Journalists that Russia is preparing to flight test prototypes of the advanced nuclear-powered Burevestnik cruise missile. The department indicated that a stealth cruise missile with a virtually unlimited range, carrying a nuclear warhead, is invulnerable to all existing and future systems of both missile defense and air defense.
The editors of TASS-DOSSIER prepared reference material on projects for the use of nuclear engines in cruise missiles Oh.
Nuclear engines
The idea of using nuclear engines in aviation and astronautics arose in the 1950s, shortly after the creation of controlled atomic reaction technology. The advantage of such an engine is long time operation on a compact fuel source that is practically not consumed during flight, which means an unlimited flight range. The disadvantages were the large weight and dimensions of nuclear reactors of that time, the difficulty of recharging them, and the need to provide biological protection service personnel. Since the early 1950s, scientists in the USSR and the USA have independently studied the possibility of creating different types nuclear engines:
- nuclear ramjet engine (NRJE): in it, the air entering through the air intake enters the reactor core, heats up and is thrown out through the nozzle, creating the necessary thrust;
- nuclear turbojet engine: operates according to a similar scheme, but the air is compressed by a compressor before entering the reactor;
- nuclear rocket engine: thrust is created by the reactor heating the working fluid, hydrogen, ammonia, other gases or liquids, which are then thrown into the nozzle;
- nuclear pulse engine: jet thrust is created by alternating low-power nuclear explosions;
- electric jet engine: the electricity generated by the reactor is used to heat the working fluid to the state of plasma.
The most suitable engines for cruise missiles and aircraft are the ramjet or turbojet engine. In cruise missile projects, preference has traditionally been given to the first option.
In the USSR, work on the creation of a nuclear ramjet engine was carried out by OKB-670 under the leadership of Mikhail Bondaryuk. The nuclear-powered jet engine was intended to modify the Burya intercontinental cruise missile (product 375), which had been designed by OKB-301 under the leadership of Semyon Lavochkin since 1954. The launch weight of the rocket reached 95 tons, the range was supposed to be 8 thousand km. However, in 1960, a few months after Lavochkin’s death, the “conventional” Burya cruise missile project was closed. The creation of a rocket with a nuclear-powered jet engine never went beyond the scope of preliminary design.
Subsequently, specialists from OKB-670 (renamed the Krasnaya Zvezda Design Bureau) began creating nuclear rocket engines for space and combat ballistic missiles, but none of the projects reached the testing stage. After Bondaryuk's death, work on aviation nuclear engines was virtually stopped.
They were returned to them only in 1978, when a design bureau of former Krasnaya Zvezda specialists was formed at the Research Institute of Thermal Processes, working on ramjet engines. One of their developments was a nuclear ramjet engine for a more compact cruise missile compared to the Burya (launch weight up to 20 tons). As the media wrote, “the studies conducted showed the fundamental possibility of implementing the project.” However, its trials have not been reported.
The design bureau itself existed under different names(NPVO "Plamya", OKB "Plamya-M") until 2004, after which it was closed.
US experience
Since the mid-1950s, scientists at the Livermore Radiation Laboratory in California, as part of Project Pluto, have been developing a nuclear ramjet engine for a supersonic cruise missile.
By the early 1960s, several prototypes of nuclear-powered jet engines had been created, the first of which, Tory-IIA, was tested in May 1961. In 1964, tests began on a new modification of the engine - Tory-IIC, which was able to operate for five minutes, showing a thermal power of about 500 MW and a thrust of 16 tons.
However, the project was soon closed. It is traditionally believed that the reason for this in both the USA and the USSR was the successful creation of intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of delivering nuclear warheads to enemy territory. In this situation, intercontinental cruise missiles could not withstand the competition.
In Russia
On March 1, 2018, speaking with a message to the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that at the end of 2017 at the Central training ground Russian Federation The latest nuclear-powered cruise missile, the flight range of which “is virtually unlimited,” was successfully tested. Its development began after the US withdrawal from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in December 2001. The rocket received the name “Burevestnik” on March 22, 2018, based on the results of an open vote on the website of the Ministry of Defense.
