Now, here’s a thing

Apart from some sensational headlines and dismissive quotes from hostile analysts, the mainstream media has not paid a great deal of attention to Russia’s new nuclear-powered cruise missile. While the 9M730 Burevestnik – named after the storm petrel (or ‘storm bringer’), a small bird that undertakes long oceanic flights at wave-top height – is a missile rather than a UAV, its successful demonstration flight represents a huge milestone in aerospace. Its technology could bring tremendous advances in everything from crewed and uncrewed aircraft to interplanetary spacecraft, writes Peter Donaldson.

Nuclear-powered cruise missiles, space rockets and aircraft were explored in the early years of the Cold War by both the United States and the Soviet Union, but soon abandoned because of the lethal filthiness of the machines they built. The danger came from open-cycle jet engines, for example, which passed atmospheric air through the reactor core (the replacement for the combustion chamber in a fuel-burning jet engine) and spewed radioactivity from the exhaust.

Burevestnik doesn’t do that; at least there have been no reports of radioactive contamination from nations bordering the Arctic regions under its flight path. This suggests that the missile has a closed-cycle engine that – if it is a jet – passes the air through a heat exchanger so that it is not directly exposed to the reactor core. This is the essence of the breakthrough, even though it is not clear exactly what the engine is. It could be a turbojet, a ramjet or something else altogether, such as a reactor that drives a generator, in turn powering an electric propulsor – although the latter option would likely be impractically complex, heavy and expensive. Few people outside the Russian development team know for certain.

The test flight started on October 21, 2025 and reportedly lasted for 15 hours, covering 14,000 km, making its average speed 580 mph (933 kph) or Mach 0.762 at sea level in a standard atmosphere – an indication that it has high-subsonic or even transonic capability. These numbers only hint at the potential of the technology.

Current high-altitude, long-endurance UAVs such as Global Hawk are ultimately constrained by fuel. Nuclear propulsion offers the prospect of years rather than hours of continuous flight, unshackled from the need to land other than to undergo maintenance and repair. Sustained supersonic or even hypersonic speeds are also potentially within reach. While current hypersonic vehicles achieve minutes of powered flight, a nuclear engine could maintain such velocities for far longer and over intercontinental distances.

For civilian use, a nuclear cargo drone could move freight across oceans without emissions or refuelling stops, while scientific platforms could monitor climate phenomena for years. In space, nuclear rockets that use the reactor to heat liquid hydrogen, for example, as the reaction mass could cut the travel time to Mars by approximately half, reducing a journey lasting a gruelling 7–9 months to one of just 3–5 months.

Back on Earth, certifying airborne nuclear powerplants would be a major challenge, and gaining public trust an even greater one. The risk of a crash spreading radioactive contamination is real, and design for containment is likely to involve significant cost and payload trade-offs. However, Burevestnik has shown that nuclear-powered aviation does not require the kind of ‘flying Chernobyl’ that the principal Cold War antagonists came so close to inflicting on the world.