TIL that Project Pluto, a Cold War US program, designed a nuclear-powered cruise missile with unlimited range that would drop multiple hydrogen bombs while continuously spewing deadly radiation along its flight path essentially a flying doomsday machine.

[u/AccomplishedStuff235]

https://nnss.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/DOENV_763.pdf

[u/DarthBrooks69420]

The most insane thing about it is that once it was going under its own power, it could fly for weeks or months. It would have been an airborne Chernobyl, you could set it to just do laps of your enemy's country and it would make the whole thing uninhabitable before the nuclear fuel would be spent to the level that it could no longer sustain thrust to remain airborne. 

Only issue though is due to how long it could remain airborne just one of these things would irradiate the whole planet.

[u/Sankofa416 → u/DarthBrooks69420]

I think I read a science fiction story by one of the authors who came up with these ideas. It is called "There is No Defense" by Theodore Sturgeon and was a space version of exactly this. Chilling to think they went ahead with a project like that at all!

[u/ph0on → u/DarthBrooks69420]

yeah I imagine winds would make that a global issue, no wonder they scrapped it

[u/DarthBrooks69420 → u/ph0on]

Just one would have made the terrain it passed over more radioactive than the chernobyl exclusion zone. If they had been made in large numbers, just traveling to their targets would have been apocalyptic.

Its fortunate Russia is probably whole ass lying about developing this tech for themselves. If they do a high atmospheric test, just one, then so much radioactive pollution will happen.

[u/[deleted]]

Isn't this part of what nuclear arms treaties was trying to prevent?

[u/shewy92]

An offshoot of The Coors Brewing Company manufactured ceramic fuel elements used in the reactors.

Also thank you Blue Jay for covering this story, but shame on you leaving out that fact lol

And I though this was the project Carl Sagan was on but that was the "Lets Nuke the Moon" project

[u/Ruadhan2300 → u/shewy92]

Also fun.. the Coca cola company was consulted on the design for a vending machine mechanism sized for nuclear bombs..

Part of the shelved Project Orion nuclear explosion propelled spacecraft.

[u/patrdesch]

Spewing radiation everywhere along the flight path (outside of Ll the bombs) was not a design goal in and of itself, just a 'happy' byproduct of the whole thing being powered by an unshielded nuclear reactor.

[u/SBR404]

And then there was Project Sundial: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=E55uSCO5D2w

[u/s0nicbomb]

The weapon system was to be called SLAM supersonic low alitutude missile, AKA the flying crowbar. Tearing along at tree top height at mach 3 would have caused a few fatalities too.

[u/WayneZer0]

honestly anything abojt the 50s and nuks is kinda funny how bad thier tried to find aplications of the.

like nuke proppeled spaceship or mining with nukes are one of the more tame ones.

[u/tent_mcgee → u/WayneZer0]

Nuclear explosion propelled spaceships are not that ridiculous, it’s possibly a very viable way to travel long distances in space.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_pulse_propulsion

[u/GeneralFrievolous]

"Battlefield Earth"'s bombing drone, basically, just with nukes instead of nerve gas.

[u/orangutanDOTorg]

Iirc it was nicknamed the flying crowbar

[u/pain-average]

Better yet, I'll build someone to fill in for you. Some kind of gamma-powered mechanical monster with freeway on-ramps for arms and a heart as black as coal.

[u/johnp299]

I think the "spewing deadly radiation" part is a bit hyped. The rocket is moving too fast to give a local population that much exposure.

[u/EndoExo → u/johnp299]

I'm not sure if it would be concentrated enough to pose a serious risk, but the problem wasn't radiation directly from the reactor. The reactor was unshielded and used weapons-grade uranium fuel that would ablate into the exhaust. Basically, it spewed fallout.

[u/MillionFoul → u/EndoExo]

The worry isn't the fuel being ablated out (U-235 has a very long half-life of 704 My, very pleasant to hang out with for a radioactive substance), it's the fission decay products like Thorium-231 (25.5 hours), Protactinium-231 (32.7 years), and Actinium-227 (21.7 years) that make the hot fuel particularly spicy. Really, mostly the third one there, since it's a beta emitter and long-lived enough to both be screamingly hot and last long enough to mess up a generation or two. The Thorium will also be crazy hot and scary, but that'll wear off in a week or so.

[u/obeytheturtles → u/johnp299]

It was a scale issue. One of these things might have been fine, but the idea would have been to have hundreds of them loitering and waiting for a strike order.

[u/Firecracker048]

We need to start giving cocaine to the skunkworks again

[u/Puzzled-Wind9286]

Gee I sure do wish we had one of those doomsday machines!

[u/electronp]

This probably inspired the sci-fi movie "The Lost Missile". It's on Youtube.

[u/TherapyDerg]

Humanity truly is the worst creature to ever come to be on this planet...

[u/adamcoe]

I'm not a military hardware expert but I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that the range of this missile, like all missiles, was limited by something.

[u/LeTigron → u/adamcoe]

By its fuel. Nuclear fuel burns a long time.

Our current nuclear powered ships need to be refueled every 25 years. A smaller one on a missile would surely function for weeks at the very least.