The Russian military has successfully tested a cruise ship with a nuclear power plant. Its flight range at subsonic speed is not limited. Such products are capable of bypassing air and missile defense areas at low altitude, destroying enemy targets with high precision. Russian President Vladimir Putin announced the appearance of the new product in his message to the Federal Assembly. According to experts, these systems are weapons of deterrence. They use air heated by a nuclear power plant to move. According to experts, we are talking about a product with the index 9M730, developed by the Novator Design Bureau. During a period of threat, such missiles can be lifted into the air and deployed to specified areas. From there they will be able to strike important enemy targets. Testing of the new product is quite active, and the Il-976 flying laboratories are taking part in them. At the end of 2017, the latest Russian cruise missile with a nuclear power plant was successfully launched at the Central Test Site of the Russian Federation. During the flight, the power plant reached the specified power and provided the required level of thrust,” Vladimir Putin said in his speech. - Russia's promising weapons systems are based on the latest unique achievements of our scientists, designers, and engineers. One of them is the creation of a small-sized, super-powerful nuclear power plant, which is placed in the body of a cruise missile such as our newest air-launched X-101 missile or the American Tomahawk, but at the same time provides tens of times - tens of times! - long flight range, which is practically unlimited. A low-flying, stealthy cruise missile carrying a nuclear warhead, with a virtually unlimited range, unpredictable flight path and the ability to bypass interception lines, is invulnerable to all existing and future systems, both missile defense and missile defense. In the presented video, viewers were able to see the launch of a unique rocket. The flight of the product was captured from an escort fighter. According to the following computer graphics, a “nuclear missile” flew around the naval missile defense zones in the Atlantic, bypassed from the south South America and hit the United States from the Pacific Ocean.
Judging by the video presented, this is either a sea- or land-based missile,” Dmitry Kornev, editor-in-chief of the MilitaryRussia project, told Izvestia. - There are two developers of cruise missiles in Russia. Raduga produces only air-launched products. Land and sea are under the jurisdiction of Novator. This company has a line of R-500 cruise missiles for the Iskander complexes, as well as the legendary Caliber missiles. Not long ago, references to two new products appeared in open documents of the Novator Design Bureau - 9M729 and 9M730. The first is an ordinary long-range cruise missile, but nothing was known about the 9M730. But this product is clearly under active development - several tenders have been posted on this topic on the government procurement website. Therefore, we can assume that the “nuclear missile” is the 9M730. As military historian Dmitry Boltenkov noted, the operating principle of a nuclear power plant is quite simple. On the sides of the rocket there are special compartments with powerful and compact heaters powered by a nuclear power plant, the expert noted. - Atmospheric air enters them, which heats up to several thousand degrees and turns into the working fluid of the engine. The flow of hot air creates draft. Such a system truly provides an almost unlimited flight range. As Vladimir Putin stated, the new product was tested at the Central Test Site. This facility is located in the Arkhangelsk region in the village of Nenoksa. This is a historical place for testing long-range missiles,” noted Dmitry Boltenkov. - From there, the missile routes run along the northern coast of Russia. Their length can reach up to several thousand kilometers. To take telemetry parameters from missiles at such distances, special flying laboratories are needed. According to the expert, two unique Il-976 aircraft were recently restored. These are special vehicles, created on the basis of the transport Il-76, which have been used for a long time to test long-range missile weapons. In the 1990s they were mothballed. Photos of Il-976 flying to an airfield near Arkhangelsk were published on the Internet, the expert noted. - It is noteworthy that the cars bore the Rosatom emblem. At the same time, Russia issued a special international warning NOTAM (Notice to Airmen) and closed the area to ships and aircraft. According to military expert Vladislav Shurygin, the new “nuclear missile” is not an offensive combat system, but a deterrent weapon. In a threatened period (an aggravation of the situation, as a rule, preceding the outbreak of war), the Russian military will be able to withdraw these products to specified patrol areas, the expert noted. - This will prevent enemy attempts to strike Russia and its allies. “Nuclear” missiles will be able to serve as retaliatory weapons or launch a preemptive strike. The Russian Armed Forces have several lines of subsonic low-altitude cruise missiles. These are the Kh-555 and Kh-101 airborne, the P-500 ground-based and the 3M14 "Caliber" sea-based. A nuclear rocket engine is a rocket engine whose operating principle is based on a nuclear reaction or radioactive decay, which releases energy that heats the working fluid, which can be reaction products or some other substance, such as hydrogen. There are several types of rocket engines that use the principle of operation described above: nuclear, radioisotope, thermonuclear. Using nuclear rocket engines, it is possible to obtain specific impulse values significantly higher than those that can be achieved by chemical rocket engines. The high value of the specific impulse is explained by the high speed of outflow of the working fluid - about 8-50 km/s. The thrust force of a nuclear engine is comparable to that of chemical engines, which will make it possible in the future to replace all chemical engines with nuclear ones. The main obstacle to complete replacement