Skyfall: Russia’s Nuclear Cruise Missile and the Madness of Infinite Flight

The missile’s true value lies in its uncertainty.

The 9M730 Burevestnik, known to NATO as Skyfall. Kyiv Post

When Vladimir Putin goes on television to announce a “new weapon never seen before,” it usually means one of two things: he’s bluffing for domestic morale, or Russian engineers just finished building something so unstable it makes Chernobyl look like a solar farm.

This time, it might be both.

Last month, Putin declared that Russia’s long-rumored nuclear-powered cruise missile, the 9M730 Burevestnik, known to NATO as Skyfall, had finally flown. Not for minutes, but for 15 hours.

Over 8,700 miles.

At low altitude.

Propelled not by kerosene or jet fuel, but by a miniature nuclear reactor.

It’s the kind of idea only a Cold War could love.

And yet here we are again.

A Reactor With Wings

Skyfall is, in theory, a missile that can stay airborne indefinitely. Not “long endurance.” Not “extended range.” Indefinitely.

Instead of burning fuel, it carries a small fission reactor that heats incoming air to generate thrust; a kind of nuclear ramjet.

If it works, the missile could loiter for weeks, weave through radar gaps, and approach its target from any direction. It wouldn’t follow the predictable arc of an ICBM; it would crawl along the Earth’s curvature like a ghost.

First: the concept. A nuclear-powered cruise missile is basically a flying furnace. Instead of burning kerosene in a combustion chamber, you shove air through a reactor core, let that reactor heat the air to very high temperatures, then accelerate the hot air out the back to make thrust.

That’s the same physics as a ramjet or an afterburner, except the heat source is fission, not flame.

The advantage on paper is brutal: nuclear fission packs millions of times more energy per kilogram than chemical fuel, so a relatively small mass of fissile material could produce orders of magnitude more endurance than conventional engines.

That’s the simple math behind “indefinite” flight.

How the reactor itself would be configured is where the engineering nightmare begins.

There are two basic architectures people discuss in open literature: a direct-cycle, “air flows through the core” design (the old SLAM/Project Pluto idea I’ll talk about in the next section), or an indirect-cycle option where a working fluid or heat exchanger stands between the reactor and the incoming air.

Direct-cycle is simpler and lighter, which is why it’s the favorite if you want something that fits inside a missile. But it also means the core is literally being bombarded by the air that becomes the exhaust.

That exhaust will carry radioactive particles and activation products with it. In short: you drive a reactor and spray whatever leaks out downwind.

For the core to survive, you need exotic materials. Temperatures in a working nuclear ramjet would climb into the thousands of degrees Celsius.

You’d want ceramics, refractory metals, or coated graphite structures that can both tolerate heat and not disintegrate under the force of high-velocity airflow. The fuel elements themselves would likely be highly enriched uranium embedded in a matrix designed to resist erosion and avoid catastrophic deformation.

Modern reactor research favors fuel forms like TRISO particles embedded in ceramic pebbles for high-temperature resilience, but even TRISO has limits in an open-air flow environment.

Neutronics and control are another headache. A tiny airborne reactor still needs a way to control reactivity with control rods, reflectors, or movable moderators. And those mechanisms must operate reliably under massive thermal and mechanical stress.

You’d want a reactor that remains subcritical during handling and becomes critical only after a safe boost pass, but that requires robust, failure-proof actuators.

Startup sequencing would probably use the booster rocket to get the vehicle to ramjet speed, then drop a cover or move a reflector so the core reaches operating geometry. That’s one more moving part that can fail catastrophically.

Radiation shielding is a cruel trade.

To protect electronics and any nearby ground crew, you need heavy shielding like lead, tungsten, or dense composites. But every kilogram you add is weight you can’t use for fuel, guidance, or payload. In a missile-sized package that means minimal shielding, so electronics must be hardened, and humans must be kept well away during pre- and post-flight.

The core would be hot not just thermally but radiologically, complicating maintenance and storage. A crashed rocket would be a radiological cleanup task on the scale of a moderate nuclear accident.

