Originally Posted by
Mesabah
Nuclear scramjets are for keeping missiles airborne for a very long time. I don’t like where this is going.
Gives you a first strike capabilty which can come from any direction, at any time and can be coordinated to arrive from many directions all at once.
Also harder to detect the launch, and harder to detect an inbound. Although a hypersonic nuclear scramjet will spew so much heat from the reactor and aerodynamic friction that it would light up like a meteor in the visible, to say nothing of IR.
A subsonic version would be harder to detect, it would look like any other small airplane.