In his Oct. 5 plenary session Q&A with the audience at the Valdai Discussion Club annual meeting in Sochi, Russian President Vladimir Putin surprised the world by announcing: “Our effort to develop new strategic weapons is nearing completion. I have already talked about them and announced their development several years ago. The latest test launch of Burevestnik was a success. This is a nuclear-powered cruise missile with a basically unlimited range.”
Sputnik posted a long article about this on Oct. 6, although it didn’t reveal much by way of technical details about the weapon itself. The article noted that the Burevestnik is one component of Russia’s multilayered response to the George W. Bush administration’s decision in 2002 to walk out on the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. “Washington’s short-sighted decision prompted Russia to dust off blueprints and prototypes of advanced rocketry and aerospace systems and designs developed in strict secrecy throughout the second half of the 20th century until the end of the Cold War,” Sputnik reported. “In the case of the Burevestnik, this involved following in the footsteps of a path forged by the Voronezh-based Chemical Automatics Design Bureau to build a nuclear thermal rocket engine using a liquid hydrogen propellant.
“The concept of a nuclear-powered engine was born in the late 1940s, at the very dawning of the Soviet rocketry and nuclear programs, with legendary rocket scientist Vitaly Ievlev receiving support from Igor Kurchatov, father of the Soviet atomic bomb, and rocket scientists Sergey Korolev and Mstislav Keldysh, to carry out theoretical work to create such an engine. While work on the program initially focused exclusively on potential military applications, the state soon also realized the tremendous potential of the concept of a nuclear-powered engine being used by spacecraft to make long-distance journeys across the Solar System, including to Mars.”
