The Real Hell's Angels – Horrific Flying War Machines

About 25 years ago I read an online article about various strange engineering projects and prototypes for military gear during the cold war. A comment in the user section led me to a very interesting article about Project Pluto. It gives detailed information about the first steps to a nuclear-powered cruise missile. Meaning that it carries nuclear bombs but is also propelled using energy from a nuclear reactor. A totally unshielded reactor.

It was the decade after the cold war.
The Soviet Union had collapsed – its own military rigging not the least reason for that, China still way behind, the USA was the sole hegemon. Global power distribution was clear, more or less, the main fear of a monstrous war was Russia selling dangerous stuff to unreliable people around the world. (What actually happened, I guess.)
So, reading about The Flying Crowbar gave me a kind of cool horror, in the way of watching some true crime TV show.

Now, things are a little bit different. Another large proxy war has been waged, on European soil, and it has not gone too well for the hegemon, at least on the surface. Russia, once totally down under Yeltsin, has improved under Putin, and seems to have gained a lot of self-conscious again. This of course also affected the military sector, and success on the Ukrainian battlefield boosts this development. Does this trigger another arms race?
This is plausible. Even if Russia is much smaller than its rivals USA and China, it is the largest country, and it owns vast amounts of natural resources. It also has a long history of weapons manufacturing. Building what is technologically possible seems logical, facing the large rivals have their boots at Russia's borders.

In concrete, Pluto seems to have a come-back. “History repeats itself,” they say, but is it a tragedy this time, or a farce? When a few weeks ago I heard about Russia's Burevestnik nuclear cruise missile, it immediately rang a Flying Crowbar Bell. And I found a comment by the same Gregg Herken, commenting on Burevestnik in an 2018 article by Jeffrey Lewis.

Indeed, sources mostly agree that the test record up to now does not show the Burevestnik Cruise Missile being a successful project. The records show failure up to lethal outcome instead. Tests of the missile itself have been performed by replacement power units, allegedly electrical. Nevertheless, test activity seem to be ramped again in the Russian outskirts. Testing activity seems to get hot again now in August 2025.
More success this time? Hard to say for a bystander, but the science and the engineering issues are the same as for Pluto: The летающий лом is a threat, and just testing the real thing would be an environmental catastrophe.

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Ressources:

• Project Pluto, Wikipedia (→)
• The Flying Crowbar, Internet Web Archive (→)
• 9M730 Burevestnik, Wikipedia (→)
• Russia’s Nuclear Powered Cruise Missile, Arms Control Wonk (→)
• Best bad idea ever? Why Putin’s nuclear-powered missile is possible… and awful, arstechnica.com (→)
• Unusual aircraft activity at Novaya Zemlya linked to Burevestnik testing, The Barents Observer (→)
• Mutual Assured Descrution, “MAD”, Wikipedia (→)