Russia says it has successfully tested an experimental weapon that sounds like something out of a sci-fi movie: a nuclear-powered cruise missile with unlimited range, whose low-flying, terrain-hugging and loitering capabilities could evade American missile defenses and drop atomic bombs anywhere on Earth.
Russian President Vladimir Putin said Sunday that the Burevestnik — meaning “storm petrel” (a type of sea bird) — was “indeed a unique weapon that no other country possesses.”
The development has drawn concern internationally, with President Donald Trump saying Monday it was “inappropriate” to be conducting such tests when Russia should be focusing on peace talks with Ukraine.
But many Western experts have questioned the value of the missile, which is code-named “Skyfall” by NATO. Some say it doesn’t do anything Russia can’t do already — while others ridicule it as a waste of money. There are also safety concerns that the mini-reactor that powers the missile could spark a radiation catastrophe.
“The main reason that no one else has tried to build something like this is that it doesn’t really have any use,” Pavel Podvig, a senior researcher at the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research, told NBC News.
The weapon is instead “largely political,” according to Podvig, who is based in Geneva and runs the Russian Nuclear Forces Project. “It was important for the Kremlin, I think, that this is unique and something no one else has done before.”
Trump pointed out Monday that there are other ways to deliver a nuclear warhead.
“We have a nuclear submarine, the greatest in the world, right off their shores,” he told reporters aboard Air Force One. So a missile “doesn’t have to go 8,000 miles,” he added.
“We test missiles all the time,” he said. “They’re not playing games with us, and we’re not playing games with them either.”
The Kremlin said it saw no reason why the test would “strain relations between Moscow and Washington,” already complicated by the shelved Putin-Trump summit.
The test was announced Sunday by Putin and Gen. Valery Gerasimov, Russia’s chief of the general staff, who appeared together in a video wearing camouflage fatigues.
Gerasimov told the president the missile had flown for 15 hours and covered 8,700 miles during a test last Tuesday — a record but not the limit of its range, he said.
Gerasimov spoke of its “assured accuracy against highly protected targets at any range” and said it had “a high capability to evade missile-defense and air-defense systems.”
This was the first time the missile had conducted “a many-hour flight,” Gerasimov added. But the Burevestnik is far from new, having been announced by Putin in March 2018.
It uses a reactor — essentially a “miniature nuclear power plant” — to heat air to temperatures of almost 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit, which powers a ramjet engine that could keep it flying for days, according to a 2019 report by the Nuclear Threat Initiative, an American nonprofit group.
The U.S. and Soviet Union both looked into developing the technology during the Cold War but abandoned it because of the concerns highlighted by experts today.
Those fears were realized in 2019. An offshore explosion in the Russian Arctic killed five scientists and spiked radiation in a nearby city. Experts and later the U.S. government said it was likely a failed Burevestnik test.
Norway said Monday that last week’s test was carried out from an archipelago in the Barents Sea. “We can confirm that Russia has conducted a new test launch of the long-range cruise missile Skyfall (Burevestnik) on Novaya Zemlya,” Vice Adm. Nils Andreas Stensoenes, head of Norway’s Intelligence Service, told Reuters in an emailed statement.
The missile is a so-called second strike weapon, designed to be part of Russia’s response to a nuclear attack. But any such assault on Moscow’s military sites would likely target the Burevestnik’s launch pads, too, Podvig and others believe. It would also likely be detected during its long flight, he said.
He and others read this week’s announcement as more of a political response to Trump’s plans for a “Golden Dome” missile defense system in the U.S.
Others see Putin’s announcement as a response to sanctions this month by the European Union and Trump.
Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov did little to disabuse this idea when asked about it during his daily news briefing Monday.
“Ensuring security is a vital issue for Russia, especially given the militaristic sentiment we are currently hearing primarily from Europeans,” he said.
“Despite all our openness to establishing a dialogue with the United States, Russia, first of all, and the president of Russia, is guided by our own national interests,” Peskov added.
Some observers, such as Fabian Hoffmann, a doctoral research fellow at the Oslo Nuclear Project, part of Norway’s University of Oslo, were not too concerned.
“I celebrate every ruble Russia invests in this useless and unnecessary missile,” he posted to X.
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