is radioactive contamination environment, which is caused by nuclear rocket engines. They are divided into two types - solid and gas phase. In the first type of engines, fissile material is placed in rod assemblies with a developed surface. This allows you to effectively heat a gaseous working fluid, usually hydrogen acts as a working fluid. The exhaust speed is limited by the maximum temperature of the working fluid, which, in turn, directly depends on the maximum permissible temperature of the structural elements, and it does not exceed 3000 K. In gas-phase nuclear rocket engines, the fissile substance is in a gaseous state. Its retention in the working area is carried out through the influence of an electromagnetic field. For this type of nuclear rocket engines, the structural elements are not a limiting factor, so the exhaust speed of the working fluid can exceed 30 km/s. They can be used as first stage engines, despite the leakage of fissile material. In the 70s XX century In the USA and the Soviet Union, nuclear rocket engines with fissile matter in the solid phase were actively tested. In the United States, a program was being developed to create an experimental nuclear rocket engine as part of the NERVA program. The Americans developed a graphite reactor cooled by liquid hydrogen, which was heated, evaporated and ejected through a rocket nozzle. The choice of graphite was due to its temperature resistance. According to this project, the specific impulse of the resulting engine should have been twice as high as the corresponding figure characteristic of chemical engines, with a thrust of 1100 kN. The Nerva reactor was supposed to work as part of the third stage of the Saturn V launch vehicle, but due to the closure lunar program and the lack of other tasks for rocket engines of this class, the reactor was never tested in practice. A gas-phase nuclear rocket engine is currently in the theoretical development stage. A gas-phase nuclear engine involves using plutonium, whose slow-moving gas stream is surrounded by a faster flow of cooling hydrogen. Experiments were carried out at the MIR and ISS orbital space stations that could give impetus to further development gas-phase engines. Today we can say that Russia has slightly “frozen” its research in the field of nuclear propulsion systems. The work of Russian scientists is more focused on the development and improvement of basic components and assemblies of nuclear power plants, as well as their unification. Priority direction Further research in this area is the creation of nuclear power propulsion systems capable of operating in two modes. The first is the nuclear rocket engine mode, and the second is the installation mode of generating electricity to power the equipment installed on board the spacecraft.
On March 1, Russian President Vladimir Putin, in an address to the Federal Assembly, announced the creation the latest systems strategic weapons, presented as a response to the construction of a missile defense system by the United States. Putin listed the following: In the United States, Putin's statements were met with skepticism, linking them with the upcoming presidential elections in Russia. NBC cited the opinions of experts and unnamed officials that the weapons named by Putin are not a surprise to American experts and that some of them are not ready for use on the battlefield, in particular, a nuclear underwater torpedo. The Pentagon assured the Americans that the US military is fully prepared [to repel such threats]. Unpredictable flight path “In addition to modernizing the “legacy” of Soviet nuclear systems, Russia is developing and fielding new nuclear warheads and launch vehicles... Russia is also developing at least two new intercontinental systems, a hypersonic glide vehicle, a new intercontinental, nuclear and nuclear-powered underwater autonomous torpedo." That is, the review mentions at least three types of the six weapons listed by Putin. It is not entirely clear whether “Dagger” or “Vanguard” is meant by the name hypersonic glider - rather, “Vanguard”. Laser weapons are not strategic and therefore do not cause much debate. The underwater torpedo appears to be the same project "Status-6", pictures of which were allegedly shown on Russian television in a report on Putin's meeting with the military in 2015. Thus, the only real surprise could be a nuclear-powered cruise missile. And it was this missile that, of all those listed by Putin, became the subject of the greatest discussion. This is how the project was described by Putin: a small-sized, ultra-powerful nuclear power plant has been created, which is housed in the body of a cruise missile like the latest Russian air-launched Kh-101 missile or the American Tomahawk and has a “virtually unlimited” flight range - because of this (and thanks to " unpredictable flight path,” as Putin put it) it is capable of bypassing any interception lines. At the end of 2017, its successful launch took place at the Central Test Site of the Russian Federation. During the flight, the power plant reached the specified power and provided the required level of thrust. As illustrative material at Putin’s speech, a video was shown in which a missile goes around the interception zones in Atlantic Ocean, goes around the American continent from the south and goes north. There is some ambiguity here: Putin is talking about installing a nuclear engine on missiles like the X-101, and this is an air-launched missile. In the video, the launch is made from the ground. Attempts to create a nuclear-powered cruise missile date back to the middle of the last century, in the United States this is the Pluto/SLAM project. A compact nuclear reactor is installed on a rocket and during flight heats air taken from outside, which is then thrown out through a nozzle, creating thrust. The advantages of such a project: there is no need for a supply of any fuel other than nuclear, that is, the combination of “nuclear reactor + air as the working fluid of the engine” has an almost unlimited power reserve - and this coincides with the description of the Russian president. In 1964 the