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October 28, 2025<\/p>\n
4 min read<\/p>\n
Here\u2019s How a Nuclear-Powered Cruise Missile Works<\/p>\n
Russian leader Vladimir Putin claimed his nation conducted a successful flight of a nuclear-powered cruise missile. Here\u2019s how that missile might work<\/p>\n
By Dan Vergano edited by Lee Billings<\/span><\/p>\n Russian president Vladimir Putin (left) speaks with Valery Gerasimov of the Russian Armed Forces on October 26, 2025.<\/p>\n Russian Presidency\/Kremlin Pool\/Alamy Live News<\/p>\n Mysteries surround Russian president Vladimir Putin\u2019s announcement on Sunday that his nation had successfully test-flown a nuclear-powered cruise missile. But there is an answer to the chief question it has prompted among the public: What exactly is a nuclear-powered cruise missile anyway?<\/p>\n Announced in 2018 as part of a package of new weapons that are meant to overcome U.S. defenses, Russia\u2019s missile\u2019s official designation is 9M730 Burevestnik (Russian for \u201cstorm petrel,\u201d a seabird known for its long, low flights in search of prey). In his recent remarks, Putin called the Burevestnik missile \u201ca unique weapon that no other country possesses,\u201d and chief of the general staff of Russia\u2019s armed forces Valery Gerasimov claimed it flew some 8,700 miles for 15 hours during its October 21 test flight. Jeffrey Lewis, a nuclear nonproliferation expert at Middlebury College, described it to the New York Times as \u201ca tiny flying Chernobyl.\u201d<\/p>\n Cruise missiles are essentially a flying jet engine that is armed with a warhead; some can fly at low altitudes to escape radar detection and air defenses. They require a boost, either via rocket launch or release from a high-speed aircraft, to get air flowing through an inlet to spin up their engine. As they fly, they compress that incoming air, mixing it with fuel and burning the mixture to produce thrust. The U.S.\u2019s latest long-range cruise missile, the nuclear-armed AGM-181, reportedly can fly more than 1,500 miles at subsonic speeds using a conventional jet engine.<\/p>\n If you’re enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.<\/p>\n A nuclear-powered cruise missile replaces that jet engine with a nuclear reactor, which heats the incoming air to produce thrust without the need for combusting fuel, thus greatly increasing how long it can fly. The concept itself isn\u2019t new: in the 1960s the U.S. pursued a nuclear-powered missile of its own, dubbed Project Pluto, before abandoning the project as too risky to be worthwhile. In the case of Burevestnik, the reactor provides \u201cunlimited\u201d range, Putin said, though the missile still flies at subsonic speeds.<\/p>\n Flying a nuclear-powered missile is much harder to do than it is to announce, leading experts such as former Los Alamos National Laboratory chemist Cheryl Rofer to doubt the alleged breakthrough. Nuclear reactors are heavy and hot\u2014neither aerodynamically convenient qualities\u2014as well as complex, potentially making them more prone to mishaps than conventional jet engines. For example, to manage very high operating temperatures, the Burevestnik missile\u2019s reactor may have a brittle, more breakable ceramic construction. Cooling the missile during flight could require bulking up its reactor to accommodate boreholes for airflow. Besides being unwieldy, such an \u201copen\u201d reactor would also expel hazardous highly radioactive particles as it flew.<\/p>\n A slimmer, more complex \u201cclosed\u201d reactor would insert a heavy heat exchanger between the reactor and the airflow, eliminating the radioactive exhaust trail. But that would add more weight\u2014and one more thing to break in flight.<\/p>\n Reactors can be sensitive beasts in general, and the specific operational challenges of mating one with a cruise missile are especially fraught, says technology risk researcher Chris Spedding, who wrote a 2023 analysis of the Burevestnik missile for the British American Security Information Council (BASIC), a U.K.-based nuclear security think tank. Rain, wind gusts, birds and other atmospheric surprises during low-altitude flight might alter the inflowing air to the cruise missile, degrading the reactor. In 2019 an explosion during a test of the missile\u2019s reactor killed at least seven people and sent atmospheric radiation soaring near the test site in northern Russia.<\/p>\n Another testing challenge is that the missile must land with its reactor intact during testing to avoid a radiologic disaster, a capability that is likely to also add weight and hurt performance.<\/p>\n \u201cI suspect that\u2014if we are to take [the Russians] at their word\u2014they\u2019ve managed to nail the reactor design, which, for me, was the main technical barrier to delivery,\u201d Spedding says.<\/p>\n Presently, observers worldwide are still waiting for any sign of airborne radioactive exhaust from the test flight, which was reportedly conducted over Russia\u2019s remote northern archipelago of Novaya Zemlya. That signal might help experts determine what sort of design the missile uses, if it truly flew. \u201cWe are all curious, but we haven\u2019t heard a lot of facts,\u201d says Stanford University\u2019s Persis Drell, chair of the Committee on International Security and Arms Control at the U.S. National Academy of Sciences.<\/p>\n Meanwhile another big mystery about Burevestnik is why Russia is pursuing the technology. In 2018 Putin boasted in a speech to the Russian parliament that Burevestnik\u2019s unlimited range would allow it to evade missile defenses and reach the continental U.S.; an accompanying animation depicted the missile striking Florida near the Mar-a-Lago home of U.S. president Donald Trump.<\/p>\n Trump proposed a \u201cGolden Dome\u201d spaceborne missile-defense system to defeat Russian intercontinental ballistic missiles earlier this year. Whether Golden Dome can work as planned or counter a capability like that of Burevestnik remains very unclear.<\/p>\n But Golden Dome wouldn\u2019t necessarily be required at all to deal with Burevestnik, Spedding says. The missile\u2019s subsonic speed means that, once detected, it should be no better than existing cruise missiles at avoiding being shot down. And the longer it flies, the easier it should be to find and eliminate. This would make it vulnerable to conventional air defenses, Spedding says, rendering it a limited-use weapon for surprise attacks\u2014ones that would likely trigger World War III.<\/p>\n \u201cSo now you\u2019ve got a very expensive toy that you probably won\u2019t use, that costs a lot, that, if you did use, you\u2019d probably lose before it struck its target,\u201d he adds. \u201cOn the subject of this missile being a bad idea, it really is up there with the worst of them.\u201d<\/p>\n If you enjoyed this article, I\u2019d like to ask for your support. 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I hope you\u2019ll support us in that mission.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" October 28, 2025 4 min read Here\u2019s How a Nuclear-Powered Cruise Missile Works Russian leader Vladimir Putin claimed his nation conducted a successful flight of a nuclear-powered cruise missile. Here\u2019s how that missile might work By Dan Vergano edited by Lee Billings Russian president Vladimir Putin (left) speaks with Valery Gerasimov of the Russian Armed<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":31371,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[50],"tags":[1295,18283,2669,1988,18284,6842],"class_list":{"0":"post-31370","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-environment","8":"tag-bad","9":"tag-burevestnik","10":"tag-idea","11":"tag-missile","12":"tag-nuclearpowered","13":"tag-russias"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31370","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=31370"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31370\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/31371"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=31370"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=31370"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=31370"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}On supporting science journalism<\/h2>\n
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