Putin says building an unstoppable nuclear-powered missile -- it's probably just a really 'bad idea'
Last edited Tue Aug 27, 2019, 07:26 PM - Edit history (1)
Russia claims to be developing an unstoppable nuclear-powered cruise missile, a weapon with roots in technology the US considered too expensive, too complicated, too dangerous, and too unnecessary to pursue.
Little is known about Russia's doomsday weapon, as it has been described, but the missile has links to systems the Americans and Soviets looked at during the Cold War, systems that both sides eventually gave up on.
During the Cold War, both the US and the Soviet Union "were looking at every possible idea for how to solve this problem of assured destruction," John Pike, founder of GlobalSecurity.org, told Insider, explaining that they pursued ideas that while theoretically possible sometimes failed to close the important gap between possible and militarily useful.
In a time of renewed great power competition, the US and Russia, as nonproliferation expert Jeffrey Lewis wrote recently, "seem to be drifting into a new arms race, either out of some bizarre nostalgia or because no one can think of anything better to do."
Last year, Putin revealed a handful of weapons, some of which have been described as "doomsday weapons." Among them was the Burevestnik nuclear-powered cruise missile, which NATO calls the SSC-X-9 Skyfall. The Russian president has stated that the aim is to defeat American missile defense systems.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/putin-says-russias-building-an-unstoppable-nuclear-powered-missile--its-probably-just-a-really-bad-idea/ar-AAGpENr?li=BBnb7Kz
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