project was finally closed The disadvantages that forced the Americans to abandon the project: the reactor, in order to be compact enough for a rocket, lacks protection, is cooled directly by flowing air, which becomes radioactive and is thrown out. Testing such a missile is extremely problematic - it emits a huge amount of heat, makes a very loud sound and covers the area over which it flies with a plume of radioactive fallout. If something happens to the rocket, an unprotected nuclear reactor could fall in a populated area. (For example, it is difficult to imagine a nuclear-powered cruise missile strike similar to the Kalibr missile strikes on targets in Syria in 2015 Russian ships from the Caspian Sea.) And yet, the engines created as part of the project were tested on stands - they demonstrated high power in line with what was expected, and the radioactivity of the exhaust turned out to be lower than the engineers expected. However, in 1964, the project was finally closed: it required large expenses, any aerial test of the missile would be extremely dangerous, and most importantly, doubts arose about the feasibility of cruise missiles of this type - by this time it became clear that the basis of the strategic nuclear arsenal was destined to become intercontinental ballistic missiles. rockets. Nuclear-powered rockets were being developed in the USSR and Great Britain around the same years, but they did not even reach the bench testing stage. How can a nuclear-powered rocket be constructed? Let's start with the sizes. The President mentioned that its parameters are comparable to the Tomahawk and X-101 missiles. The Tomahawk has a diameter of 0.53 cm, and the X-101 (it is not round in shape) has a described diameter of 74 cm. For comparison, the diameter of the SLAM missile should have been more than three meters. Independent nuclear technology expert Valentin Gibalov believes that the parameters of the new Russian development may be somewhere in the middle, and that effectively fitting a design with a nuclear reactor into a diameter of 50–70 centimeters is very difficult and hardly makes sense. Based on the test video, taking into account the size of the launcher, one can estimate that the diameter of the new missile is about 1.5 meters. What's inside this pipe? The simplest option is the so-called ramjet engine, when air entering through the air intake at the front passes through the reactor, heats up, expands, and higher speed comes out of the nozzle, creating jet thrust. The SLAM project was based on this principle, however, this scheme is far from the only one. New development may use some variant turbojet engine, air heating can occur not directly, but through a heat exchanger - the reactor can generate electricity and power an electric motor that rotates the propeller. Unmanned drone with long wings or corn husk No matter how exotic this option sounds, it could work, only such a rocket would fly at a maximum speed of 500 km/h and would look more like an unmanned drone with very long wings or... like a corn husk. The fact is that a nuclear installation that additionally converts thermal energy into electrical energy will have a very large relative mass for a given power. “Let’s say there is a project that is now classified, but until 2016 was quite widely published - this is a project of a megawatt (megawatt is useful energy with 4 megawatts of thermal energy) RUGK reactor and a TEM (Transport Energy Module) installation on its base, it is everywhere called a space-based nuclear tug. In this project, the weight of the reactor plant plus the energy conversion system is almost seven tons with a power of 1 megawatt. It can be compared to the AN-2 aircraft: it has a maximum take-off weight of approximately seven tons and an engine power of approximately 1 megawatt. It turns out that if we have nothing but a reactor and turbogenerators, then something like the AN-2 will come out,” says Gibalov. Maximum speed AN-2 - 258 km/h, such a missile is unlikely to be needed by the Russian army. Another exotic option mentioned in the comment Federal agency news, Professor of the Russian Academy of Military Sciences Sergei Sudakov: “We are now offering completely new technology- this is a very compact engine of a completely new generation... That's all that concerns cold reactions and cold nuclear fusion. These engines are completely different, and they have nothing to do with the installations that the United States developed in the 50s.” An expert, apparently unrelated to the project, explains that Russian engineers managed to create an engine using “low-enriched uranium” with high efficiency, and there will be nuclear “exhaust”, but it will be minimal. “We have made a rocket that flies at low temperatures and with virtually minimal pollution,” Sudakov said. If the military suddenly has such an excellent source of energy Cold thermonuclear fusion, that is, a thermonuclear reaction that occurs at relatively low starting energies (in a classical thermonuclear reaction, such as a thermonuclear explosion, the fuel must initially be heated to a very high temperature - for example, by a laser or explosion) is a fringe theory. The scientific consensus is that cold thermonuclear fusion is impossible in principle; a few adherents of this approach from time to time loudly declare that they have achieved success, but no one has yet been able to repeat their experiments. There is another argument against the cold thermonuclear in the new rocket - it could be used much more effectively for other military purposes: “What is the point of then numerous state-funded projects of autonomous nuclear power plants for the Arctic, if the military suddenly has such an excellent source of heat and energy, and then they wouldn’t carry fuel on airplanes, as is now happening for diesel engines,” notes Gibalov. But other, more traditional approaches, according to Gibalov, are too complex for an engine that must operate for a very long time and under conditions of harsh radiation: “For example, an air jet engine with a turbine requires extremely complex high-precision mechanics, which, if