9M730 Burevestnik: Russia's Cruise Missile with "Unlimited Range"

A nuclear missile that can fly so low and maneuver around missile defenses so well that it’s never detected while having the capability to loiter for days as it waits for the perfect opportunity to strike sounds like a commander’s dream, or a nightmare if you’re on the receiving side.

This is exactly what Russia claims to have achieved with the 9M730 Burevestnik missile, also known as Skyfall in NATO circles.

Powered by a nuclear reactor and armed with a nuclear warhead, this weapon—the first of its kind—could, in theory, completely bypass missile defense systems, at least according to Vladimir Putin.

There is another side to this coin, however. One that shows nuclear-powered missiles as an engineer’s worst nightmare, an unreliable, uncontrollable mess that can be downed by the tiniest changes in airflow, and the Burevestnik, hailed in Russia as the second coming of the Tsar Bomba, might check all of those boxes.

The Why and the How

It’s not difficult to see why Russia, or any other major military power for that matter, would want a nuclear-powered missile. Unlike conventional rocket-propelled missiles, nuclear-powered missiles theoretically have unlimited range and flight time. The missile would still be somewhat limited due to the durability of other, non-nuclear components of the weapon, but when it comes to the main driving force of the missile, it could circle the globe over and over before striking.

A missile with this kind of capability could be launched far away from the target’s defensive zone and minimize chances of being shot down. Moreover, if paired with top of the line sensory suites and an AI matrix that controls communications and effectively controls the missile, it could analyse enemy defenses and avoid them, and even loiter and wait for the perfect time to strike.

For comparison, the currently active missile with the greatest range—at least that we know of—is the Russian superheavy intercontinental ballistic missile RS-28 Sarmat, which was, incidentally, presented alongside the Burevestnik. It boasts a range of 11,000 miles or 18,000 kilometers. The American counterpart to the Sarmat is the LGM-30 Minuteman, with the latest block—the Minuteman III—having a range of about 14,000 kilometers or 8,700 miles. This means that the Sarmat could easily travel from Moscow to New Zealand and the Minuteman III could fly from New York to Cape Town, and both missiles would still have enough fuel left for another 1,500 kilometers.

This calculation does not account for the arc of the missiles and their sub-orbital flight, but that’s roughly the range we’re looking at with the most developed conventional ICBMs. The Burevestnik blows them all out of the water.

The Russians started developing this project during the Cold War. Back in the day, the USSR and the United States were both working hard to develop nuclear-powered aircraft—this included both combat aircraft and missiles. The idea showed a lot of promise but it was ultimately abandoned because the development of conventional ICBMs and nuclear submarines rendered the designs pointless, with neither power ever fielding operational nuclear aircraft.

Fast forward to 2001 and the United States pulls out of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, and Russia decides to revisit the old Soviet idea of nuclear-powered missiles. The knowledge and the designs were, after all, already there and all they needed to do is turn the blueprints into reality. The theory of the nuclear-powered missile being nothing more than a revival of a Soviet idea was put forward by professor Mark Galeotti, a leading Russia analyst at the Royal United Services Institute, who described it as just being “taken off the shelves and given new investment”.

Vladimir Putin himself openly said that the Burevestnik missile is size-wise comparable to the Kh-101 cruise missile, which has been in design since the 1990s and entered service in the 2010s. Unlike the Kh-101, which is powered by jet fuel, the Burevestnik is fitted with a small nuclear power unit that powers it for the majority of the missile’s flight, while a small rocket booster is needed just to launch it and get it into the air.

The world’s first nuclear-powered missile—and generally the first nuclear-powered aircraft of any kind—is about 1.5 to 2 times the size of the Kh-101, measuring in at around 12 meters or 39 feet and 4 inches at launch, but at 9 meters or almost 30 feet after the boosters are dropped. According to reports from Russian journalists, the nose of the missile has the shape of an ellipse and it measures in at roughly 1 by 1.5 meters or 3.3 by 4.9 feet. The weight of the Burevestnik was not made official, but military journalists think it might be up to ten times as heavy as the Kh-101, which itself weighs 2,400 kilograms or 5,300 pounds, so we’re looking at approximately 24 metric tons.

The Kh-101 could be launched from aboard the Tu-160 and Tu-95 strategic bombers, but this is impossible with the Burevestnik because of its mass.

