic especially if it insunuates a device will wipe all all the East coast cities.
It seems anything they have will be able to wipe out all the stuff they want to wipe out just with ICBMs.
If this ever comes into play it is all over anyway.

> That sounds unrealistic especially if it insunuates a device will wipe all all the East coast cities.
Well, they'd have to use more than one.
> It seems anything they have will be able to wipe out all the stuff they want to wipe out just with ICBMs.
The idea is that this sort of weapon is a response to US anti-ICBM systems, so Russia can maintain their MAD.

> If it was for coastal destruction why not drop it to the bottom and then swim away and let it detonate in safety.
For that matter, why even be tactical about it? Just drop it off a cargo ship into the bay and let it sink under 20 feet of mud, then if war ever comes, detonate it remotely. (How you say? Obviously, signal it seismically from the other side of the planet...)

Three issues with the physics behind some statements re project pluto's.
(1) Doing damage with sonic booms. Not happening. Sonic booms do not cause serious damage. Breaking windows, scaring wildlife, keeping people up. They aren't breaking down doors. Much of our assumptions about sonic booms comes from the anti-Concorde movement that in turn is political. Even at mach3+, this thing is tiny compared to concorde and its wake would not be a weapon. The mythbusters covered this well.
(2) Fallout from the exhaust. The russians actually flew a direct cycle nuclear (ramjet-style) engine, the Tu-95LAL. The pilots died painfully, but it didn't contaminate any large area. The americans ran it on theirs on a test stand for five minutes. How is that test area now? To get the equivalent 5-minutes of overflight this thing would have to do tight laps for years and years.
(3) Flying at Mach3 at low level. Yes it can be done, but not for years or even days. At that speed/altitude the craft is well into the "thermal thicket" where friction and compression heating of the air warms the aircraft. With no fuel to burn (to dump heat) and nowhere cool to radiate, this missile would need some magic cooling system. That highspeed dash can only be a dash, which also impacts (1) and (2) above.

1) The sonic booms are from this thing moving at only a few hundred feet overhead. Concorde was also designed with efficiency in mind: sonic booms lower efficiency. I doubt as SLAM was, since it doesn't "burn" fuel. The airframe isn't even area ruled. I doubt it would flatten a modern steel reinforced concrete building without falling on it, but it would certainly break windows and damage some structures.
2) Yes, it was relatively clean with no reactor damage when tested on a stand for 5 minutes. I suspect a few days or weeks of flying at tree level the reactor would physically decay. Breathing uranium/beryllium dust seems unpleasant to me.
3) It was definitely designed to fly at low level at Mach 3 for at least as long as it takes to drop all its bombs. What happens after that is kind of irrelevant, but whatever it is is guaranteed to make a mess. If you stop to think about it; this is inherently a high temperature device. Whatever they were using for electronics and servos would have had to deal with this. It would be interesting to know how some of these subsystems worked for certain.

The first link in the article is quite interesting (the current project is named Status-6)
https://foreignpolicy.com/2015/11/12/putins-doomsday-machine...
also Russian wikipedia has a longer article on this beast
https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A1%D1%82%D0%B0%D1%82%D1%83...
it says that this contraption is straight out of Dr. Strangelove
* once it is on its way then it can't be recalled
* also they plan to put Cobalt near the fusion core, making it a cobalt bomb, just like in Dr. Strangelove ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobalt_bomb )
* Russian wikipedia says that this outrage is supposed to counter US Anti ballistic missiles. (Again Dr. Strangelove - the doomsday device was supposed to counter a massive ballistic missile buildup - for a fraction of the cost).
What worries me is that the worlds elites seem to be a bit less rational than what we had during the cold war ... The Russians seem to be a lot more saber rattling than the Soviet leadership. (I may be wrong here; the defense council is said to have considered the nuking of China during the 1969 border conflict http://www.scmp.com/article/714064/nixon-intervention-saved-... )

what the hell is NUKEMAP 3D? it's in the russian wiki, never heard of it. http://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap3d/

i think it is supposed to calculate the effect of a blast - given such parameters as height of detonation and charge, it estimates the fallout and how it is spread out by prevailing winds. They used to have a paper-wheel calculator for that https://www.fourmilab.ch/bombcalc/ ; this is the online graphical version for the 21st century.

