September 9, 2024
Why the U.S. Abandoned Nuclear-Powered Missiles More Than 50 Years Ago
President Donald Trump says the U.S. has a missile like the one that killed seven in the Russian arctic. That's untrue, because the U.S. abandoned the idea decades ago.
President Donald Trump says the U.S. has a missile like the one that killed seven in the Russian arctic. That’s untrue, because the U.S. abandoned the idea decades ago.

Last week’s mysterious nuclear accident in Russia became even more mysterious as the government admitted that a small nuclear reactor had exploded, killing seven people.

Evidence is piling up that the incident is somehow related to Russia’s development of a nuclear-powered cruise missile, and President Donald Trump took to Twitter to state that the U.S. has a similar system. One problem: the U.S. looked into nuclear-powered cruise missiles more than half a century ago before rejecting them as impractical.

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Earlier reports of the August 8th incident stated that two individuals from Russia’s Defense Ministry were killed and six badly injured. Russia’s nuclear energy agency, has since admitted five of its employees were also killed in the explosion, with another three receiving injuries and burns. According to the Guardian, Rosatom said it was working on a number of experimental technologies, including “miniaturised sources of energy using [fissile] materials,” though a spokesperson did not explain how such research was related to the explosion.

After the incident, Greenpeace accused the Russian government of a coverup, using its own data to claim that radiation levels in the nearby city of Severodvinsk briefly spiked up to twenty times normal levels. The levels were not serious enough to warrant public health warnings.

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