The recent explosion of a Russian missile and release of associated radiation, which, according to U.S. accounts has killed seven nuclear experts and technicians, may be related to the country’s attempt to develop a nuclear engine for a long-range cruise missile.
As the Russian government has claimed since 2018, the New York Times noted, the explosion way have occurred during testing of what NATO calls the SSC-X-9 Skyfall cruise missile, which Vladimir Putin has claimed could strike anywhere in the world at any time. Cruise missiles fly low, under radar surveillance, making them difficult for targets to intercept and destroy, unlike high-altitude ballistic missiles. If powered, or assisted, by a nuclear engine, they could have extended flight times, increasing the threat.
As some details emerged – the Russian government has, as usual, been sparing with facts – President Trump tweeted, “The United States is learning much from the failed missile explosion in Russia. We have similar, though more advanced, technology. The Russian ‘Skyfall’ explosion has people worried about the air around the facility, and far beyond. Not good!”
The British newspaper Independent commented, “The post raised a number of possibilities: that Mr Trump had casually revealed the existence of a secret US nuclear programme; that he had misunderstood the nature of his country’s nuclear arsenal; or that the claim was a baseless brag.”
My bet is on the lie, so characteristic of Trump. The alternative is that he has revealed a deep, dark secret of U.S. military strategy and weapons development. That’s also plausible.
As I discussed in my 2012 book “Too Dumb to Meter: Follies, Fiascoes, Dead Ends and Duds on the U.S. Road to Atomic Energy,” which focused on military nuclear projects in the post WWII era, the then-Atomic Energy Commission and the Defense Department collaborated on what Georgia Tech nuclear engineer James Mahaffey called “the weapons system from hell.”
It was a nuclear-powered cruise missile, carrying nuclear warheads that could reign down hell and damnation on our enemies. Begun in 1955, it was called Project Pluto, named for the Greek god of the underworld, also the namesake of plutonium, used in nuclear weapons. Gen. Donald Keirn, an Air Force lifer who ran the nation’s military nuclear flight program (which also included a failed attempt at a nuclear powered strategic bomber) in a 1960 paper, described “a force of supersonic, low-altitude ramjet missiles on ceaseless mobile ground alert within the borders of the United States.” The inevitable acronym was SLAM for Supersonic, Low-Altitude Missile.
But there were serious problems with Pluto. Among them:
* Stealth. The missiles would have been the opposite of stealthy. Program aerospace engineer John White said, “SLAM’s shock wave overpressure alone (162 dB) would have devastated structures along it flight path.” That flight path likely would have been over U.S. territory and over our allies.
* Radiation. White added, “And if that were not enough, the type’s nuclear fueled ramjet would continuously spew radiation-contaminated exhaust over all of the countryside.” Again, over the U.S. and our allies.
* Indiscriminate destruction. It was, as I described it, “designed to be a devilishly diverse death machine, indiscriminate in the rain of radiation and force of explosion it brought down on its target and in its path.”
The military and the AEC moved Pluto off of the drawing boards and began testing nuclear ramjet engines in 1961. But defense analysts in the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations had begun raising objections to the project on military and cost grounds.
While the powerful Congressional Joint Committee on Atomic Energy (which never saw an atomic pipedream it couldn’t support) continued to support Pluto. But eventually the skeptical bureaucrats – who called SLAM “Slow, Low and Messy” prevailed over the enthusiastic politicians. In a 1990 article, flight historian Gregg Herken described Pluto as a “flying Chernobyl” and quipped, “Pluto had begun to look like something only Goofy could love.”
Orphaned and abandoned, a missile without a mission, Pluto crash landed in July 1964 as the new fiscal year began with no funds appropriated.
— Kennedy Maize