put into the conditions of a nuclear reactor, will not work for any long time. It is necessary to sort through all the components of such a combined engine and carry out extensive research on each component - what materials should be used to replace it, how to improve it. The further we delve into the details of such a possible more complex option, the clearer it will be that such a development is comparable, if not larger, in scale with the USSR's development of nuclear rocket engines for space rockets, and they required the construction of several nuclear centers with reactors, stands at Semipalatinsk test site, where hydrogen was blown through a nuclear reactor. All this dragged on for about 20 years, about 25 – working out. And it was very labor-intensive and very resource-intensive. I think that any other option except straight-through is about the same. Oil is more likely to flow from a Formula 1 engine than from an Opel. According to the expert, the new development is most likely a continuation of the ideas of the 1960s, primarily the ramjet engines of the SLAM project. Gibalov claims that modern materials and new technologies for the production of heat transfer elements make it possible to make such a rocket much cleaner than 60 years ago: – All reactors are designed in such a way as to retain fission products, that is, radioactive dirt that is formed during operation. They are airtight in this regard. Here, of course, there is a certain difficulty: the higher the temperature, the more difficult it is to do this, that is, the walls begin to flow. But, it seems to me, in principle this problem can be solved. It can be assumed that in an accident-free version, such a direct-flow reactor is comparable in emissions into the air with a closed reactor with heat exchangers and a secondary circuit. However, one can hardly expect that such complex and completely new equipment will always function properly, especially at the testing stage. “Oil is more likely to flow from a Formula 1 engine than from an ordinary Opel,” explains Gibalov. Name A name for the Russian nuclear-powered cruise missile has not been invented - and even a competition has been organized on what to call it. However, military observer Alexei Ramm in Izvestia puts forward the version that we are talking about the product 9M730 of the Novator Design Bureau, one of the developers of Russian cruise missiles. At the same time, the article itself mentions that Novator specializes in ground-based and sea-based missiles, and “air-launched products” are developed by Raduga. And the X-101 missile mentioned by Putin is precisely air-launched. Novator products numbered 9M728 and 9M729 are really cruise missiles, one for the famous Iskanders, the other a ground-based analogue of the X-101 mentioned by Putin. And indeed, judging by the government procurement website, the product is in a state of active development. However, there is no evidence that this is indeed the missile announced by Putin. The article provides a description of a rocket with a nuclear engine by military historian Dmitry Boltenkov: “On the sides of the rocket there are special compartments with powerful and compact heaters powered by a nuclear power plant.” This is somewhat different from the concept that air flows directly around the reactor, and assumes some kind of heat exchange system. Eccentric types of nuclear weapons American Russian weapons expert Michael Kofman, in his blog, agrees with Ramm’s assumption that the nuclear-powered missile is the 9M730. Kofman believes that we are talking about a reactor without protection, based on the size and weight of the rocket. He also quotes former Secretary of Defense Ash Carter as saying in a 2017 article: "Russia is investing in new ballistic missile submarines, heavy bombers, new ICBMs... But they are also being combined with new operational concepts." nuclear weapons and some new and even eccentric types of nuclear weapons systems,” which, according to Kofman, now played in a new light. Another weapons expert, Jeffrey Lewis, writes in an article for Foreign Policy that all the systems unveiled by Putin were known to the Barack Obama administration: “Even the cruise missile, about which, as I now understand retroactively, American officials have been hinting for some time." Were there any tests? CNN and Foxnews reported, citing unnamed officials, that the missile announced by Putin is still in the development stage and that the United States recently witnessed an attempt to launch such a missile that ended up crashing in the Arctic (although it is not entirely clear how to distinguish a successful missile launch from launch, ending with its fall - and in any case, in real tests of the rocket at the end of the flight the nuclear reactor should crash into the surface of the Earth at high speed). According to Putin, the tests took place at the Central Test Site. Ramm in Izvestia cites the opinion that this is a training ground in the village of Nenoksa, Arkhangelsk Region (State Central Marine Test Range of the Navy). Moreover, the Central Nuclear Test Site of the Russian Federation is located on the archipelago New Earth. Kofman also suggests that the launch shown in the video took place on Novaya Zemlya. In this regard, the authors of the Warzone project recall the mysterious release of the radioactive substance iodine-131 into the atmosphere in February last year, the source of which was the Kola Peninsula in northern Russia. The release of iodine-131, they say, was recorded - among dozens of other isotopes - during nuclear engine tests in Nevada in the 60s. Four isotopes of iodine and two isotopes of ruthenium at once True, the release of one isotope of iodine without other radionuclides can hardly be a consequence of testing a “dirty” nuclear-powered rocket. “Most likely, there would be at least two isotopes and even more,” explains Gibalov. – When we have a flow, roughly speaking, from a working reactor, we immediately see four isotopes of iodine and two isotopes of ruthenium ( but this does not appear to apply to the ruthenium leak in the Urals last year.