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Comment by Merrill | Hacker News Reader

>The 9M730 Burevestnik (Russian: Буревестник; "Petrel", NATO reporting name: SSC-X-9 Skyfall) is a Russian experimental nuclear-powered, nuclear-armed cruise missile under development for the Russian Armed Forces. The missile is claimed to have virtually unlimited range. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9M730_Burevestnik https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_Central_Navy_Testing_Ran...

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Yes, but this is some leak from a civic nuclear power station, not some nuclear powered missile. Either from the stone-age Leningrad plant, or maybe from a secret Russian military ship cruising around that time, with a Poseidon (Skyfall) But very unlikely that that ship is nuclear powered. http://www.hisutton.com/Akademik-Aleksandrov.html

Poseidon and Skyfall are two distinct weapons with a shared motivation. Skyfall is a nuclear ramjet powered cruise missile, while Poseidon is a nuclear powered torpedo (in principle an unmanned miniature nuclear submarine with a suicide mission, although probably without hydrostatic buoyancy control.)

Both are motivated by the perception that ABM technology may render ICBMs ineffective.

Old news. Submarine-powered cruise missiles have been for decades Russia's biggest defense weapons against USA' offensive threats. You cannot just defend them. Like the Granit (which most likely was shot at the Pentagon) Those two nuclear powered missiles are not much different, just they can be theoretically be shot off days ahead. The submarine must not hide for weeks near the US coast.

ICBM's are unneeded since the 80ies. That's why they don't have them.

To be clear, a Poseidon is not a cruise missile; it's a torpedo. It has different characteristics from an Oscar class loaded with Granits. Being a torpedo (which doesn't fly) a Poseidon can only attack things on or next to the water (probably ports / coastal cities.) Because a Poseidon is slow (relative to a missile) it seems an unlikely choice for a first strike attack; it's more likely to be intended as a retaliation weapon that's hard to intercept. Russia may also be planning on creating Poseidon "silos" on the seabed of the Arctic Ocean. Possibly related to this, Russia has a single submarine capable of carrying a Poseidon, the K-329 "Belgorod" which is a stretched Oscar-II. It can also supposedly operate as a mothersub for small submarines like the Losharik; the plan may be to use a submarine like the Losharik to install Poseidons on the bottom of the Arctic Ocean to act as a 'Dead Hand' system. However after the Losharik fire, I wonder what their plans are...

The biggest advantage of a Skyfall missile over a Granit is obvious; range. If a Skyfall missile works as they plan, there'd be no need to sneak an Oscar anywhere close to the target, or even use a submarine at all. Furthermore it could strike inland targets beyond the range of a Granit fired from an Oscar sitting in coastal waters. An Oscar would need to sneak it's way up the Mississippi River if it wanted a chance of hitting a target in Nebraska with Granit missiles, which leads into:

ICBMs. With respect to ICBMs you're mistaken. Russia does have a variety of ICBMs and SLBMs still in service with plans for more. They have enough already to easily overwhelm America's extant ABM systems, which are primarily a defense against smaller nuclear threats (e.g. North Korea.) Poseidon and Skyfall are hedges against the possibility that ballistic missiles are rendered truly obsolete by ABM systems, but that scenario hasn't [yet] become reality.

Exactly the reason we don't have nuclear powered aircraft.

Disasters would be magnified exponentially.

We don't have nuclear powered aircraft because the required shielding was too heavy. Both the US and the USSR tried in the 1950s and 1960s, but the only "successful" program was the Soviet Tu-95LAL which got around the problem by simply omitting most of the shielding, irradiating the crew.

Then the ICBM made the strategic bomber obsolete, and there was no incentive to sink any more money into nuclear-powered aircraft. Concern for safety had little to do with it, especially if you compare it to other occurrences at the time [1]. Now we can build autonomous vehicles that don't care about radiation and can make use of all that power, and that's exactly what Russia is doing.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear-powered_aircraft

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_military_nuclear_accid...

1950's version: http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2015/ph241/rossi1/

At one point I'd found someone's doctoral thesis on the subject, but now it's not quickly popping up in searches on Project Pluto or SLAM.

>The Soviet Union and later Russia have been uncertain since the 1980s to what extent their ICBM nuclear arsenal is nullified by the United States' anti-ballistic missile system Strategic Defense Initiative,[7] proposed during the Reagan Administration and commonly known as the Star Wars program.[8] This type of weapon flies under the ballistic weapon shield and is part of President Putin's broader program to attempt to re-balance Russian nuclear strike capability.

>Military expert Anton Lavrov in the Izvestia article suggested that the design of the Burevestnik uses a ramjet engine, which, unlike the more traditional propulsion systems for nuclear weapons, will have radioactive exhaust throughout its entire operation.

> Military expert Anton Lavrov in the Izvestia article suggested that the design of the Burevestnik uses a ramjet engine, which, unlike the more traditional propulsion systems for nuclear weapons, will have radioactive exhaust throughout its entire operation.

That statement implies that all ramjets produce radioactive exhaust, which is false.

Interestingly the US was developing nuclear ramjets too, but stopped when ICBMs proved feasible. It's two sides of the same coin; America discontinues nuclear ramjets because they think ICBMs will work; Russia invests in nuclear ramjets because they think ICBMs won't work.

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

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