In 2018, Putin announced an entire series of new Russian weapons in a bizarre, two-hour long speech at the Kremlin during which he was interrupted every few minutes by the audience’s applause. Aside from the entire ordeal giving us a good chuckle, it also demonstrated the new nuclear-powered missile.

The demonstration shows the missile being launched from a platform on an incline, implying that it won’t be launched from combat aircraft. According to Russian journalists, the missile uses a solid-fueled booster engine to take off and it switched to a nuclear-powered ramjet engine mid-flight. The American geopolitical intelligence platform, Stratfor, reports that the Burevestnik is instead using a liquid-fueled booster and a turbojet engine.

The difference? Both types of engines need air to be compressed before mixing it with fuel. Turbojets use fans that spin quickly to suck air in and compress it, while ramjets rely on the speed of the aircraft itself for air compression.

The trouble with them is that ramjets require a pretty high speed to function—an aircraft needs to fly between Mach 3 and 6 for a ramjet engine to operate efficiently. This is why it was originally believed that the Burevestnik was a much quicker missile than it really is. In reality, it’s a subsonic missile, at least according to the UK’s former Chief of Defence Intelligence, James Hockenhull. This means it flies slower than the speed of sound.

If it’s using a ramjet engine, the engine can function at such a low speed, but it won’t be anywhere near optimum efficiency.

With that being said, we really don’t know what its speed is and we won’t know until it’s first used or until Russia makes the information public, but for now we’re moving forward on the assumption it’s subsonic.

Now, how exactly is the nuclear reactor used is a mystery, but according to Chris Spedding, an analyst for the British American Security Information Council—a UK-based nuclear security think tank, there are two options.

One of them is the ‘open loop’ design. With this design, the incoming air would flow straight through the reactor, heat up considerably, expand, and propel the missile forward. The issue with the open loop design is the fact that it would result with radioactive particles exiting the exhaust and effectively spraying everything and everyone who found themselves under the missile as it passed by.

To be clear, the air itself wouldn’t be irradiated or dangerous. However, reactor materials would degrade because of the intense heat, pressure, and operation, causing tiny bits to chip off and exit through the exhaust—these particles would be highly radioactive and therefore dangerous. The extent of degradation, however, is anyone’s guess, but according to the BASIC report mentioned earlier, some radioactive material would be released even if under optimum performance of the reactor.

An open loop design would also be significantly larger than a closed loop design, and when it comes to aerodynamics, smaller is generally better. It would also be heavier—airflow ducts needed for this configuration would increase the amount of fuel needed to achieve critical mass, and that would in turn increase the total weight of the missile.

A closed loop design would see the reactor isolated from the airflow. A heat exchanger would transfer the reactor’s heat to the air, heat it up, cause it to expand, and propel the missile forward. Although a closed loop reactor would weigh less, heat exchangers would add more weight and volume to the entire missile design, and would bring liquid metal coolants like sodium and potassium into it.

It’s unknown which of these two options Russian engineers went for, but the complexity of adding heat exchangers makes the open loop design a logical choice, especially if we consider that Russia wanted to develop this missile quickly.

Another major difference between the Burevestnik and the Kh-101, which it clearly used as a template, is the placement of the wings, which are located on top of the fuselage, according to Russian journalists. The wings on the Kh-101 are right under the fuselage.

The warhead aboard the new missile will most definitely be nuclear, although the exact filling weight and blast yield are unknown.

When presenting it, Putin said that the missile provides a longer range of flight “which is practically unlimited. The low-flying, unobtrusive cruise missile armed with a nuclear warhead with unlimited range and an unpredictable flight trajectory, with the possibility of bypassing interception systems, is invulnerable to all existing and advanced missile defense systems.”

How accurate is that description and are nuclear-powered missiles as invulnerable as Russia’s chief would have us believe are questions we’ll answer later, but what we know so far about this specific design is that it definitely started off on the wrong foot.

(Un)successful Testing

The Burevestnik was developed by the All-Russian Scientific Research Institute of Experimental Physics in Sarov, and it was manufactured at Yekaterinburg’s NPO Novator—a company specializing in long-distance missile production.

Although Russia expected the Burevestnik to be adopted into active service by 2027, that deadline seemed unlikely at first thanks to the many unsuccessful tests that Russia, naturally, tried to sweep beneath the carpet. Nevertheless, the Nuclear Threat Initiative—a group that oversees nuclear activity all over the globe—claims that Russia tested the missile at least 13 times between 2016 and 2024. Out of those 13 tests, only two were partially successful, with the remainder being total failures and with no completely successful tests.

