Asger Risom
A new MIT analysis reveals that Russia’s “Skyfall” nuclear-powered cruise missile utilizes a crude, direct-cycle engine that sucks in atmospheric air and blasts it directly through a nuclear core. The design allows for nearly unlimited range, but causes the weapon to spew a massive trail of toxic radiation into the atmosphere throughout its entire flight path.
When Vladimir Putin first unveiled Russia’s “Burevestnik” nuclear-powered cruise missile back in 2018, Western experts were deeply skeptical. A missile that could fly indefinitely sounded like science fiction. However, following a successful 15-hour long-endurance test late last year, the reality has officially set in: Russia has successfully flown the first true nuclear-powered aircraft in human history.
But a chilling new scientific analysis reveals that this engineering milestone comes with a terrifying catch. The missile is essentially a flying Chernobyl—a weapon that systematically pollutes the atmosphere and poisons everything in its path long before it ever reaches a target.
Hacking the engine by cutting safety corners
To understand why this missile is so dangerous, you have to look at how it actually stays in the air. For decades, both the United States and the Soviet Union abandoned nuclear-propelled flight because the engines were simply too heavy and unsafe. Russia managed to bypass the weight problem by stripping away the most basic safety features.
According to a detailed study by aerospace and nuclear engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the Burevestnik—known to NATO as the SSC-X-9 Skyfall—almost certainly utilizes a “direct-cycle” nuclear turbojet engine.
In a standard nuclear reactor, a closed-loop system uses a fluid like water to safely transfer heat without letting radioactive material escape. Russia threw that rulebook out the window. The Skyfall engine sucks in raw atmospheric air, forces it directly through the hyper-hot radioactive core of the reactor to heat it up, and then blasts that air out of the exhaust nozzle to create thrust.
The resulting propulsion system is incredibly compact, but the ecological consequences are horrifying. As clean air passes straight through the exposed nuclear fuel, it becomes severely irradiated. The hot exhaust trailing behind the subsonic missile is filled with dangerous radioactive isotopes of carbon, krypton, and argon, scattering toxic waste across the surface below for every second it is in flight.
A history of deadly accidents
The technology is so volatile that Russia’s path to developing it has been paved with body bags. In 2017, a prototype missile crashed into the sea during an early test. Two years later, a massive explosion rocked a barge in the White Sea, killing five nuclear scientists and sending radiation spikes through nearby Russian cities. Experts believe the deadly accident occurred when the lost reactor accidentally restarted itself while crews were attempting to haul the wreckage off the ocean floor.
Furthermore, the MIT researchers highlighted a fundamental design flaw: the intense heat and compressed air rushing through the engine will naturally corrode the reactor core during prolonged flights. This means the longer the missile stays in the air, the more internal components disintegrate, generating an even higher concentration of radioactive particles spewing into the sky.
A terrible weapon with very little military value
Given the immense environmental risks and the trail of dead scientists left in its wake, military experts are left scratching their heads as to why Moscow is bothering to build the Skyfall at all.
On paper, the missile’s main trick is unlimited range. Because it is powered by nuclear fission, it could theoretically stay aloft for days, flying all the way around the world to sneak into the United States from the south, completely bypassing northern early-warning radar lines.
But outside of its unpredictable flight path, the missile is a total dud by modern warfare standards. It is slow, flying at a sluggish subsonic speed of around Mach 0.75, and it lacks any stealth coating. Because it literally leaks a massive trail of radiation across the sky, it is incredibly easy for Western intelligence to track on sensors and simple for modern air defenses to shoot down.
Military analysts suggest the Skyfall is less of a strategic breakthrough and more of a vanity pet project for Putin, who became obsessed with the propaganda value of an “unstoppable” unlimited-range weapon. Alternatively, Russia may simply be using the dangerous prototype as a stepping stone to test reactors for future, more practical space-based nuclear systems. Whatever the motivation, Russia has built a weapon whose very existence poses a greater threat to the global environment than it does to any battlefield target.