–RS). If we have a certain amount of iodine flow through the wall, then all these four isotopes travel together. And this is all very well monitored and determined, the method is widely used. My opinion: in the case of real flights, even on Novaya Zemlya with the nuclear engine turned on, namely flights, and not ground bench tests, monitoring stations will notice them - however, provided that the reactor is “flowing”. During normal operation, the expert claims, it will be quite difficult to detect traces of its work: “Yes, air activation still occurs. Unfortunately, the longest-lived isotope that can be detected is argon-41, which has a complete decay period of approximately two hours. The USA has planes that are equipped with detectors of all kinds of activation products, decay products. But, I think, with such an aircraft it is possible to record the trail of a rocket, practically only by flying through it for not such a long time.” But the absence of leaks in a new nuclear engine, as mentioned above, is extremely unlikely. Putin said in his speech that successful tests were carried out at the end of last year. Vedomosti made a strange addition to this information, reporting, citing a source close to the military-industrial complex, that radiation safety during rocket testing was ensured, since “the nuclear installation on board was represented by an electrical mock-up.” From a technical point of view, a reactor is just a heater Could it be possible to launch a prototype rocket that uses an electric plant instead of a nuclear engine? Gibalov says that this is not only possible, but also quite logical: – From a technical point of view, a reactor is just a heater; it is very easy to replace it with fuel elements made of wire through which current flows, with conventional TEMs. This would be a very reasonable decision during the first flights of the rocket to understand how well the aerodynamics and control system are designed. We simply throw away, say, a future warhead, and replace it with half a ton of batteries, which provide the thermal equivalent of a reactor, perhaps of reduced power. They do this for a very short time, 10, 20, 30 seconds, no more than a minute, but they allow you to explore it all without fear of disaster right on the first flight. In an interview with NBC journalist Megan Kelly, Putin said that the tests of new weapons went well, “some systems still need to be worked on, tweaked, and some have already entered the troops and are on combat duty.” When asked to answer on the record the question “do you have a working nuclear-powered intercontinental missile that has successfully passed testing,” Putin said: “They all passed it successfully. It’s just that.” different systems are at different stages of readiness." Everything is 100% closed Gibalov calls the creation of a cruise missile with a nuclear power plant a theoretically solvable task, taking into account modern level technologies, but still extremely expensive and resource-intensive. He names indirect arguments indicating that in reality the missile that Vladimir Putin presented to the Federation Council may not exist: “Unlike other new types of weapons announced by the president, there were no traces of this design. For example, the development of Sarmat has been known for a long time. Here and there, design elements, estimates, scientific articles came out, there was some kind of trail of indirect signs that such development was underway. One can, of course, explain the absence of this trail in the case of a cruise missile by the fact that the nuts were really tightened here. For example, it is impossible to find anything on the development of modern nuclear weapons, what weapons are being developed, what technical principles are used there - this is all absolutely 100% closed. But there is not only a nuclear part, there is also a missile and cruise part. And, as it seems to me and other colleagues, there would be some traces. I think at least this project is at a fairly early stage of development. Strategic Balance William Perry, US Secretary of Defense in the Bill Clinton administration and a disarmament expert, writes in Politico that the new weapons announced by Putin do not change anything in the balance of nuclear deterrence: Russia does not need to invent new means to overcome US defenses by “entering from the south.” ”, because it already has all the capabilities for this: the missile defense system, as Washington has repeatedly stated, is not able to withstand the massive launch of intercontinental missiles, its goal is individual salvos from pariah states like North Korea, and Russia and the United States already have the ability to destroy each other. Perry is concerned that the US could be drawn into this newest race with Russia to see who has the bigger nuclear button. And you are in the mud, and the pig is happy Lewis says the same thing: “An arms race with the Russians is pointless. The Russians are taking it to themselves. A race with the Russian military-industrial complex is like a fight with a pig: both you are in the mud and the pig is happy.” Kofman does not believe that Russia needs new weapons to ensure a viable nuclear deterrent, nor that they fundamentally change the military balance with the United States. According to the expert, “Russia is not confident in its conventional [military] capabilities in the coming years or ever.” The speech of the Russian president contained a clear message: “no one in the world has anything like this yet,” “no one really wanted to talk to us, no one listened to us. Listen now.” But it is interesting that Putin uses only the development of US missile defense as a justification for new Russian weapons, without discussing, for example, the improvement of US ballistic missiles, which, as experts argue in the article “How the modernization of US nuclear forces undermines strategic stability,” could change the balance of power containment, especially given the limited Russian system early warning. In the same speech, Putin said that “the updated review of US nuclear strategy... lowers the threshold for the use of nuclear weapons” and that Russia