9M730 Burevestnik (SSC-X-9 Skyfall) cruise nuclear-powered missile

I do not see the value add if existing ballistic weapons are assumed to have worked anyway, given the effort involved. There are much easier ways to add to warhead count. But Russia can do whatever it wants; I am fine with them spending money on these projects rather than something more strategically useful.
 
If you don't see the value in freeing up existing assets and in general assets of a specific kind in the future for high value targets only and introducing another variable for the defender to account for (which has to account for delayed arrival as well, another dimension added), then I can't help you either. Because ultimately, this is the logical conclusion of a multi-domain strategic defensive posture.

The only missing element now is space based strategic strike to hold an adversary at risk at all times. Unfortunately there are probably several treaties in place that prohibit this. Luckily geopolitical upheaval is eroding the framework on which such treaties were established. So it's to be seen if Burevestnik remains as the pinnacle of counter-value weapons and if the ballistic missile stockpile can be further relieved from having to carry the strategic burden after Burevestnik laid the groundwork.
 
Josh_TN said:
I consider this missile rather pointless. It will arrive half a day after a strategic exchange already occurred. It only makes sense if one thinks ABM systems would actually be significantly effective in a large scale nuclear war, IMO.
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That is exactly the cause.

Russia thought that GBI etc would be effective in a full strategic exchange. Or at least someone convinced Czar Vlad that it would be.



Josh_TN said:
I personally think the project might be more for long term technology development rather than a useful operational system.
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I mean, I'd love to borrow the engine for a planetary-exploration probe series. Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, all their moons, etc. We'd need many of those engines, at least one per planet/moon.
 
very interesting conversations occurring about this unproven prototype super weapon. Im sure this will be as credible as the other list of wunderwaffe. Odds on the performance being completely different than the stated figures? Zircon / khinzal vibes
 
Ainen said:
Card game warfare doesn't work in strategic exchange. It isn't a game. Orbital frying isn't done by ASAT, it's done by ballistic missiles on direct ascent. To intercept them, you need to have, at least, something like nuclear pumped lasers on orbit.
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Or boost-phase SBIs, which are planned. If such an attack was successful, then nuclear war starts and ICBMs and SLBMs are launched, Burevestnik arrives the next day, if it wasn't taken out by the aforementioned.
EmoBirb said:
Either way, may I ask how this is in any shape or form relevant to Burevestnik? There's a Golden Dome thread for this kind of fantastical ramblings.
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SB-AMTI detects it, aircraft dispatched, shot down with APKWS, much cheaper than GBI needed for ICBMs.
 
Forest Green said:
SB-AMTI detects it, aircraft dispatched, shot down with APKWS, much cheaper than GBI needed for ICBMs.
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What aircraft? This is a weapon designed to strike (not necessarily be launched) after a strategic exchange. There won't be a USAF left to try and intercept it, while the Missile Defense has been depleted and destroyed in the initial exchange.

If you don't think any major USAF base eats at least one warhead each, then I have a bridge to sell you. The neat side effect is that thanks to counter value being off loaded to Burevestnik, more ballistic missile warheads available to flatten everything barely related to military structure. There won't be anything in the air but the missile itself.
 
This is my POV from a private exchange:

I'm just an enthusiast, not an expert -- buuut...:

Direct impacts of modern nuclear warheads on population centers and key military infrastructure are rather limited in terms of their area of effect; what makes a nuclear war so feared is the nuclear fallout that follows.

As a concept, Burevestnik is essentially a lower-atmosphere, subsonic HGV with indefinite endurance. But what does a nuclear-tipped, nuclear-propelled cruise missile actually bring to the table that you couldn't achieve by simply building more (& better) ICBMs and glide vehicles?

If the idea is to decimate the enemy after they've already spent their interceptors and lost most of their sensor and C2 network, why not simply overwhelm their defenses even more during the 1st strike, or even the 2nd? Established systems are inherently cheaper, and they also happen to be harder to intercept (even if much easier to detect). The only real advantage this cruise missile has for its intended mission is its endurance and ability to repeatedly change its flight path -- LO design matters less than people think within the horizon, and it's ultimately bound by physics how much you can reduce its RCS...