One of these tests was a catastrophic failure. On August 8th of 2019, five Russian nuclear engineers died and three were injured when the engine of the new missile exploded, and the incident was followed by a 40-minute radiation spike in Severodvinsk, the city closest to the Nyonoksa test range. Initially, the Russian government tried to bury the details of the incidents, saying that the explosion was the result of a failure of a liquid fuel rocket engine, and even lied about the death toll, saying that only two engineers were killed.

Western officials were puzzled too, and for a while they believed that the scientists were while trying to retrieve a nuclear missile that was on the bed of the White Sea. One of the main reasons western experts believed this to be more likely than the testing of a nuclear-propelled weapon was because they simply believed Russia didn’t have the financial nor technological backing to develop and produce a nuclear-powered missile in large quantities. It turns out that they were wrong.

It was later confirmed by the head of the Sarov nuclear center that the engineers died during a test which involved a radio-isotope propellant. President Putin would confirm that in November, later that year. According to Russian officials, the engineers completed the testing of the engines successfully, after which a fire broke out and blew the engine up.

This is the most catastrophic Burevestnik test, but it’s far from an isolated incident. Two years earlier, in 2017, the missile was tested at the Pan’kovo test range—an ideal test location for nuclear weapons thanks to its remoteness on the coast of the Novaya Zemlya archipelago in the Arctic Ocean. The missile then flew for only two minutes, crossed a distance of approximately 35 kilometers and crashed into the Barents Sea.

It would take until late 2025, October, to be precise, for Russia to finally complete a successful test. Chief of General Staff Valery Gerasimov announced that the Burevestnik was launched, flew around for 15 hours, and covered a distance of about 14,000 kilometers or 8,700 miles without any issues. He also pointed out that this distance is not the missile’s limit—that was just the test limit. The missile is also a low-flying weapon as it can fly as low as 50 meters or about 160 feet above the ground to avoid detection and maneuver very effectively, and during the test, Burevestnik demonstrated high capabilities to bypass missile and air defense systems.

With that, Russia seems to have more or less perfected the design, something that Putin said would be accomplished “regardless of anything” all the way back in 2019. The new missile has not yet been introduced into service at the time of writing, and there’s still a dense fog surrounding the spread of the Burevestnik in Russia’s arsenal simply because Russia’s budget is spread far too thin since the country went to war with…seemingly everyone.

Even if the eastern superpower manages to find the means to mass produce the nuclear-powered, unlimited range missile, this design does not come without its faults.

The Problem With The Burevestnik and All Nuclear-Powered Aircraft

Unlike turbojet engines, which compress air, add it to fuel and burn it to produce thrust, nuclear-powered aircraft—which includes missiles—replace jet engines with a nuclear reactor. The nuclear reactor heats up the incoming air to an incredible degree and it produces thrust without the need to combust fuel, and that is, in essence, how a nuclear-powered aircraft works. The reason it can fly indefinitely, at least in theory, is because you can’t exactly run out of fuel. Nuclear reactors do, of course, have their limitations, but they’re measured in years, rather than hours, with smaller nuclear reactors, such as the ones used with the Burevestnik, being more limited than the reactors used in power plants or with aircraft carriers.

There are a few problems surrounding the idea of putting a nuclear reactor aboard an aircraft.

Chronologically, the first one to overcome was making nuclear reactors small enough to fit aboard something as small as a jet or a missile. Do you recall that scene from the first Iron Man movie when Obadiah Stane, in an attempt to get Stark Industries engineers to replicate Tony Stark’s reactor technology, tells them that the technology already exists, he just needs them to make it smaller?

Well, that’s roughly the same issue with real life nuclear reactors when it comes to getting them to power aircraft. You need to miniaturise something the size of a pickup truck to the size that fits aboard a cruise missile.

Nuclear reactors are also heavy and that’s not something you want aboard an aircraft that’s supposed to fly at high speeds and perform complex maneuvers that require plenty of agility. To make matters even worse, if you’re looking to fit a nuclear reactor aboard a moving vehicle with human beings inside, you need to provide shielding, and radioactive shielding is usually very heavy as it’s made from steel plates and complex metals, all of which are usually heavy.

During the USSR-US race to see who can develop nuclear aircraft first, which was deemed so important to the USSR that they ordered every single bomber-related design bureau to abandon all projects and focus solely on the nuclear aircraft project, neither country completely fixed this problem. The USSR fielded, or rather aired—the Tupolev Tu-95 experimental nuclear aircraft that took its first flight in 1961.

