The Russians have been rattling their nuclear saber for years. Their nuclear bombers have invaded other countries airspace and their nuclear submarines have invaded other countries territorial waters. They have moved nuclear missiles into border provinces to threaten neighbors. Putin has publicly threatened to use tactical nukes if Russia is losing a conventional war against NATO.
Recently, Putin has been bragging about the amazing new nuclear weapons delivery systems the Russians are developing. They have announced a new missile with twenty-four independently tagetable warheads that could overwhelm any anti-missile system in the world, a hypersonic cruise missile that can be launched from a plane, an underwater stealth drone that could sail undetected right into the harbor of an enemy and detonate a nuclear bomb. They also announced this March that they are working on a cruise missile with a nuclear engine that would be able to fly for days without the need for fuel and reach anywhere in the world.
The U.S. once worked on a missile with a nuclear engine but decided that it was not really a good idea. The missile would spew radiation as it traveled because there would be no shielding. That would mean that if it were launched from a location on the maker’s territory, it would irradiate the countryside on its way to the enemy. The project was abandoned.
The Russians have been working on their new nuclear-powered missile design since the year 2000 but only announced it in March of this year. The new missile is believed to use a gasoline-powered engine for takeoff before switching to a nuclear-powered one for flight.
Reports from the U.S. intelligence community have stated that four tests of the new Russian nuclear power missiles between November and February all crashed. The longest test lasted about two minutes. The missile crashed after flying just twenty-two miles. The shortest test flew for five miles before crashing. Apparently, the nuclear engine failed to ignite during the tests. It has been reported that senior Russian officials demanded that the tests be carried out over the objects of the engineers that the missile was not ready for testing.
Now it appears that they cannot find the wreckage of one of the new missiles that they launched on a test flight in November. The missile went down in the Barent Sea north of Russia and Norway which the Soviet Union used as a dumping ground for nuclear waste and contaminated equipment and ships for decades. There have been times in the past when the Russians warned the Norwegians that there was a danger that Norwegian fishing zones were being contaminated by Russian underwater nuclear dumps.
The Russians have launched a recovery mission for their nuclear power missile. Three ships will be involved including one equipped to handle radioactive materials. The U.S. intelligence report that revealed the Russian recovery mission did not mention any threat to the environment or public health.
A spokesman for the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists released a statement that said, “It goes without saying that if you fire a missile with a nuclear engine or energy source, that nuclear material will end up wherever that missile ends up. If this missile was lost at sea and recovered in full, then you might hypothetically be able to do it without pollution, I would have my doubts about that because it's a very forceful impact when the missile crashes. I would suspect you would have leaks from it.”