At face value, this is essentially just a delayed warhead delivery method. And while delivering it (before, or) after the fact may increase its chances of success, that doesn't necessarily mean it increases the overall success of your nuclear war...

Additionally, if you want more systems to survive the enemy's retaliation for your 2nd strike, why not simply build more bunkers that can survive the nuclear fallout? The whole point of this weapon is to catch the enemy with their guard down, but any launch and increased activity in the run-up to it will still be picked up by enemy space assets, while they'd also be far more alert during a crisis anyways.

If you launch it after M.A.D. occurs, while you can assure that its individual mission succeeds, you could have decimated the enemy even more and received less retribution in return by increasing the size and complexity of your 1st strike instead...

And this weapon is developed as a negotiation tool, but by the time nuclear fallout occurs, all negotiations would have already failed and neither side would have a functional state structure remaining anyway... And who even would want to rule over a world doomed by nuclear *Fallout* (pun intended!)...?

In the end, there are indeed certain use cases where such a weapon brings value. But frankly, it would make more sense for the US to actually develop such a capability rather than Russia. And it can't really remain a niche capability if you want it to be effective, but it can't become a widespread capability either.
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EmoBirb said:
What aircraft? This is a weapon designed to strike (not necessarily be launched) after a strategic exchange. There won't be a USAF left to try and intercept it, while the Missile Defense has been depleted and destroyed in the initial exchange.
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EmoBirb said:
If you don't think any major USAF base eats at least one warhead each, then I have a bridge to sell you. The neat side effect is that thanks to counter value being off loaded to Burevestnik, more ballistic missile warheads available to flatten everything barely related to military structure. There won't be anything in the air but the missile itself.
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Don't you see the obvious problem with that statement? If you claim that jet-powered stuff taking off from the ground won't exist after the initial exchange, then neither will the Burevestnik. If it takes off beforehand then my previous statement applies. Of course it's not unthinkable that some tankers and aircraft from bases all over the world could be airborne prior to the initial strike either, given the 25-30 minute warning provided by SB assets.

Please note that intercontinental cruise missiles existed and were dropped long before Burevestnik and that was in the days long before SB-AMTI, AEW and the like. All the nuclear propulsion adds to the equation is cost but it does have some useful applications outside of global nuclear war.
 
Forest Green said:
Please note that intercontinental cruise missiles existed and were dropped long before Burevestnik and that was in the days long before SB-AMTI, AEW and the like.
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Yes, because they had to fly along predictable courses due to their fuel-limited range. They could fly low and fast and had LO but they were still just aircraft with a finite threat lifespan.

Burevestnik can fly any route it wants, anytime. It can back-off if it detects AEW or SAM radars, it can reroute to try to find a gap or just go and loiter over the Pacific for another week. It can consume defensive resources nearly indefinitely - it could even go and self-destruct and you'd still have to assume a defensive posture, since you couldn't assume it was gone.

To paraphrase: Burevestnik only needs to be lucky once, the defenders need to be lucky every time.
 
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Kiltonge said:
Yes, because they had to fly along predictable courses due to their fuel-limited range. They could fly low and fast and had LO but they were still just aircraft with a finite threat lifespan.

Burevestnik can fly any route it wants, anytime. It can back-off if it detects AEW or SAM radars, it can reroute to try to find a gap or just go and loiter over the Pacific for another week. It can consume defensive resources nearly indefinitely.
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Or until it's detected and shot down, and SB-AMTI will do that immediately.
 
EmoBirb said:
And then everyone stood up and clapped, lol
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The first SB-AMTI sats are already up and the rest are following, the launch plume will cue them. Out of Burevestnik, Poseidon and Avangard, the latter worries me far more than either of the former, which worry me very very little.
 
As we have established ad nauseam, SB-AMTI is purely ISR, it only tracks missiles (good luck tracking Poseidon loitering in the deep ocean), there is no kinetic component. It's less than certain that SBI will deliver a robust kinetic component, when that would be and how coverage and density would be. Aside from the fact that SBI would be more so geared towards intercepting ballistic missiles in their ascend, not in their terminal phase and it would do fuck all against a maneuvering cruise missile that can change altitude, speed and direction at will, let alone a nuclear powered undersea system that can dive, loiter and traverse in regions and patterns which are not related to those of submarines.

