The Hunt for the Red Pluto-ber

Russia has been working on a number of weapons to circumvent the American ballistic missile defense system. They apparently have more faith in the capability than we do. Or less in their ballistic missiles. Either way, the Russians have come up with some pretty crazy things to deal with these defenses. Almost all of their solutions, are as expected, to delivery nuclear weapons.

Two of the craziest of them were the nuclear armed strategic torpedo/unmanned underwater vehicle called the Poseidon (originally called Status-6) and the other was the Burevestnik, a nuclear powered cruise missile. Yes, nuclear powered. We'll get to that. The Poseidon is meant to be fired off and have it swim for thousands of miles to its target, such as a port city, and then either lie in wait or detonate on arrival. The Russians, true to form, have been talking about using it on US aircraft carrier battle groups. The other weapon is even crazier.

The Burevestnik (Storm Petrol, a type of sea bird), as stated, is a nuclear powered nuclear carrying cruise missile. It does carry a nuclear warhead. It also uses a nuclear reactor as a ramjet where it heats the air passing through to make it expand faster creating thrust. The US considered the design in the 1960s in Project Pluto. It was considered too insane to actually use and was abandoned. The Russians decided it was not insane because it gives them effectively, if they can make it work, unlimited range. The nuclear reaction in the reactor could keep the aircraft in the air for years. The downside is that it spews chunks of the reactor everywhere. That was actually a design feature in the original Project Pluto, btw, laying waste to the country side through supersonic shockwaves and leaving radioactive fallout all over the place. Nice, huh? The point though is that the missile could be fired south over Kazakhstan and then go all the way south over Antarctica before coming all the way up to hit the US in say, Florida.

The Russians have been testing this like crazy. Between November 2017 and February 2018, the Russians reportedly fired off four missiles. They all 'crashed.' From the sounds of it, these may have been launcher tests rather than tests of the missile itself. The times and ranges of the flight are pretty off if the reactor was actually on. However, if this was a case where a mass simulator (an inert body like aluminum) was being used with the rocket intended to launch the cruise missile up to ramjet speeds, then those tests make sense. After all, the russians did release a video of one of the cruise missiles followed by chase planes. You are not going to do that if it was a 22 second flight.

However! It may be on the 4th test, they attempted to launch a live reactor carrying cruise missile. The Warzone is reporting the Russians are sending ships to recover the missile from the Barents Sea. If this was a mass simulator, who cares? However, if it is a real missile, then the US and others might want to recover it. They sent a ship to recover a Mig and a sukhoi lost during the Russian flights off their carrier in support of their campaign in Syria for fear of what the US (or others) might find out from the wrecks salvaged from the seafloor. This would be worth about a million times more.

And the US has the capability to retrieve the missile wreck if they want to. That's in part what the USS Jimmy Carter, a heavily modified Seawolf class, is for.

So, we may have a race for whoever recovers the missile first.

You might call it the Hunt for the Red Pluto-ber.