On propulsion performance: a nuclear ramjet would offer very high specific energy and therefore the potential for very long ranges at cruise speeds. Don’t expect hypersonic sprint speeds if you want endurance; you trade raw velocity for loiter and maneuverability. Mach numbers in the high-subsonic to low-supersonic envelope are the practical sweet spot because airflow and material limits scale badly with speed.

The reactor’s thermal power and the core’s aerodynamic coupling determine thrust; in plain terms, the hotter and larger the core you can carry, the more sustained thrust you get but the harder it is to survive structurally.

Emissions and environmental signature are decisive.

A working Skyfall would radiate neutrons and gamma rays, and its exhaust could contain activated air molecules and particulate fuel fragments.

That makes it visible to a range of sensors: radiological detectors, high-altitude sampling, and, paradoxically, infrared because the reactor throws off obscene heat.

You can hide a ballistic missile in a silo; you cannot hide a nuclear-heated exhaust plume from detectors if anyone is looking with the right gear.

Finally, maintenance and logistics are brutal. You can’t “store” a fueled nuclear cruise missile on the shelf in a routine ordnance depot. It demands nuclear-licensed facilities, remote handling gear, contamination monitoring, and a political willingness to accept the occasional catastrophic accident near your own territory.

That’s the core operational constraint that makes an operational fleet of these things both technically possible and geopolitically toxic.

For Russia, that’s the whole point. Skyfall isn’t about adding more nuclear firepower. Moscow already has enough warheads to turn the planet into a discount Mars.

It’s all about undermining Western missile defenses. The US can intercept predictable ballistic trajectories. What it can’t stop easily is a low-flying, maneuverable cruise missile that never needs to refuel.

It’s a weapon designed for strategic uncertainty; the idea that the threat alone can paralyze decision-makers. You don’t need to launch it.

You just need your enemy to wonder where it is.

The American Prequel: Project Pluto

But Russia didn’t invent the nuclear cruise missile. America did.

In the early 1960s, US engineers at Lawrence Livermore and Los Alamos worked on Project Pluto: a supersonic, low-altitude missile powered by a nuclear ramjet and armed with multiple hydrogen bombs.

The plan was simple: build a flying reactor that could circle the globe spewing radiation and death.

It was called SLAM, the Supersonic Low Altitude Missile.

It was also, without exaggeration, the most deranged weapon system ever conceived by the human race. Engineers joked that if they ever actually launched it, “America might win, but the environment would lose.” Fucking understatement of the decade, that.

SLAM could have flown for days at Mach 3, dropping warheads as it went. It was effectively a flying apocalypse with a half-life.

By 1964, sanity prevailed. Intercontinental ballistic missiles proved cleaner, faster, and far less likely to irradiate entire test ranges. Project Pluto was shut down before a prototype could ever fly. No doubt after several millions of dollars were spent on its feasibility.

Russia’s Skyfall is Pluto’s ghost: same concept, modernized with better materials, digital controls, and the same fatal flaw: a nuclear engine that can turn any crash site into a radiological disaster.

The 2019 Explosion: Russia’s First “Oopsie”

In August 2019, residents near Russia’s White Sea noticed a sudden spike in background radiation. The official line? A “liquid-fuel rocket accident.”

The unofficial one? Skyfall had blown up.

The Nyonoksa blast wasn’t just another Russian “accident.” It was the kind of event that makes even hardened intelligence analysts stop scrolling. Within hours of the explosion, radiation sensors as far as Norway detected elevated levels.

Civilian flights were rerouted. Local doctors were ordered to sign non-disclosure agreements. And the town of Severodvinsk, thirty miles away, briefly shut down its radiation monitors, because when your Roentgen (R) numbers are that high, you may as well just turn the screens off and make sure your affairs are in order.

The incident unfolded like a bad Cold War made-for-TV miniseries: state media confused, local officials panicking, and men in hazmat suits loading something glowing onto a barge.

