Fingers dancing over the black-and-white keys, physicist Theodore Merkle accompanied the bawdy songs being belted out by his crew on the piano perched on the back of the truck, lurching into the village of Mercury, Arizona. Their elation could be shared with no one: Earlier that afternoon, on 14 May 1961, on a great arid plain called the Jackass Flats, Merkle’s crew had fired up a giant, bright red device that was roughly the size and shape of a steam locomotive. It was designed to power a cruise missile flying at tree-top level for thousands of kilometres at three times the speed of sound.
The project’s leadership had code-named it Pluto, for the Roman god of the dead, who was devoured by his father, Saturn, and then vomited out with his siblings into the universe.
Last week, President Vladimir Putin announced that the 9M730 Burevestnik cruise missile made its first successful long-endurance flight, traversing more than 14,000 kilometres over 15 hours with its nuclear-powered ramjet engine. The endurance is unimaginable with conventional fuels. This means the Burvestnik—Russian for ‘Storm Petrel’—can evade air defences by taking circuitous routes or loitering near the targets for days.
Even though Putin had unveiled the Burevestnik as one of six super-weapons back in 2018, its nuclear-powered engine is no radical technological breakthrough. The strategic concept underpinning the Burevestnik would have been familiar to the engineers who were celebrating the first successful test of a nuclear-powered engine at Mercury more than six decades ago.
Less than two months after Merkle’s team successfully tested an advanced version of their nuclear ramjet in 1964—producing the equivalent of over 150 kilonewtons of thrust, or the maximum power of both the Rafale’s two Snecma M88 engines—the programme was shut down. Even though their Tory IIC engine could have traversed a staggering 37,000 kilometres, competing technologies—notably the Inter-Continental Ballistic Missile (ICMB)—offered long-range nuclear-warhead delivery at lower costs and with fewer risks.
This raises the question of why Russian nuclear strategists—familiar with the sound reasoning behind America’s decision to abandon nuclear ramjet propulsion—have now invested in the Burevestnik and other new categories of weapons. The answer offers disturbing insights into the unravelling of the nuclear order, which has long mitigated the risks of war between the three superpowers.
Search for power
The second decade of the Cold War was an excellent time to be a mad scientist. The roseate optimism that marked the end of World War 2 was shattered by the Korean conflict in 1950, leading many strategists to conclude that nuclear war between the superpowers was inevitable, and possibly imminent. Fear led politicians to commission ever-larger nuclear bombs, and ever-faster combat jets to deliver them—as well as more eccentric projects, like the radiation-spewing rocket that tossed out thermonuclear bombs.
Engineers working with fuel-hungry jet engines had begun hitting trade-offs between speed and range, and saw nuclear engines as a potential solution. Clarence ‘Kelly’ Johnson, the aeronautical engineer who designed legendary aircraft like the Lockheed U-2 and SR-71 Blackbird, noted that “the advent of a type of power plant that will solve the range problem is of the utmost importance”.
Lightweight materials to shield human crews from radioactivity did not then exist, so creating such an aircraft posed special challenges. From 1956, an experimental reactor was fitted to a Convair NB-36H strategic bomber, with the original crew cabin replaced by an 11-tonne nose section lined with lead and rubber. To further protect against radiation escaping from the reactor, nine water-filled shield tanks were fitted into the central fuselage.
The NB-36H made 47 flights from July 1955 to March 1957, with the reactor going critical for the first time in flight in September 1955—though it was never coupled to the engines. The project, then-classified documents show, was killed off in 1959, after it became clear no one could commit to a deadline for its completion.
An uncrewed missile allowed for substantial reductions in weight and complexity, though the ramjet still needed special ceramic components to survive the 2,500°C temperatures of the reactor core, as well as environmental factors such as rain, snow, and salt water. The Coors Porcelain Company—an offshoot of the brewers of Coors beer—created 5,00,000 ceramic fuel elements used in the reactor.
