Russia Is Reviving a 1964 US Nuclear-Powered Missile Idea, Despite the Radiation Risk

In 1964, the US built and then shelved Project Pluto, a nuclear-powered cruise missile concept abandoned largely over radiation hazards. Russia has revived the idea with Burevestnik, a direct-cycle turbojet that heats incoming air with a reactor and can shed radioactive isotopes along its flight path, a risk underscored by a 2019 White Sea test incident linked to Rosatom.

In 1964, the United States built and then shelved a nuclear-powered cruise missile concept because the propulsion system would have spewed radioactive exhaust across everything in its path. Russia has now brought that idea back to life in the form of Burevestnik, a reactor-heated, direct-cycle turbojet missile that trades conventional fuel limits for a moving radiation source. The tests have already come with grim reminders, including a 08/08/2019 explosion in the White Sea linked to Rosatom and radiation spikes flagged by the Bellona Foundation. What looks like a throwback weapons project is also a live experiment in how far a government will push a technology the original inventors decided was too dirty to fly.

Every so often, a buried engineering idea resurfaces and reminds Washington why it was shelved in the first place. Back on the drawing boards of 1964, the US built a prototype for a nuclear-powered cruise missile called Project Pluto. It worked, according to historical accounts, but it carried a problem no test range could solve: radiation along the entire flight path.

Now Russia is revisiting the same harsh logic with Burevestnik, a nuclear-powered missile Moscow has teased publicly for years. The point is not just another nuclear warhead, but a nuclear propulsion system that turns the journey itself into the hazard. That distinction is what has arms-control experts and defense analysts paying attention again.

During the Cold War, both superpowers chased nuclear propulsion for strategic endurance. In the US case, Project Pluto explored a nuclear-powered engine that could keep a missile in the air for extraordinary distances without refueling, a seductive advantage when early warning systems were improving.

The price was unavoidable contamination. The reactor needed to interact with outside air to make thrust, and that meant radioactive exhaust was not an accident, it was baked into the design. The US ultimately canceled Pluto not because engineers failed, but because the environmental and safety implications were too extreme to operationalize responsibly.

A recent analysis from researchers at MIT puts new detail around the Russian design. Instead of Pluto’s older approach, the study describes Burevestnik as using a direct-cycle nuclear turbojet: outside air flows through the reactor core, heats up from fission, then blasts out the back as propulsion.

That simplicity helps shrink the system into a missile about 9.5 meters long, per the analysis. But it also means the exhaust can carry radioactive byproducts. The researchers describe likely releases that include isotopes of argon, krypton, and radioactive carbon, plus particles from reactor erosion under heat and pressure.

Strategically, the appeal is persistence. A nuclear-powered cruise missile could, in theory, loiter for hours or longer and approach from unexpected directions, complicating missile defense planning and surveillance coverage. But the same feature creates a glaring drawback: the longer it flies, the more it potentially sheds.

Testing has also been shadowed by incidents. A notable flashpoint was the 2019 White Sea explosion that killed 5 Rosatom scientists, widely linked to work around exotic propulsion. The MIT analysis raises an additional possibility: a recovered reactor could have reactivated during handling, a reminder that “miniaturized reactor in a missile” is not just a design challenge, it is a lifecycle risk.

So is Burevestnik a practical weapon or a technology demonstrator for other systems, including long-endurance drones or future space platforms? Either way, it is resurrecting a class of nuclear engineering the US once decided was too dangerous to field.