All of this assumes that the Fools Gold Halfsphere doesn't get canned immediately as soon as Trump leaves office and whoever follows actually diverts the funds into realistic and useful programs that could possibly offer the US greater deterrence in an era where their adversaries dominate the domain of strategic deterrence by comfortable margin.

But as it stands the only thing SB-AMTI could do against Burevestnik when it's being fielded is trying to intercept it by deorbiting itself in an attempt to crash into it. Doesn't seem particularly promising to me, to be honest, but you seem to be very confident in that approach (assuming someone's left alive in the USSF to deorbit the satellites).

Edit: all of the above assumes that US satellites would even remain operational, and given that Burevestnik is more so a third strike weapon, it's almost assured that the orbit will be a no mans land when it flies. Given that adversary satellites rank extremely high on the "to be destroyed in WW3" list. Something everyone already conceptualized during the Cold War.
 
Sonar networks track Poseidons plus submarine superiority and nope SB-AMTI is targeting too. Once a cruise missile is tracked, any fighter can shoot it down.
 
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Forest Green said:
The first SB-AMTI sats are already up and the rest are following, the launch plume will cue them.
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What launch plume? Burevestnik is launched by a simple solid-fuel booster, like any cruise missile or drone. A thousand rocket decoys could be prepared with such boosters to confuse sattelite systems. It's not ICBM booster stage; it's a small JATO unit.
 
Forest Green said:
Sonar networks track Poseidons plus submarine superiority and nope SB-AMTI is targeting too. One a cruise missile is tracked, any fighter can shoot it down.
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Any fighter?
The cruise missile is still 1000nm away and headed for California, but your remaining fighters be in Texas or Virginia. And the tankers have gone, burned on the ground or run out of airfields when they ran out of fuel, two days ago.
Exactly how will take it down, when your SAM stocks have gone to zero and no military aircraft be left on the West Coast?

Your satellites be down by now, just debrie in orbit.
 
zen said:
Any fighter?
The cruise missile is still 1000nm away and headed for California, but your remaining fighters be in Texas or Virginia. And the tankers have gone, burned on the ground or run out of airfields when they ran out of fuel, two days ago.
Exactly how will take it down, when your SAM stocks have gone to zero and no military aircraft be left on the West Coast?

Your satellites be down by now, just debrie in orbit.
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If everything is already gone, then what is the point of this missile? That's the problem, it's a Catch-22, the only way it actually works is if it isn't needed. It's like a mechanic that can only mend cars when the workshop is empty.

That said there could conceivably be carrier aircraft and VTOL drones like X-BAT still operation and some SHORADS around California.

Satellites down how? The SBIs shot down the missiles you tried down them with and the debris from that killed some of your ICBMs during the boost phase - an own goal.

Dilandu said:
What launch plume? Burevestnik is launched by a simple solid-fuel booster, like any cruise missile or drone. A thousand rocket decoys could be prepared with such boosters to confuse sattelite systems. It's not ICBM booster stage; it's a small JATO unit.
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You underestimate how good launch plume detection is. Then there's SB-GMTI to track the TELs.

Don't get me wrong, a nuclear-powered jet engine is a neat achievement with potential applications, this just isn't one of them.
 
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Forest Green said:
Sonar networks track Poseidons plus submarine superiority and nope SB-AMTI is targeting too. One a cruise missile is tracked, any fighter can shoot it down.
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What fighter? There won't be any organized interception effort in place for the envisioned use case. Search and track are entirely meaningless without kinetic interceptors. And while you seemingly try to ignore that for like 3 pages straight, the assumption that after the first and second wave of a strategic exchange there would be much left of the USAF, USSF, strategic command is approaching the realm of willful fiction. The only thing left would be USN submarines, simply because they're too numerous and too survivable to be destroyed wholesale (although any unfortunate submarine in port would most likely be destroyed).