Worth it for this alone:
"Yes, I would have worked on project SLAM: as far as I can tell, it was the most epic redneck project ever funded by the US government. Not that we should have built such a thing, but holy radioactive doomsday smoke, Batman, it would have been a fun job for a few years."
Reminds me of this old bit of Backwoods Fun: http://www.netfunny.com/rhf/jokes/89q2/origtopfus.366.html

Sounds good, but I think you could probably skip the 8-week timer.

How principled.

The article paints a very harsh criticism of the current US "established experts" on Russia. I wonder why such an important designation is being appropriated by these "fools".

Nuclear torpedos or Project Pluto is not what I'm most afraid of. This one is:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Hand_(nuclear_war) "An example of fail-deadly deterrence, it can automatically trigger the launch of the Russian intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) if a nuclear strike is detected by seismic, light, radioactivity and overpressure sensors."

Interesting, why are you afraid of it? Should you be more afraid if it wasn't there. Idea behind it makes so much sense. Its main reason for existence is to handle crazy twitchy hands of nervous people at the top of the Soviet (Russian) govt.
The idea is if they think there is an attack, say from a failed sensor, without Perimeter they'll be more likely to press the trigger while they still have time, before they are wiped out and never get a chance to retaliate. With Perimeter, they just activate it, and it will increase the chance of retaliation even if initial attack (presumably from US) succeeds. So in result they'll be less twitchy, more calm and as a result everyone lives happier, longer lives longer on earth.

The upside of this story is once after this kind of weaponry is fired off anywhere on earth there will be one hell of an economic vacuum and a lot of startup opportunities. Considering, of course, you're one of the lucky few million left alive on this planet :-).

Indeed I already have sorted enough caps to seed my own radroach farm when the day comes....

Startup idea: use ambient radiation from nuclear fallout to power bigger IoT devices. Also cheap communication and cheap heating.

1000m waves doesn't really sound believable.

He said 1000 feet, which makes it about ten times as tall as that big Tsunami in Alaska in 1958. If you look at the description of the wave created by the Baker shot at Bikini Atoll, it wasn't nearly that high:
"The disturbance created by the underwater burst caused a series of waves to move outward from the center of the explosion across the surface of Bikini lagoon. At 11 seconds after the detonation, the first wave had a maximum height of 94 feet and was about 1,000 feet from surface zero. This moved outward at high speed and was followed by a series of other waves. At 22,000 feet from surface zero, the ninth wave in the series was the highest with a height of 6 feet."
I think the 1000 feet mentioned in this article might come from a misinterpretation of "1000 feet from surface zero" which just means 1000 feet from the center of the explosion.
http://www.abomb1.org/nukeffct/enw77b2.html
[Edited because I can't read and was off by an order of magnitude on my first try.]

Doesn't this say that the 1958 Tsunami was 100 ft, not 1,000 ft, in height?
> the sudden displacement of water resulted in a megatsunami that destroyed vegetation up to 1,722 feet (525 m) above the height of the bay and a wave that traveled across the bay with a crest reported by witnesses to be on the order of 98 feet (30 m) in height.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1958_Lituya_Bay_megatsunami

Ah, you're right: "A tsunami with a record run-up height of 1720 feet..."
I guess I should read harder.

Can anyone help me out with how the run-up height is ~17x greater than the wave height? This is because the wave hits the shore and the volume of water in the wave gets squished thin, making it temporarily higher?

Waves are different around atolls than continental shelfs. The closer to land the larger the wave would get.

It says feet, not meters, which makes it a lot more possible.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1958_Lituya_Bay_megatsunami

That's because you misread the units as metres when they are actualy given as feet.

Humans are just too "clever" on destroying ourselves! Why can't we build something for improving our world?

That torpedo is for military targets in water, such as carrier. It is too small to cause tsunami, or to have much effects on ground targets.

The description of the torpedoed from the leaked Russian document, when translated, says: "destroy important economic installations of the enemy in coastal areas and cause guaranteed devastating damage to the country's territory by creating wide areas of radioactive contamination, rendering them unusable for military, economic or other activity for a long time".

The torpedo is merely the delivery vehicle. The payload would be a 20 megatonne warhead. Easily enough to cause coastal destruction.

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