Later, independent researchers spotted a heavily guarded containment vessel floating in the White Sea; the kind used to store irradiated reactor components.

Moscow, meanwhile, kept insisting it was a routine rocket mishap.

But context mattered. The blast occurred at a naval range used for testing cruise missiles. The dead were not generic “technicians” as claimed, but nuclear engineers from Rosatom, Russia’s state atomic agency. Ahem, you know, the people you call when your rocket runs on uranium instead of kerosene.

The recovery barge itself was later photographed listing in the water, leaking contaminated debris, while locals filmed the cleanup from fishing boats.

What the world saw was a regime so determined to prove its technological prowess that it risked turning part of the Arctic coastline into a fallout zone.

The United States had scrapped this exact idea in the 1960s because it was too dangerous to test. Russia resurrected it and promptly demonstrated why.

The irony is that the Kremlin framed the accident as proof of progress: “Work continues on advanced systems,” Putin said… As if losing five nuclear scientists and irradiating your own shoreline were just part of the research cycle.

In truth, the Nyonoksa explosion revealed how far propaganda had outpaced reality. It was the moment the myth of invincibility met the laws of physics, and the laws won.

Why Russia Wants It Anyway

So why resurrect an abandoned American idea with a potential friendly death toll baked into its engineering?

Because Russia’s entire nuclear doctrine depends on signaling. The Kremlin knows it can’t match NATO in conventional precision warfare. What it can do is keep the world guessing and to field systems so unpredictable that no one feels confident enough to test them.

Putin’s 2018 “invincible weapons” speech introduced Skyfall alongside hypersonic glide vehicles and underwater drones with nuclear propulsion. The message was theatrical: “You can’t contain us. We can fly forever.”

In Russian military psychology, endurance is the ultimate flex. A missile that doesn’t land, doesn’t tire, and doesn’t need fuel is propaganda gold. It speaks to the same myth that built the Red Army: that Russians endure while others expire.

What 15 Hours Really Means

When Russia claims a 15-hour flight over the Arctic, we should assume it’s partially true. Sensors detected a long-duration object, likely powered by something other than conventional fuel.

But “success” in Russian military PR usually means “it didn’t explode this time.”

If Skyfall truly flew for 15 hours, it’s a major step; not toward practicality, but toward a working prototype. The range numbers make sense; the safety does not. A malfunction mid-flight could spread radioactive debris over multiple countries.

Imagine an airborne Chernobyl that doesn’t crash right away.

The weapon’s stated purpose: “unlimited range and unpredictable trajectory,” reads like a Cold War fever dream resurrected for modern fear optics. It’s designed less for launch than for leverage.

But here’s what I think… Skyfall is not meant to be fired. It’s meant to exist.

The missile’s true value lies in its uncertainty. Every exercise, every radar blip, every Arctic overflight forces NATO and NORAD to consider: is that thing nuclear-powered? Is it armed? Is it still flying?

That psychological tax compounds. It keeps Western intelligence guessing, analysts modeling, and policymakers anxious. The Cold War was built on that kind of fear math: mutually assured destruction through ambiguity.

The danger is that in reviving it, Russia isn’t modernizing deterrence. It’s gambling with deterrence fatigue.

When everything is possible, nothing feels urgent. And that’s when mistakes happen.

The Irony of Infinity

In chasing “infinite flight,” Russia has built the perfect metaphor for its current trajectory: endless motion, no destination. A weapon that can fly forever but never land safely.

If Skyfall works, it poisons the air around it. If it fails, it poisons the ground it crashes into. It’s the ultimate expression of the Russian state: powerful yet weak, self-destructive, and convinced the fallout is someone else’s problem.

The Americans walked away from this idea 60 years ago because they had the luxury of better options.

Russia doesn’t. It’s cornered by its own mythology, building weapons that prove endurance while quietly corroding its own future.

A missile that flies forever isn’t a triumph of engineering. It’s a confession: that a nation’s only way to feel infinite is to flirt with annihilation.

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