This is the best summary I could come up with:
However, satellite images circulated last month indicated that Russia had recently built new facilities at a remote Arctic island location where Soviet nuclear tests were previously conducted.
“We have now virtually finished work on modern types of strategic weaponry about which I have spoken and which I announced a few years ago,” Mr Putin told a meeting in the Black Sea resort of Sochi on Thursday which was broadcast live on state television.
The missile, code-named Skyfall by Nato, is said to be powered by a nuclear reactor, which is supposed to activate after solid fuel rocket boosters have launched it into the air.
But the New York Times quoted an arms control campaign group, the Nuclear Threat Initiative, as saying that the previous known 13 tests of the system between 2017 and 2019 were all unsuccessful.
During the same meeting in Sochi, Mr Putin said the plane crash that killed Wagner Group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin in August was not caused by “outside interference” such as a missile attack.
He said the mercenary chief and others who died in the crash had been found to have “hand grenade fragments” in their bodies, adding: “The head of the Investigations Committee reported this to me just the other day.”
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You have to wonder if Putin’s ass is jealous of the shit his mouth spews.
How would that work? Nuclear reactors are, AFAIK, not capable of very much beyond getting extremely hot.
Would that heat be used to cause rapid expansion of, for example, a lightweight solid into its gaseous form for propulsion?
Or is there something new up Putin’s short sleeves.
I’m aware that the US proposed (and perhaps tested) the use of continuous, rhythmic nuclear bombs as a method of propulsion for space flight, but abandoned it as too erratic.
Heating up substances using a nuclear reactor in order to produce propulsion has been demonstrated before successfully, usually with liquid hydrogen, as it offers the best specific impulse, see for example the US NERVA project (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NERVA), which was a great success, but sadly abandoned anyway, and the Soviet RD-0410 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RD-0410). But from what I can find this new Russian weapon is a subsonic cruise missile, which is most likely closer to something like the old US Project Pluto engine (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Pluto) which just pumps air through a nuclear reactor to heat it, which then cools the reactor and provides trust. Honestly, we don’t know nearly enough about this new Russian weapon to be able to say how exactly it works, but it is probably not as groundbreaking as people might think, since all the projects I have mentioned above date back quite a while back.
We can already shoot their faster missiles out of the sky fairly reliably. 🤷♀️
I don’t get the point of it tho? You can already make missiles that go much faster and reach the entire globe. What usecase does this have? I highly doubt it’s gonna be cheaper than a regular rocket engine.