The Tu-95, nominally a bomber aircraft, was fitted with a nuclear reactor in its bomb bay. Many adaptations had to be made just for the aircraft to fit the reactor aboard, and since it performed poorly from an aerodynamic standpoint—once again because of the reactor’s weight—it required further aerodynamic refitting. More than 40 research flights were made up to 1969 just to test the strain put on the aircraft because of the combined weight of the reactor and its shielding, as well as the effectiveness of the shielding itself.

At the same time across the globe, the United States was conducting several programs. In fact, the country that safely established itself as the greatest global superpower after the Second World War recognized the potential of nuclear energy and started developing new technologies with it as early as 1946.

Two main goals were written on the board—developing a nuclear-powered aircraft and a nuclear-powered missile, with the latter being a bit ironic given that their rivals would accomplish that around 70 years later.

To get over the line, four different reactor projects were active at various points between the late 40s and the 60s. After many test flights with nuclear reactors aboard a modified B-36 Peacemaker bomber, mostly just to test how the airplane reacts to the weight and how effective the shielding is—very similar to Soviet tests—the US decided to completely abandon all projects in this direction.

Although the idea of a strategic bomber that can stay in the air for up to a week at a time is attractive in its own way, another technology was being developed by both superpowers at the time—intercontinental ballistic missiles—and at the time, ICBMs were much closer to reality than nuclear-powered aircraft.

Aside from the weight issue, another problem both the Soviets and the Americans came across was the intense heat radiated by nuclear reactors, something mentioned at the beginning of the video.

Although an aircraft can be safe from a very hot onboard object with proper shielding, things can go awry very easily and most pilots would feel unsafe with a nuclear reactor emitting such intense heat aboard their plane.

The Aircraft Reactor Experiment, which was one of the four projects looking to develop an aircraft-capable reactor, developed the world’s reactor to use circulating molten salt fuel. In theory, the reactor was supposed to have an operational life of 1,000 hours, with as much time as possible at its max power of 3 Megawatts. The result of that was a peak temperature of 860 degrees Celsius or 1,580 Fahrenheit.

The Pratt & Whitney Aircraft Reactor-1—another aircraft-capable reactor project—held a stable temperature of about 675 degrees Celsius or 1,247 Fahrenheit.

The temperatures at the air outlet of the Burevestnik measure between 1,400 and 1,600 degrees Celsius or 2,552 and 2,912 Fahrenheit, while the temperature at the center of the reactor fuel, which is just a few centimeters away, would be significantly higher. This means that most traditional reactor materials can’t be used with the Russian missile as they would simply melt.

It’s unknown how this issue was resolved with the Burevestnik missile, but there are two possible solutions.

It’s possible that the missile used a closed ceramic construction as a closed loop solution. Ceramics are more resistant to melting because of their structure. The issue with this theory is that a closed structure would add more weight, and ceramics can be fragile, becoming just another thing that can break mid-flight.

The other solution, and this is something Russian journalists theorized about but haven’t confirmed, is the use of boreholes. Boreholes would allow airflow which would naturally cool the nuclear reactor during the flight, but the issue with that is that an open reactor would release highly radioactive particles in its trail. This, however, comes with its own can of worms as changes in speed, wind speed, and heading will affect the reactor cooling rate.

For example, in the case of a gust of tailwind, the incoming air speed drops, which results in a lower cooling rate and an increase in temperature. Although this is a fixable problem with safety systems that would increase air outlet temperature and accelerate the missile to cruising speed if this happened, the air isn’t the only problem. Since the missile is designed to fly at a low altitude, dust and debris, leaves, snow, and rain all pose a problem. Even if all of that is somehow avoided or solved, the changes in outside temperature, pressure, and humidity would also affect the reactivity of the reactor, and this makes the missile difficult to use in practice.

The Burevestnik is designed to fly for days, at least in theory, and across different terrains, breaking through different climate patterns, and if it’s used like that, it’s inherently susceptible to changes in surrounding elements that will affect the reactor.

If the missile were to fly through a rainstorm, for example, or even just through a particularly humid area, the temperature of the reactor could rise significantly. Water slows neutrons down, which causes uranium to absorb them more easily, which would, in turn, cause another fission event.

All of this to say that the very design and the intended use of nuclear-powered missiles make them extremely susceptible to drops and rises in reactor activity, and that can cause them to crash very easily—they are that sensitive.

