Yeap. Just what the world need, another nuclear arm race. https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/08/12/russia-mysterious-explosion-arctic-putin-chernobyl/ On Thursday, Aug. 8, Russian authorities issued a surprising announcement. Some sort of accident had occurred during a test of a missile engine near the city of Severodvinsk, along Russia’s Arctic coast. Two people died, and there had been a brief spike in radiation detected. Soon after, images and videos appeared on social media of first responders in hazmat suits, ambulances, and a helicopter for an emergency airlift. The reference to radiation was striking—tests of missile engines don’t involve radiation. Well, with one exception: Last year, Russia announced it had tested a cruise missile powered by a nuclear reactor. It calls this missile the 9M730 Burevestnik. NATO calls it the SSC-X-9 Skyfall. A nuclear-powered cruise missile is an outrageous idea, one the United States long ago considered and rejected as a technical, strategic, and environmental nightmare. Vladimir Putin’s Russia, though, thinks differently. My colleagues and I at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies—who regularly use open-source tools to monitor the state of nuclear proliferation around the world—wondered if something had gone wrong with the Skyfall. We soon discovered there was good reason to believe so. The first thing we did was attempt to locate where the incident had occurred. Many of the reports pointed to a missile test site at a place called Nenoksa, about 18 miles up the coast from Severodvinsk. Our assumption was that the accident had occurred at the Nenoksa Missile Test Center. The facility is no secret: It is well documented in declassified intelligence reports and even marked on open-source platforms such as Wikimapia. The test center has been there since the 1960s—and, from satellite images, looks every year of its age. But when we looked more closely at the site, we were surprised to find something new. To tell you what we saw, I have to tell you a little more about the Skyfall. .... The United States and Russia seem to be drifting into a new arms race, either out of some bizarre nostalgia or because no one can think of anything better to do. The Trump administration’s 2018 Nuclear Posture Review talks about the return of great-power competition as though that’s an exciting development and calls for a vast modernization of the United States’ nuclear arsenal. Russia is investing billions of rubles in its own modernization, with a myriad of bizarre weapons under development to defeat U.S. missile defenses, including this nuclear-powered cruise missile. And on the sidelines, nitwits like the New York Times’s Bret Stephens are cheering it all on with nonsense like “The U.S. Needs More Nukes.” When we think about the dangers of the arms race, we think about the possibility of a civilization-ending cataclysm. But even though the Cold War didn’t end in wide-scale catastrophe, it still resulted in a series of small-scale catastrophes for many of the people who lived it. Ask environmentalists in Russia about the costs of the nuclear arms race or the people who live near Rocky Flats, Hanford, or countless other sites in the United States. Sometimes we are so focused on the horrific things that we narrowly avoided during the Cold War that we forget all the horrific things that actually did happen. The sorts of things that often happen, as Rosatom noted so coldly, “when testing new technologies.” There are human beings out in the real world who will bear the costs of this arms race. Here are five of those people. Five people whose parents, spouses, and children will never see them again. Is that worth it? I don’t think so. No, the United States does not need more nukes. And no, Russia does not need new ones. Not as much as wives need their husbands or children need their fathers.
A 'nuclear powered cruise missile?" That sounds ridiculous. Doesn't Putin have better things to spend Russia's money on than that? More likely a warhead on something that blew up and no one wants to admit it. Us or them. A warhead won't go off unless precise things happen in sequence, but you could blow one up and get at least some radioactive crap in the air. In my opinion. Putin is going crazy. Certifiable.