can use nuclear weapons “only in response to the use against it or its allies... of weapons of mass destruction or case of aggression... when the very existence of the state is threatened.” However, the United States sees Russia as “lowering the threshold” in the use of nuclear forces: “Russia’s confidence that by being the first to use nuclear weapons, including low-yield weapons, one can gain such an advantage is partly based on Moscow’s idea that the possession A greater number and variety of non-strategic nuclear weapons provides superiority in a crisis situation or in a more limited conflict. Russia's recent statements regarding this emerging doctrine of the use of nuclear weapons can be interpreted as Moscow lowering the "nuclear threshold", crossing which it is possible to be the first to use nuclear weapons... Forcing Russia to abandon such illusions is a strategic task of paramount importance... Increasing the flexibility and diversity of US nuclear capabilities, including allowing for the possibility of using low-yield nuclear weapons, is important for maintaining the ability to prevent aggression on a regional scale. This will raise the “nuclear threshold” and encourage potential adversaries to realize that they cannot gain an advantage through limited nuclear escalation, which in turn will reduce the likelihood of the use of nuclear weapons.” Often in general educational publications about astronautics, the difference between a nuclear rocket engine (NRE) and a nuclear rocket electric propulsion system (NRE) is not distinguished. However, these abbreviations hide not only the difference in the principles of converting nuclear energy into rocket thrust, but also a very dramatic history of the development of astronautics. The drama of history lies in the fact that if research on nuclear propulsion and nuclear propulsion in both the USSR and the USA, which had been stopped mainly for economic reasons, had continued, then human flights to Mars would have long ago become commonplace. The engines developed as part of the Pluto project were planned to be installed on cruise missiles, which in the 1950s were created under the designation SLAM (Supersonic Low Altitude Missile, supersonic low-altitude missile). The United States planned to build a rocket 26.8 meters long, three meters in diameter, and weighing 28 tons. The rocket body was supposed to contain a nuclear warhead, as well as a nuclear propulsion system having a length of 1.6 meters and a diameter of 1.5 meters. Compared to other sizes, the installation looked very compact, which explains its direct-flow principle of operation. The developers believed that, thanks to the nuclear engine, the SLAM missile's flight range would be at least 182 thousand kilometers. In 1964, the US Department of Defense closed the project. The official reason was that in flight, a nuclear-powered cruise missile pollutes everything around too much. But in fact, the reason was the significant costs of maintaining such rockets, especially since by that time rocketry was rapidly developing based on liquid-propellant rocket engines, the maintenance of which was much cheaper. The USSR remained faithful to the idea of creating a ramjet design for a nuclear powered engine much longer than the United States, closing the project only in 1985. But the results turned out to be much more significant. Thus, the first and only Soviet nuclear rocket engine was developed at the Khimavtomatika design bureau, Voronezh. This is RD-0410 (GRAU Index - 11B91, also known as “Irbit” and “IR-100”). The RD-0410 used a heterogeneous thermal neutron reactor, the moderator was zirconium hydride, the neutron reflectors were made of beryllium, the nuclear fuel was a material based on uranium and tungsten carbides, with about 80% enrichment in the 235 isotope. The design included 37 fuel assemblies, covered with thermal insulation that separated them from the moderator. The project provided that the hydrogen flow first passed through the reflector and moderator, maintaining their temperature at room temperature, and then entered the core, where it cooled the fuel assemblies, heating up to 3100 K. At the stand, the reflector and moderator were cooled by a separate hydrogen flow. The reactor went through a significant series of tests, but was never tested for its full operating duration. However, the outside reactor components were completely exhausted. Technical characteristics of RD 0410 Thrust in void: 3.59 tf (35.2 kN) Relatively small overall dimensions and weight, high temperature of nuclear fuel (3100 K) at effective system cooling by a hydrogen flow indicates that the RD0410 is an almost ideal prototype of a nuclear propulsion engine for modern cruise missiles. And, considering modern technologies obtaining self-stopping nuclear fuel, increasing the resource from an hour to several hours is a very real task. There are three types of nuclear propulsion engines depending on the type of fuel for the reactor: In gas-phase nuclear propellant engines, the fuel (for example, uranium) and the working fluid are in a gaseous state (in the form of plasma) and are held in the working area by an electromagnetic field. Uranium plasma heated to tens of thousands of degrees transfers heat to the working fluid (for example, hydrogen), which, in turn, being heated to high temperatures forms a jet stream. Based on the type of nuclear reaction, a distinction is made between a radioisotope rocket engine, a thermonuclear rocket engine and a nuclear engine itself (the energy of nuclear fission is used). An interesting option is also a pulsed nuclear rocket engine - it is proposed to use a nuclear charge as a source of energy (fuel). Such installations can be of internal and external types. The main advantages of nuclear powered engines are: For example, the outstanding Russian scientist Anatoly Sazonovich Koroteev, the author of the invention under the patent, provided a technical solution for the composition of equipment for a modern YARDU. Below I present part of the said patent document verbatim and without comment. The output of the reactor unit 5 is