Russia says it has successfully tested an experimental weapon that sounds like something out of a science fiction movie: an unlimited-range, nuclear-powered cruise missile whose low-altitude flight, terrain avoidance and prowling capabilities could evade U.S. missile defenses and drop atomic bombs anywhere on Earth.
Russian President Vladimir Putin said Sunday that the Burevestnik – meaning “storm petrel” (a type of seabird) – was “indeed a unique weapon that no other country possesses”.
The development has raised international concerns, with President Donald Trump saying on Monday that it was “inappropriate” to conduct such tests when Russia should be focusing on peace negotiations with Ukraine.
But many Western experts have questioned the value of this missile, called “Skyfall” by NATO. Some say it doesn’t do anything Russia can’t already do – while others deride it as a waste of money. There are also safety concerns because the mini-reactor that powers the missile could trigger a radiological disaster.
“The main reason why no one else has tried to build something like this is that it doesn’t really have any utility,” Pavel Podvig, a senior fellow at the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research, told NBC News.
The weapon is rather “largely political”, according to Podvig, based in Geneva and responsible for the Russian nuclear forces project. “It was important to the Kremlin, I think, that it was unique and something that no one else had done before.”
Trump stressed Monday that there are other ways to deliver a nuclear warhead.
“We have a nuclear submarine, the largest in the world, right off their coast,” he told reporters aboard Air Force One. So a missile “doesn’t need to travel 8,000 miles,” he added.
“We test missiles all the time,” he said. “They don’t play with us, and we don’t play with them either.”
The Kremlin said it saw no reason for the test to “strain relations between Moscow and Washington,” already complicated by the abandonment of the Putin-Trump summit.
The test was announced Sunday by Putin and General Valery Gerasimov, Russia’s chief of staff, who appeared together in a video wearing camouflage fatigues.
Gerasimov told the president that the missile flew for 15 hours and traveled 8,700 miles during a test last Tuesday — a record but not the limit of its range, he said.
Gerasimov spoke of its “assured accuracy against highly protected targets at any distance” and said it had “a high ability to evade missile defense and air defense systems.”
It was the first time the missile had made “a flight lasting several hours,” Gerasimov added. But the Burevestnik is far from new, since it was announced by Putin in March 2018.
It uses a reactor — essentially a “miniature nuclear power plant” — to heat air to temperatures of nearly 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit, which powers a ramjet that could keep it flying for days, according to a 2019 report from the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a U.S. nonprofit group.
Both the United States and the Soviet Union considered developing the technology during the Cold War, but abandoned it due to concerns highlighted by experts today.
Those fears came to fruition in 2019. An offshore explosion in the Russian Arctic killed five scientists and increased radiation in a nearby town. Experts, and then the U.S. government, said it was likely a failure of the Burevestnik test.
Norway said Monday that last week’s test was carried out from an archipelago in the Barents Sea. “We can confirm that Russia has carried out another test launch of the Skyfall (Burevestnik) long-range cruise missile over Novaya Zemlya,” Vice Admiral Nils Andreas Stensoenes, head of Norway’s intelligence service, told Reuters in an emailed statement.
The missile is a so-called second-strike weapon, designed to be part of Russia’s response to a nuclear attack. But such an attack on Moscow’s military sites would likely also target the Burevestnik’s launch pads, Podvig and others say. It would also be likely to be detected during its long flight, he said.
He and others interpreted this week’s announcement as a political response to Trump’s plans for a “Golden Dome” missile defense system in the United States.
Others see Putin’s announcement as a response to sanctions imposed this month by the European Union and Trump.
Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, did little to disabuse the idea when asked about it during his daily press briefing on Monday.
“Ensuring security is a vital issue for Russia, especially given the militaristic sentiment that we currently hear mainly from Europeans,” he said.
“Despite all our openness to establishing a dialogue with the United States, Russia, first of all, and the Russian president, are guided by our own national interests,” Peskov added.
Some observers, like Fabian Hoffmann, a doctoral researcher at the Oslo Nuclear Project, part of Norway’s University of Oslo, weren’t too worried.
“I celebrate every ruble that Russia invests in this useless and useless missile,” he posted on X.