Whichever way they went, however, it’s presumed that Russian engineers solved the heating and cooling problem, but the fact that solutions are so difficult to find leads us to the third, and perhaps the most important reason nuclear reactors are so painstakingly hard to utilize aboard aircraft.

These things are exceedingly complex, making them smaller makes them even more complex, and a more complex design is more prone to mishaps. You generally want to avoid those when you’re flying a few kilometers above the clouds.

A good example of that is the incident that marked the end of the Aircraft Reactor Experiment. During the ascent to high power on a test flight, the reactor had to be shut down as the main fuel pump started leaking fission gases and vapors, which were the result of nuclear fission. There were defective seals in some electrical junctional panels and the gases got through, causing the safety radiation detectors to shut the reactor down. This was the only incident during testing, but it goes to show how easily things can go wrong with a nuclear reactor, especially one aboard an aircraft.

This isn’t the sole reason Americans abandoned the nuclear aircraft idea—the entire program was only alive thanks to the space race and the belief that such a weapon would be useful, but it quickly became obvious that it’s not financially viable and that ICBMs are a better long-distance solution.

Fast forward to today, and Chris Spedding of BASIC analyzed the Burevestnik and pointed out just how vulnerable the missile would be mid-air. This doesn’t only apply to the Burevestnik, but to all nuclear-powered aircraft designs. Rain, birds, and even strong enough gusts of wind during low-altitude flight will alter the inflowing air to the cruise missile, and that will degrade the reactor.

If the reactor were to fail during flight, the missile would crash at sea or over land, and the cleanup would be not only extremely dangerous and complex, but also expensive and necessary, as without it contamination would be widespread. The “what if” factor is simply too great for nuclear-powered missiles and aircraft to be a viable solution, but that didn’t prevent Russia from producing the Burevestnik.

Simple geometry is another reason nuclear-powered missiles are difficult to build. The reactor fuel, which are either blocks of uranium-oxide or pin-style fuel assemblies, needs to be set up precisely in a reactor to ensure optimum function. However, as the missile flies at a low altitude and maneuvers around terrain and enemy defenses, inertial forces come into play.

The fuel needs to be able to handle this alongside regular turbulence without disturbing neutron flux, which is the distance traveled by free neutrons, and without getting too deep into how a nuclear reactor works, we’ll just summarize it by saying that neutron flux is crucial for a stable reactor and you don’t want to destabilize it. If fuel geometry changes too much and too quickly, reactivity will spike, and the opposite can happen too—if the fuel moves too far away, reactivity could drop, which results in a drop in thrust and a crashed missile.

So, the fuel has to be set up in a way that either mitigates inertial forces and turbulence, or the design has to find another way to deal with this problem that doesn’t affect the reactor’s function. It’s unknown how the Russian design handled this.

One final issue that relates specifically to nuclear-powered missiles, not all aircraft, is the control and stealth factor. Since you generally want your missile to reach the target in secret, without the enemy’s defense systems taking it down, you can’t have a missile operator receiving and issuing commands. Stealth is instrumental as the low and slow-flying Burevestnik would be a very easy target for interceptors once detected.

Therefore, once you launch it, your nuclear-powered missile is on its own.

Not only does it need to navigate autonomously, it also needs to control the reactor autonomously, which is a monumental task as reactors are usually overseen and controlled by a group of highly-experienced experts who are physically present. The system in charge of the reactor, which would be aboard the missile, also needs to be immune to the intense radiation. The solution for this problem used on the Burevestnik is, just like with most other problems, unknown, which is beginning to sound like code for “we haven’t figured it out yet, but we want our rivals to think we did”.

When you combine everything said so far—the extreme reactivity of a flying nuclear reactor to even the smallest changes in its immediate surroundings, the danger presented by flying debris, the heating and cooling issues, the spread of radioactive particles, the general proneness of such complex systems to breakdowns, the lack of financial viability of such a weapon, the autonomy and durability of onboard control systems, and finally the potential catastrophe caused by a crash of such a missile, one question pops up—why the hell is Russia after this?

Air-Defense Game Changer

One reason behind the development of this weapon could be the desire to show Russia’s adversaries that the doctrine going forward is strategic surprise and defeating early warning systems. This, however, is not the only answer.

There is a theory that the sole reason Russia went all-in on a nuclear-powered missile design is just to show that it has the technological capacity to do it. This, however, would be silly, to say the least.