connected to the input of turbine 6, the output of turbine 6 is connected to the high-temperature input 14 of the heat exchanger-recuperator 9. The low-temperature output 15 of the heat exchanger-recuperator 9 is connected to the entrance to the Ranck-Hilsch vortex tube 10. The Ranck-Hilsch vortex tube 10 has two outputs , one of which (via the “hot” working fluid) is connected to the radiator refrigerator 11, and the other (via the “cold” working fluid) is connected to the input of the compressor 7. The output of the radiator refrigerator 11 is also connected to the input to the compressor 7. Compressor output 7 is connected to the low-temperature 15 input to the heat exchanger-recuperator 9. The high-temperature output 16 of the heat exchanger-recuperator 9 is connected to the input to the reactor installation 5. Thus, the main elements of the nuclear power plant are interconnected by a single circuit of the working fluid. The nuclear power plant works as follows. The working fluid heated in the reactor installation 5 is sent to the turbine 6, which ensures the operation of the compressor 7 and the generator 8 of the turbogenerator-compressor. Generator 8 generates electrical energy, which is sent through electrical lines 13 to electric rocket engines 1 and 2 and their supply systems 3 and 4, ensuring their operation. After leaving the turbine 6, the working fluid is sent through the high-temperature inlet 14 to the heat exchanger-recuperator 9, where the working fluid is partially cooled. Then, from the low-temperature outlet 17 of the heat exchanger-recuperator 9, the working fluid is directed into the Ranque-Hilsch vortex tube 10, inside which the working fluid flow is divided into “hot” and “cold” components. The “hot” part of the working fluid then goes to the refrigerator-emitter 11, where this part of the working fluid is effectively cooled. The “cold” part of the working fluid goes to the inlet of the compressor 7, and after cooling, the part of the working fluid leaving the radiating refrigerator 11 also follows there. Compressor 7 supplies the cooled working fluid to the heat exchanger-recuperator 9 through the low-temperature inlet 15. This cooled working fluid in the heat exchanger-recuperator 9 provides partial cooling of the counter flow of the working fluid entering the heat exchanger-recuperator 9 from the turbine 6 through the high-temperature inlet 14. Next, the partially heated working fluid (due to heat exchange with the counter flow of the working fluid from the turbine 6) from the heat exchanger-recuperator 9 through the high-temperature outlet 16 again enters the reactor installation 5, the cycle is repeated again. Thus, a single working fluid located in a closed loop ensures continuous operation of the nuclear power plant, and the use of a Ranque-Hilsch vortex tube as part of the nuclear power plant in accordance with the claimed technical solution improves the weight and size characteristics of the nuclear power plant, increases the reliability of its operation, simplifies its design and makes it possible to increase efficiency of nuclear power plants in general.
It all started with atmospheric aircraft with a ramjet nuclear engine
Designers in the USA and USSR considered “breathing” nuclear installations capable of drawing in outside air and heating it to colossal temperatures. Probably, this principle of thrust generation was borrowed from ramjet engines, only instead of rocket fuel, the fission energy of atomic nuclei of uranium dioxide 235 was used.
In the USA, such an engine was developed as part of the Pluto project. The Americans managed to create two prototypes of the new engine - Tory-IIA and Tory-IIC, which even powered the reactors. The installation capacity was supposed to be 600 megawatts.
Reactor thermal power: 196 MW
Specific thrust impulse in vacuum: 910 kgf s/kg (8927 m/s)
Number of starts: 10
Working resource: 1 hour
Fuel components: working fluid - liquid hydrogen, auxiliary substance - heptane
Weight with radiation protection: 2 tons
Engine dimensions: height 3.5 m, diameter 1.6 m.
Nuclear rocket engine designs
A nuclear rocket engine (NRE) is a jet engine in which the energy generated during a nuclear decay or fusion reaction heats the working fluid (most often hydrogen or ammonia).
The most complete is the solid-phase version of the engine. The figure shows a diagram of the simplest nuclear powered engine with a solid nuclear fuel reactor. The working fluid is located in an external tank. Using a pump, it is supplied to the engine chamber. In the chamber, the working fluid is sprayed using nozzles and comes into contact with the fuel-generating nuclear fuel. When heated, it expands and flies out of the chamber through the nozzle at great speed. 
The main disadvantage is the high radiation hazard of the propulsion system:Nuclear propulsion system
Considering that any reliable information about nuclear power plants from publications, including from scientific articles, it is impossible to obtain, the operating principle of such installations is best considered using examples of open patent materials, although they contain know-how. 
The essence of the proposed technical solution is illustrated by the diagram presented in the drawing. A nuclear propulsion system operating in propulsion-energy mode contains an electric propulsion system (EPS) (the example diagram shows two electric rocket engines 1 and 2 with corresponding feed systems 3 and 4), a reactor installation 5, a turbine 6, a compressor 7, a generator 8, heat exchanger-recuperator 9, Ranck-Hilsch vortex tube 10, refrigerator-radiator 11. In this case, turbine 6, compressor 7 and generator 8 are combined into a single unit - a turbogenerator-compressor. The nuclear propulsion unit is equipped with pipelines 12 of the working fluid and electrical lines 13 connecting the generator 8 and the electric propulsion unit. The heat exchanger-recuperator 9 has the so-called high-temperature 14 and low-temperature 15 working fluid inputs, as well as high-temperature 16 and low-temperature 17 working fluid outputs.
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