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Comment by roywiggins | Hacker News Reader

And that's why we didn't test one ourselves back in the 60s. You need a special kind of attitude to be willing to fly one of these things over your own country.

Or perhaps just ready access to barely-populated Arctic regions where nobody's watching you drop nuclear reactors around.

These things are the most over-the-top method of beating missile defenses. A normal response would be to just deploy more missiles, which are cheaper and faster to build than defense, so it's easy to keep up. But no, apparently they went in this direction.

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You need a special kind of attitude to be willing to fly one of these things over your own country

America tested nuclear weapons in its own country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinity_%28nuclear_test%29

The primary nuclear powers stopped doing nuclear tests decades ago for very good reasons. We're coming up on 30 years since the US or Russia has detonated a nuclear weapon.

At the time of Trinity, there was a very poor understanding of the consequences.

No; there wasn’t. We clearly didn’t know the exact numbers to expect from the detonations, but we could clearly predict that exploding bomb A is going to cause a fallout of scale 5 to 10. In the case of war you’d want to know if you’re about to kill 500k vs 1m people, but ethically speaking this number is already vastly over something to be considered OK.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_Bravo

Castle Bravo's yield was 15 megatons of TNT, 2.5 times the predicted 6.0 megatons, due to unforeseen additional reactions involving 7Li,[3] which led to the unexpected radioactive contamination of areas to the east of Bikini Atoll.

>These things are the most over-the-top method of beating missile defenses. A normal response would be to just deploy more missiles

Deploying more missiles would be visible and would clearly demonstrate aggressive intentions.

In a way that saying you are developing nuclear-powered ones does not?

I think if you count public opinion then it may be more acceptable to have small number of advanced cruise missiles than to have more missiles.

For example what sounds more aggressive, 10 cruise missiles or 1000 missiles?

More aggressive than a radiation-belching nuclear ramjet?

We don’t know the design used here. There are nuclear thermal designs that do not enit contaminated exhaust.

Not according to TFA. Do you have a source for your counterassertion? I doubt Tyler Rogoway would get such a point of fact incorrect - even when I've disagreed with his analysis I've never found him to be dishonest.

I have prior training as both aero and nuclear engineer and there are obvious design space solutions? NERVA was an open cycle reactor meaning the propulsive intake air made direct contact with the core, and ablation is what caused radioactive exhaust. Closed cycle designs are more typical in production systems in which a high temperature conventional radiator would transfer heat from the core to the jet reaction chamber. The article is flat out wrong/misinformed.

They've signed agreements limiting the amount of nuclear weapons. This is an intent to improve capabilities while staying in the framework of the treaty.

Putin has a certain reputation to maintain?

The simulation with warheads dropping on Florida reminded me of the old idea of dropping Tungsten rods from orbit onto your enemies, I'm surprised they didn't propose that one too.

"Rods from God"

> You need a special kind of attitude to be willing to fly one of these things over your own country.

Sadly, Russian leaders seem to have that attitude. About 30% of the adult male population was killed in World War II.

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