First of all, nuclear deterrence is about capability as much as it is about communicating that capability to a country’s rivals and developing destructive force with credibility. That final part of that is a message that won’t frighten too many of Russia’s adversaries when it comes to the Burevestnik simply because the missile failed more than a dozen times so far, killing a few engineers on one occasion, and it only succeeded in testing once. That single successful test does not, however, guarantee successful performance in practice because of the many, many things that can go wrong with a nuclear-powered missile, covered in the previous chapter.

Yes, the missile could, in theory, loiter for days and find a safe path to target, and yes, the strike would be devastating, but if the likelihood of the missile crashing mid-flight is high just because of how complicated and vulnerable it is, you can’t call that type of weapon reliable.

Effective operation of a nuclear-powered missile is almost impossible even if the system is as close to perfect as it can get, and developing an over-engineered but practically not-that-useful missile just for the sake of showing the entire world that you can is a huge waste of resources.

The Burevestnik could only be used as a first strike weapon thanks to its stealth. After the initial strike there would be little use for it as the cat would be out of the bag, and after that ICBMs are the more useful weapon, so why pour all of these resources on such a highly sensitive weapon with limited practical use and with no guarantee that it could actually work well?

Russian leadership provided somewhat of an answer to that question. Russian developments of nuclear capabilities are usually justified as a necessity needed to keep up with the United States. For example, the announcement of the Golden Dome missile defense system was condemned by the Kremlin, and the same logic applies here.

Just weeks before the first successful test of the Burevestnik, Putin mentioned the Golden Dome saying that it could “nullify our efforts to maintain the status quo in the field of strategic offensive arms” and that Russia will “respond appropriately in this case”. He did not outright say “We’ve been developing the Burevestnik because of the Golden Dome,” but he did boast about the Burevestnik’s ability to maneuver through missile defenses.

We can trace this line all the way back to 2018 when the Burevestnik was in its dodgy testing phase. During the presidential address, mentioned earlier, Putin said that the Burevestnik and other weapons were created specifically to bypass missile defense systems, and as a response to the USA’s withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.

To no one’s surprise, Putin is kind of eating his own words here because when the United States originally withdrew from the treaty, he commented on the decision saying that it did not pose a threat to Russia’s national security because Russia already possessed missiles capable of bypassing anti-missile defense.

The ultimate goal of the Burevestnik, at least according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, is not to indicate that Russia wants to use this weapon against Ukraine. Instead, this is a test for American leadership intended to discourage U.S. decisionmakers from pursuing policies that threaten Russian interests, including U.S. weapons transfers and policies in negotiations for a peace deal in Ukraine and encouraging the United States to agree to a one-year informal agreement to follow New START numerical limits without inspections. New START, in case you don’t know, is a nuclear arms reduction treaty signed between the two countries in 2010.

So, Russia wants the US to think that it can modernize and expand its nuclear capability, and the Burevestnik is, in essence, part of a warhead-measuring contest between the two countries.

How far away is it from active service? Nobody really knows—Russia expects it to enter service in 2027, but we’d have to be crazy to take the word of Russian officials without a grain of salt.

Putin called for the armed forces to move to the phase of operationalization with the Burevestnik and “determine which class of weapons this new system belongs to, identify possible modes of employment, and begin preparing the infrastructure to base it in our Armed Forces.” But Putin himself also said that this is a process, commenting that “substantial work has to be done in order to place this weapon on combat duty.”

We will likely hear about more tests in the near future and at some point the Wikipedia service history category will change from “Under development” to “Active service”, but is it going to go from being just another showboating design influenced by Cold War-era thinking to a weapon with practical on-field use?

Certainly hope not.

Key Takeaways

• Russia’s Burevestnik missile is a nuclear-powered, nuclear-armed cruise missile with theoretically unlimited range.
• The Burevestnik missile has faced numerous technical challenges and test failures, including a catastrophic incident in 2019.
• Nuclear-powered missiles are highly complex and susceptible to environmental factors, making them unreliable.
• Russia’s development of the Burevestnik is seen as a response to U.S. missile defense systems and a show of technological capability.
• The Burevestnik missile is intended to bypass missile defense systems and serve as a strategic deterrent.

Sources

• Original MegaProjects video: 9M730 Burevestnik: Russia’s Cruise Missile with “Unlimited Range”
• Hero image source by Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from Washington D.C, United States / openverse, by.

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