Even though Pluto had an engine, the missile it was meant to power—Supersonic Low-Altitude Missile, or SLAM—had not moved past the design stage. The challenge would almost certainly have been met, but a growing ranks of critics began asking just what mission Pluto was meant for. The lack of a clear answer led to the project being terminated.
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SLAMming the brakes
For all the magnificence of the technical achievements, the Burvestnik faces the same question. The missile, unlike Pluto’s SLAM, is subsonic, making it easier to intercept than many other platforms in existence. The missile’s long loiter times and extended range are useful, but also give defenders more time to shoot it down. The operational risks are high: Fission reactors, as Chernobyl and Fukushima demonstrated, can cause catastrophic problems, and a 2019 Burevestnik accident is reported to have claimed the lives of a number of scientists.
The genesis of the Burvestnik and its sister super-weapons instead lies in the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty, signed between the United States and the Soviet Union in 1971. The treaty gave both countries the right to operate a single anti-ballistic missile site. The Soviet Union chose to protect Moscow with A135 nuclear-armed interceptor missiles, while the US had its Grand Forks base in North Dakota.
For nuclear strategists, limiting a nation-state’s ability to defend itself from attack made perfect sense: The whole point of deterrence, after all, was ensuring unacceptable damage. An ABM race, it was believed, would only lead adversaries to expand their arsenals, to ensure some warheads still got through.
In 2002, though, President George W Bush’s government withdrew from the ABM Treaty, confident that cash-strapped post-Soviet Russia simply could not match its own progress in ABM technology. The US claimed it needed ABM systems to protect against potential attacks by so-called rogue states with small numbers of missiles, like North Korea or Iran.
As America’s ABM systems became more effective, Russia and China both began to invest in exotic technologies to defeat them. Both countries began expanding their arsenal of large ICBMs capable of carrying multiple, independently-targeted warheads (MIRVs), glide vehicles, and hypersonic missiles, which can evade missile defences by flying at more than five times the speed of sound. The push has accelerated since earlier this year, when President Donald Trump announced he was seeking a BMD system to protect the entirety of the US.
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Highest stakes
At least some of Moscow’s new technologies are likely designed to help expand its arsenal and counter this future threat, while also remaining in compliance with New START. Signed in 2010, the New START treaty limits both the US and Russia to an arsenal of 1,550 ICBMs, deployed submarine-launched ballistic missiles, and deployed heavy bombers. Although some of Russia’s new weapons, such as the Sarmat ICBM, fall within New START definitions, the Burevestnik and Poseidon underwater nuclear drone arguably do not, giving it something to trade against America’s ABMs.
The real problem is that ABM systems may be buying nuclear states the mere illusion of security. As nuclear non-proliferation expert Sam Lair notes, missile defence resembles a sieve more closely than a shield, filtering out only a percentage of incoming warheads. Arrow3 and SM3 interceptors knocked out 15 of 180 Iranian missiles mid-course in their trajectory during the recent 12-day war, for $8 million per hit. Forty-five of the 165 missiles that made it through this first layer of interception hit their targets, the rest being intercepted at their terminal stage.
Even these impressive results, though, are far from the impenetrable missile shield Trump is promising voters. As the number of incoming missiles increases (as it would if Russia or China were involved) or the density of interceptors decreases (as it would over a giant area like the continental US), so would the holes in the sieve.
The nuclear sanity clawed back through the START treaty and other nuclear agreements through the later stages of the Cold War is at a real risk of being lost, as leaders are seduced by the idea that their territories can be made invulnerable. The Burvestnik test makes clear that nuclear nation-states will keep searching for means to go under, over or around ABM defences—leading the world into an expensive technological race with profoundly uncertain outcomes.
As scholar Barton Hacker notes, the Pluto story needs more attention. It shows that technological achievement is not in itself a strategic end. “Because I can” belongs in the lexicon of the professional adventurer or juvenile delinquent, not the nuclear war-fighter.
Praveen Swami is contributing editor at ThePrint. His X handle is @praveenswami. Views are personal.
(Edited by Prasanna Bachchhav)