He didn’t say the test was successful…
Thinking about it some more, you could imagine a teeny-tiny NERVA-style engine, or an RTG producing a few kilowatts for an electric turbofan, but why? Of course, if you’re going to end the world (which is basically what nuclear-armed cruise missiles are for) you’re not going to worry about environmental damage.
Historically, russian nuclear stuff has not been all that reliable…
In response, Donnie is now proposing to extend his bigly beautiful wall to bisect the Atlantic AND Pacific Oceans. from the North Pole to the equator…
Nuclear powered, or carrying a nuclear warhead? Big difference. Is this just a confused report, or was Putin’s speech actually this odd?
All true of course—but I find the notion that Vlad the Poisoner would find environmental or radiation hazards to his fellow Russians troubling fanciful. This guy has ordered his own citizens bombed, after all( Moscow apartment bombings, pretext for Chechnya invasion).
What is the point of this insanity?
Thanks, Yeltsin!
Putie-poot is just making ludicrous promises to help him win the election.
Donnie learned from the best.
Can’t blame this on yeltsin, much as The Poisoner would have us believe.
Agreed. They might be armed with small nuclear devices, but they are not nuclear powered.
I was assuming a NERVA type rocket, but then thought that didn’t make sense because it seemed like, even assuming they didn’t bother to shield the reactor (thank you for your work fueling and prepping nuclear rocket. Your services to the Motherland are appreciated, comrade!), the reaction mass plus reactor would have to weigh more than a turbofan and fuel. So then I thought “RTG?” And that seemed even stupider because I didn’t see how one of any size could put out enough power to get the RTG, much less the rest of the missile off the ground.
At which point, I concluded the whole thing was bullshit, bluster, trolling gullible press types, or a translation error.
Nuclear powered cruise missiles are no match for Trump’s coal powered cruise missiles!
Like I said, can’t decide whether that makes it more or less believable. The USSR had an long history of casually irradiating its own citizens, and rendering broad swaths of its territory (or, more often, the territory of the non-Russian republics) uninhabitable with its nuclear weapons program. It’s nuclear subs were and are guaranteed to shave at least a decade off the average lifespan of its sailors. They built lakes with H-bombs and then neglected to tell any of their citizens that they were dangerously radioactive.
But you’d think Chernobyl and the slight lessening of press controls would have made the new regime a little more sensitive to that kind of thing now.
All true, and I’d have to believe there are those in the Regime who’d indeed be more sensitive to that—but Putin has worked assiduously to silence dissent, in any form (ie, killing of journalists, “disappearance of FSB assets who “knew too much”). I recently read a Putin bio by Masha Gessen, it is outstanding—and was an eye-opener. There are a faint murmurs of discontent that he got way over his skis with the 2016 meddling, but his reaction is just to double down, and hunt any dissenting voices. His utter lack of compassion for loss of life—including his own citizens—is startling. He endured great privation growing up—despite his parents’ efforts to spoil him—for which he blames reformers and the West, and harbors enormous resentment.
ETA—whereas Kruschev and Yeltsin viewed Stalin as a cautionary tale, I think Putin sees him as a role model.
Ronald Reagan’s Missile Defense Initiative – it didn’t even work – is what brought the Soviet Union down. Now Vladimir Putin is trying to resurrect the Soviet Union with an invincible nuclear missile that also won’t work. The fiction of invincible weapons and invincible defenses goes on, but it might be enough now to scare the UK to forget about Brexit.
Idunno. If you got rid of safety constraints you might be able to make a NERVA small enough to run a cruise missile. They make tactical nukes that size, and NERVA engine just has to not get quite hot enough to go boom. For a while.
I could see someone smart and ambitious and unconstrained by sense designing something like that, especially if they lived in russia and their job depended on it. (And like I said earlier, “test” covers a multitude of possibilities.)
In Putin and Donald’s “honor”.
It was meant as a bit of a joke, along the lines of “Thanks, Obama”.
But in another sense, it is all Yeltsin’s fault because he designated Putin as his successor - everyone presumes this is because Putin had dirt on Yeltsin and some of his associates.
Ah got it - sorry I missed the snark, that was a good one. As for yeltsin, who knows what Putin threatened him with. I put nothing past the Poisoner.