rickair7777

No. Core physics all wrong, you'd need an actual purpose-built warhead on board. You could hypotheticaly use various techniques to adjust core physics to achieve some prompt criticality but that would barely work and be more complex and heavy than a simple modern warhead. Probably too complex and heavy to fly, the engine needs to be optimized to be an engine, it's already going to be heavy AF compared to any other aircraft engine.

And it would be a nuclear warhead, since the engine core would make a spectacular dirty bomb (ie spread a bunch of high-grade contamination on impact) there's almost no point contemplating any conventional use of this.

Hetman

IIRC, that video is the ammo dump in Siberia.

Solid rocket fuel plant in Henderson, NV; 1988. Same effect, just less humidity:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mUBTG9M5MCY

Mesabah

A conventional fuel driven scramjet would be much better for that purpose. The only reason to use nuclear fuel, it’s significantly less efficient, is for airborne longevity.

rickair7777

Not longevity as in days, weeks, months. Frankly it would be very hard to build a reactor core which could survive more than a handful of hours operating at jet engine temps, most power reactors are water cooled and operate closer to boiling temps than to turbine engine hot section temps.

Core design is a tradeoff between heat thermodynamics, core physics, and physical structure. Structure is going to have to be light and thin on this one.

The longevity benefit would be in range... it could fly around the world and attack from any direction. Likely many from different directions all at once.

JamesNoBrakes

I doubt this would make a viable weapon. Russia and formerly the Soviet Union seem to develop things just to one-up the West, except they are often not viable/practical, can't be implemented in any kind of numbers, have extreme reliability issues, and so on. They weren't really functional weapons. So they may develop this to make a few and station them somewhere, but it would be more of a statement than a threat IMO, considering the past.

Not that it can't be done, just that I doubt the effort being more serious than a couple one-off missiles.

TiredSoul

Can anybody provide any links so I can edumecate myself mo’ better on nuclear scramjet engines?
Didn’t even know they existed 10 days ago.

rickair7777

More this than a viable game-changer threat. More for prestige, internal consumption.

Also the russians know that even if they rationalize this as necessary because of our missile defenses, it can ALSO defeat early warning systems so it clearly has a first strike capability and that would make us very nervous. The russians know that nervous americans can probably come up with a response that would be even more dangerous to them and that we can afford to do it on a scale that they cannot hope to match. Russia couldn't outspend us when their soviet command economy could blow 20% of their GDP on defense... they are even more limited today because their people expect to not starve while freezing in the dark.

rickair7777

Google the USAF attempt at nuclear aircraft engines about 60 years ago. Basically a familiar turbojet engine with the hot section replaced with a fission reactor core. Works just like you think it does. The problem wasn't making it work, it was weight, shielding, crash risk, core failure risk (V1 cut would be a whole 'nother level of Oh $&)#! )

Then google scramjet. Basically a ramjet BUT the airflow through the hot section is supersonic, which creates tremendous design challenges, basically keeping a birthday candle lit in a M 2.0+ airflow. All conventional turbojets and ramjets slow the airflow entering the hot section to subsonic but if you want the airframe to go really fast (hypersonic) at some point you can no longer slow the intake air enough.

Then google hypersonic missile.

Combine the three concepts to get a very fast, very long range (infinite range for practical purposes, it could circle the globe) cruise missile. Might have to cruise subsonic to stay cool (ie stealthy) and then sprint in the terminal attack phase).

tomgoodman

Sounds like a Potemkinjet.

Excargodog

All true, and why it never replaced the J-79, but pretty much irrelevant to something designed to be used only for WWIII.

A fission reactor core is at the center of pretty near all of our gravity drop and missile nukes today, and some of them are quite light (like the B-61 whose entire weight including case and fins and the rest of the Teller-Ulam stuff is only ~700#).

For a cruise missile, shielding would be less of a problem (although a huge neutron flux that impinged upon the warhead of the missile might certainly be problematic ). Crash risk and core failure risk is much less of a problem if you base these in isolated locales or aboard ships.

And the Russians have always been a bit more....cavalier about such things. You may recall the Tsar Bomba which they EXPECTED to produce about 35 MT (with most of its third stage U-238 tamper replaced by lead) actually generated a 50 MT blast, the (subsonic) TU-95 dropping it being overtaken by the blast and severely shaken and losing a few thousand feet of altitude, even from 30 miles away and with the reflected blast wave breaking windows as far away as Norway and Finland well over 500 miles away.

Simply because they CANNOT compete head to head because of the GDP disparity with the US, they go in for high risk solutions. I can see them spending the money to create such a threatening weapon in an attempt. They were paranoid about foreign invasion even before Napoleon and Hitler.