Antinuclear

Evidence Grows That Russia’s Nuclear-Powered Doomsday Missile Was What Blew Up Last Week https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/29380/evidence-grows-that-russians-nuclear-powered-doomsday-missile-was-what-blew-up-last-week, BY JOSEPH TREVITHICK, AUGUST 12, 2019
, Seven personnel from a major nuclear weapons research laboratory died in the mysterious incident at a test site in northwestern Russia.   Rumors and speculation continue to swirl around a radiological accidentlast week at a missile test site in northwestern Russia even as officials held a memorial service today for those who died in the incident. The Kremlin has now acknowledged that the incident killed at least seven scientists and other personnel from a major state nuclear research laboratory, who were working on a system that included a small nuclear reactor at the time. This same lab is linked to the development of a nuclear-powered cruise missile called Burevestnik and U.S. intelligence officials are reportedly increasingly of the view that one of these weapons, or a test article related to it, exploded in this mishap.

Late on Aug. 11, 2019, Valentin Kostiukov, the director of the Russian Federal Nuclear Center-All-Russian Scientific Research Institute of Experimental Physics, also known by the acronym RFNC-VNIIEF, along with the institute’s scientific director Vyacheslav Solovyev and deputy scientific director Aleksandr Chernyshev, held a televised press briefing regarding the accident. RFNC-VNIIEF falls under Russia’s top nuclear Corporation, Rosatom, which first admitted its involvement in the incident at the Nyonoksa missile test site in the country’s Arkhangelsk region and that the explosion had occured during work on a system that included a nuclear “isotope power source,” on Aug. 9, 2019.

Neither Kostyukov, nor the other two representatives from the RFNC-VNIIEF, offered any details about what specifically the scientists had been working on. “One of the lines [of research and development] is the creation of sources of thermal or electric energy using radioactive materials, including fissile materials and radioisotope materials,” Solovyev said, also noting work on small nuclear reactors.

Solovyev continued on to point out that there are potential military and civilian applications of such developments both on earth and in space, specifically highlighting the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) Kilopower program as an example of a non-military endeavor occurring elsewhere in the world. The U.S. military is also investigating a number of small nuclear reactor designs as possible battlefield power sources, projects The War Zone has explored previously in-depth.

VNIIEF could certainly be working on small nuclear reactors for various applications. Given the Kilopower reference, there is the possibility that the “isotope power source” in question may have been a radioisotope thermoelectric generator or a small nuclear reactor for use on satellites or other spacecraft. The liquid fuel rocket motor, which reportedly was the component of the overall system that actually exploded, might point to some sort of launch vehicle that could have supported a test to see how a new generator or reactor design might respond to the stresses of getting blasted into orbit.

However, there are various additional details that continue to point to the nebulous Burevestnik program. The U.S. Intelligence Community, which would have access to additional sources of information not available to the public, is reportedly increasingly of this view, as well, according to report on Aug. 12, 2019, from The New York Times.

Russia’s President Vladimir Putin first revealed this weapon, also known to NATO as the SSC-X-9 Skyfall, in a speech in March 2018. Subsequent reports, citing U.S. intelligence officials, suggested that Russians had been testing it for since at least 2017, unsuccessfully, in Novaya Zemlya, an archipelago in the country’s Arctic region that served as a nuclear weapon proving ground in the past.

Details remain scarce about Burevestnik and how it works, but the most prominent working theory is that its main propulsion source is a nuclear ramjet. A weapon in this configuration would use rocket motors – potentially liquid-fueled, which would explain the source of the explosion in this accident – to boost it to the optimal speed for the ramjet to work. After that, air would pass over the nuclear reactor and get heated before passing through an exhaust nozzle at the rear to produce thrust.

This, in principle, would give the weapon virtually unlimited range and a maximum flying time measured in days or weeks. Another possibility might be that it uses a nuclear thermal rocket, which uses a liquid fuel source instead of air, but this would have a more limited flight time compared to an air-breathing design given its use of a more finite fuel source. Reports of “liquid fuel” may also point to a liquid fuel reactor design.

Whatever the case, the officials from the RFNC-VNIIEF said that preparations had been underway for the test at Nyonoksa, also sometimes written Nenoksa, for around a year. This would line up with observations, including from commercial satellite imagery, that researchers at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey in California had made in the same timeframe.

Satellite imagery indicated that Russia had at least begun dismantling the suspected location of the Burevestnik tests – located in the first place by analyzing a video, seen above, of a purported test launch of one of the missiles that the Kremlin released with Putin’s speech – in Novaya Zemlya between July and August 2018. A very similar looking facility subsequently appeared in imagery from Nyonoksa.