nuclear-news

US analysts think the accident involved the prototype of a nuclear-powered cruise missile that the Russians call Burevestnik, or Petrel, but is known in the West by its NATO designation, Skyfall. Putin has called it “a fundamentally new type of weapon” – an “invincible missile” with virtually unlimited range, easily able to evade US defences.

When Skyfall was first announced, early last year, some Western military analysts started hyperventilating. “That’s a technological breakthrough and a gigantic achievement,” claimed one. “These weapons are definitely new, absolutely new.”

But in fact, these “new” missiles are a throwback to the early days of the Cold War. And back then, it was the United States that developed a nuclear-powered cruise missile, in the early 1960s.

“Project Pluto” was part of a Pentagon program known as Supersonic Low Altitude Missile, a clunky name almost certainly designed to yield its catchier acronym, SLAM. The missile was cancelled in 1964, never having taken flight. Nuclear-powered cruise missiles were not a good idea then, and they are not a good idea now.

That’s not to say that such weapons are not impressive, in a way.

SLAM envisioned a locomotive-sized missile flying at three times the speed of sound near treetop level, tossing out hydrogen bombs along the way and spewing radiation in its wake. (In 1990, when I worked at the National Air and Space Museum, I researched the history of the project for an article in Air and Space magazine.)

The shock wave alone might have been lethal. And since Pluto’s nuclear ramjet engine ran at 2500 degrees Fahrenheit (1371 degrees), portions of the missile would have been red-hot — literally “frying chickens in the barnyard” on the way to its targets.

Indeed, SLAM operated on the same principle as the errant low-flying B-52 bomber in Dr Strangelove. As Major Kong observed to his crew, “they might harpoon us, but they dang sure ain’t going to spot us on no radar screen.”

An alternate idea was to tie Pluto to a tether at the Nevada Test Site. (“That would have been some tether,” dryly observed another scientist at the lab.) Finally, what do you do with a highly radioactive missile once it’s been tested? Dumping it in the ocean was the solution offered back then. And it is probably Putin’s preferred solution now.

Ultimately, in the United States, cooler heads prevailed.  Six weeks after the successful static test of Livermore’s nuclear engine in Nevada in July 1964, the Pentagon pulled the plug on Pluto.

But Pluto, it seems, has risen again, this time in a Russian incarnation – a nuclear-powered Frankenstein, a flying Chernobyl.

Putin’s Skyfall cruise missile also has a seagoing sibling: a giant nuclear-powered torpedo, dubbed Poseidon, designed to destroy US port cities with a multi-megaton blast.

Of course, flying nuclear reactors and giant nuclear-armed undersea drones could do a lot of damage to cities if they really existed and were ever used. But the real danger of Putin’s Potemkin arsenal is that it will – as Khrushchev’s boast did decades ago – spark a US overreaction and lead to pressure to revive ideas like Livermore’s Pluto and Sakharov’s Poseidon: forgotten relics of Cold War 1.0 that are best left dead and buried.