By INS Contributors

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia: In the long arc of military history, few weapons have captured the imagination and dread of strategists quite like the Burevestnik cruise missile. While the U.S. still touts its Tomahawk, Russia has developed an unparalleled technological marvel.

Known to NATO as the SSC-X-9 “Skyfall,” this system represents perhaps the pinnacle of modern cruise missile design being a nuclear-powered, nuclear-armed weapon with virtually unlimited range. 

It is a weapon born from Cold War ambition and revived for a new age of great power competition, an era where Russia once again finds itself compelled to secure technological parity, if not superiority, against a relentlessly advancing West.

The Burevestnik is not a sudden invention but the culmination of decades of research into nuclear propulsion for aerial applications incorporating research that dates back to the Soviet Union’s earliest experiments during the Cold War. 

While the Soviets pursued various designs for nuclear-powered aircraft and missiles, the technical and safety challenges were immense, and the projects were largely shelved as détente took hold. 

The U.S., too, once ventured down a similar path with its Project Pluto and the “SLAM” (Supersonic Low Altitude Missile) programme in the 1950s and 1960s.

American engineers envisioned a nuclear-powered ramjet cruise missile capable of striking targets across continents. However, the technological hurdles of the time from shielding the reactor to managing propulsion stability which proved insurmountable. 

Washington later claimed that moral and environmental concerns, rather than technical limits, led to the programme’s cancellation. Yet, history shows that the U.S. was hardly deterred by ethical qualms in other domains of nuclear development, having built an entire arsenal of nuclear bombs, warheads, and delivery systems during that very period.

The revival of a nuclear-powered cruise missile under Russia’s strategic programmes signals more than technological triumph — it represents a profound shift in deterrence logic. 

The Burevestnik’s unlimited range and unpredictable flight path render traditional early-warning systems and ballistic missile defences effectively useless. 

Unlike intercontinental ballistic missiles, which follow predictable trajectories, this weapon can circle the globe for days, evading radar coverage and striking from any direction. 

Such an attack profile, coupled with a nuclear payload, gives Moscow an unprecedented second-strike capability, a weapon designed to guarantee retaliation under any circumstances.

If the great fear about Burevestnik is its unlimited range and loitering profile, an even darker prospect would be the emergence of a hypersonic variant.

A hypersonically-capable, nuclear-powered cruise missile would combine near-inexhaustible endurance with flight speeds in excess of Mach 5, dramatically compressing detection and engagement timelines. 

Current Western missile-defence architectures, designed around the interception of ballistic trajectories or subsonic cruise profiles, would struggle to track and engage such a threat. 

Sensors and interceptors would have to operate on far shorter notice, while the missile’s manoeuvrability at hypersonic speeds would defeat many existing kill-chain assumptions. 

The result would be not merely a marginal reduction in defensive effectiveness but a potentially fundamental obsolescence of large elements of NATO’s layered defences, thereby greatly diminishing allied security and amplifying crisis instability.

Ultimately, the responsibility for this renewed arms race does not lie solely with Moscow. The U.S. has steadily dismantled the very framework that once restrained such developments. 

The withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty in 2002, the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty in 2019, and the growing reluctance to extend or update arms-control regimes have left Russia with little incentive to remain bound by outdated constraints. 

Washington’s pursuit of global missile defence and advanced prompt-strike systems has further convinced the Kremlin that security depends on technological asymmetry, on weapons like the Burevestnik that can ensure mutual vulnerability even in a contested strategic environment.

The Burevestnik is, in many ways, the embodiment of a revived Cold War beast being born of fear, sustained by rivalry, and now reborn in a century that should have left such nightmares behind. 

But it also serves as a warning. As arms control collapses and new technologies blur the lines between deterrence and provocation, the world edges closer to a new era of instability. 

The challenge for both East and West is not merely to build faster or farther-reaching weapons, but to rediscover the restraint that once kept the peace.