Didn’t the US come up with the idea of a nuclear powered ramjet missile back around the cold war? I seem to recall the idea was that it’d massively contaminate everything it flew over before crashing and exploding. It would be able to fly for many hours or days and shooting it down just meant a load of radioactive scrap landed on your head. I think it too was deemed “uniquely stupid” and shelved, but it sounds like the Russians have resurected the idea.
Yep, the USA build a bunch of them and ran several tests, so they are very qualified to know how bad an idea this is. Radioactive pollution in the air + the risk of an active nuclear reactor falling from the sky. Supposedly some Russians have already died in 2019 when recovering a missile that crashed in 2017.
Didn’t the US come up with the idea of a nuclear powered ramjet missile back around the cold war? I seem to recall the idea was that it’d massively contaminate everything it flew over before crashing and exploding. It would be able to fly for many hours or days and shooting it down just meant a load of radioactive scrap landed on your head. I think it too was deemed “uniquely stupid” and shelved, but it sounds like the Russians have resurected the idea.
The Russian way: Impractical, self-harming, unreliable, half-assed. 10% research, 20% development, 20% hype, 50% damage control and saving face.
Yep, the USA build a bunch of them and ran several tests, so they are very qualified to know how bad an idea this is. Radioactive pollution in the air + the risk of an active nuclear reactor falling from the sky. Supposedly some Russians have already died in 2019 when recovering a missile that crashed in 2017.
A much more in depth article than the wiki article, but with more speculation: https://basicint.org/brief-burevestnik/
Yes, the nuclear torpedo was too.