This is either the weapons-storage area explosion, or the experimental nuclear-powered jet/rocket engine that blew up in the last ten days.

I’ve seen a lot of conventional weapons explosions (made a few of them myself). None of them have ever looked like this.




Ahh. Fixed it. Raw link below as well.

Saw another article this morning, more video of this, where the Russians admit it was their nuclear scramjet project.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?feature=...&v=Y4c6Lqt_1HU

I thought we GAVE THEM Permissive Action Links so stuff like that wouldn’t happen?

If that was a WSA, there may be special material scattered over a wide area. You have to sort of hope it was their nuke scramjet.

Nuclear scramjets are for keeping missiles airborne for a very long time. I don’t like where this is going.

PALs probably don't apply to nuclear power units, including nuclear aircraft engines. PALs also only prevent unauthorized use... this sounds authorized to me.

Although the Russians have actually built power units capable of going prompt critical, so maybe that thing could have used a PAL. It frankly looks like a powerful enough explosion that it might have been very low-grade prompt critical, ie a small percentage of the core graduated from power core to bomb status for just a tiny moment. That's what happened at chernobyl too.

Worth noting that all western power cores are designed with core physics such that they are self-damping, ie runaway power produces material affects which dampens the chain reaction. Russians don't seem to see the need though.

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.

Would not the radioactive emissions of a reactor engine be fairly straightforward to track?

They would be easy to track yes, but if they plan on flying these things for months on end just off our coasts, tensions will certainly boil over. This is certainly not the direction the world needs to be going.

A perfectly designed and functioning aircraft engine would not emit any nuclear core material at all, so no high grade contamination. It would be hard to carry much shielding so such an engine would emit some radiation but that's short range in the atmosphere, I think it would be hard to detect from a distance unless you had a space sensor staring at the object... might work for tracking, at great expense, but probably not detection.

The airflow through the engine would get massively neutron irradiated in the core, which would generate radioactive isotopes of air component atoms and any air particulates. That would be detectable after the fact, by ground monitoring or airborne sampling. But that would not be anything close to real time.

Me neither. It almost says they could make the engine also be the warhead.

Not easy to track in subsonic cruise, see above (especially if the airframe is stealthy).

I seriously doubt the russians intend a permanent airborne nuclear alert using these things.

- Airframes don't fly forever, how do you recover it?
- Other people (ie us, Europe) would be VERY nervous when such things were launched for alert duty. In the cold war, airborne alert was intended for survivability. This would obviously have a tremendous first strike potential. By "very nervous" I mean DEFCON 1.
- Such gadgets won't be very reliable, how many bombs are you willing to lose control of due to crashes?

No, I think it's intended to get around our ballistic missile defenses, probably as a deterrent but unfortunately it opens up a big can of first strike worms. US missile defense were actually implemented to defend against small attacks from the likes of DPRK and Iran, not against russia which could easily overwhelm all US missile defense with sheer numbers. But MDA probably makes the russians nervous.