Assuming SB-AMTI survives every orbital platform being targeted and remains operational for long enough (despite nuclear warheads going off in space, direct ascend Anti-Satellite weaponry being used and vast debris clouds sweeping through every level of earths orbit) to track and designate an entire wave of Burevestnik being launched (presumably as part of/a system similar to Perimeter), then what? US command structures were targeted, overwhelmed and wiped out in the first wave of the exchange. CONUS based assets of the US armed forces like the major airbases housing tactical and strategic aviation are among the targets as well. Assuming that SBI would've become a reality and some what operational, the interceptors would've been depleted and the satellites for the most part would've gone out of operation.

Are you suggesting that a man in rural Texas will shoot down a nuclear powered cruise missile with his shotgun when it approaches over the southern border several days up to weeks after a full scale strategic exchange which killed millions initially and millions more after food, water, medical and sanitary supply chains collapse, that would have destroyed the majority of US based force structures and military assets? Who would SB-AMTI track for, assuming it's still there. Who would take over the kinetic intercept when there would be few surviving military installations and it's more than doubtful these installations would remain manned after a nuclear war. No satellites, no jets, no SAM sites.

The only plausible way to counteract this would be to have dispersed and hardened start ramps for something like X-Bat, which could be controlled by a dead hand system as well. But then you have Burevestnik which can simply out-loiter such drones due to it's propulsion. Realistically there is no plausible counter to this kind of weapon the US has or could deploy now or in the foreseeable future (submarine SAM anyone?)

And this is the whole point of it, it's meant to greatly complicate strategic defense efforts and introduce a flood of variables an adversary has to account and budget for, which is impossible and especially impossible for the US which has to fund all sorts of wonder weapons across all it's branches at exorbitant costs with increasingly dragged out timelines and near decade long delays. And compared to all of that, Burevestnik is a simple and low cost investment that ensures that imaginary multibillion Star Wars systems would only counter a fraction of one aspect of the entire strategic portfolio (a limited amount of ICBMs in that context). The US has put itself into the role of the defender, as it's strategic offensive capabilities have been outpaced greatly by it's main adversaries decades ago. Unfortunately, by it's very nature, the defender is at a huge disadvantage when it comes to investing resources and funds. Meanwhile the Russians concluded that overwhelming and unorthodox offensive capabilities in the realm of strategic warfare substitute any defensive posture for significantly less cost. That's what a strategic deterrent is all about, this is text book Cold War stuff. Hoping, praying and sinking several billions of dollars into Wunderwaffen and conceptual silver bullets is the opposite of that, and the US attempted that already once and concluded that SDI was a waste of time, money and resource. Obviously and evidently in this forum in threads adjacent to the topic, the matter still captures the imagination and dreams of the generation old enough to have been a child back then. Anyone born after that has little nostalgia for it, as do the people that ended that fever dream back then.
 
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I think this conversation is just going in circles and not really providing any real information. People have developed different opinions about the value of this weapon and I think those are known and we can give it a rest.
 
Forest Green said:
You underestimate how good launch plume detection is. Then there's SB-GMTI to track the TELs.

Don't get me wrong, a nuclear-powered jet engine is a neat achievement with potential applications, this just isn't one of them.
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I do not doubt that launch plume could be detected. What I'm pointing is that it could be easily decoyed. The cruise missile booster is a relatively small JATO bottle; literally a thousands of decoys could be prepared to confuse and overload the tracking systems.
 
Once again, this is an economic weapon, its goal is to force the US to spend an inordinate amount of money to defend against it. Even just s single Burevestnik requires the US to develop a 360 cruise missile layer to Golden Dome, and the costs balloon if you can't safely rely on your space layer. If nukes are flying you can be assured that some of them might be used in space...
 
How many ICBM warheads could you buy for one nuclear reactor driven missile? I just do not see the economics working out unless one assumes Golden Dome survives the Trump administration and is somehow magically effective. Of course, this weapon heavily predates the Dome, and was a response to the far less ambitious GBMI or whatever it has be renamed to. That seems pointless to me, but again Russia is free to invest in whatever it wants to for deterrence. I hope my country never follows the example.
 

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