Russia Announces Successful Test of Reactor-Driven Burevestnik Missile

Moscow has trialed the reactor-driven Burevestnik strategic weapon, according to the nation's top military official.

"We have executed a multi-hour flight of a reactor-driven projectile and it traveled a vast distance, which is not the maximum," Top Army Official the general told President Vladimir Putin in a broadcast conference.

The low-flying prototype missile, first announced in 2018, has been portrayed as having a potentially unlimited range and the capacity to avoid defensive systems.

Foreign specialists have in the past questioned over the projectile's tactical importance and Russian claims of having successfully tested it.

The president stated that a "concluding effective evaluation" of the weapon had been conducted in last year, but the claim was not externally confirmed. Of over a dozen recorded evaluations, just two instances had moderate achievement since several years ago, based on an arms control campaign group.

Gen Gerasimov reported the weapon was in the air for fifteen hours during the evaluation on October 21.

He explained the missile's vertical and horizontal manoeuvring were assessed and were determined to be up to specification, based on a domestic media outlet.

"Consequently, it exhibited superior performance to evade anti-missile and aerial protection," the media source reported the official as saying.

The projectile's application has been the subject of intense debate in defence and strategic sectors since it was first announced in 2018.

A 2021 report by a foreign defence research body determined: "A nuclear-powered cruise missile would provide the nation a distinctive armament with global strike capacity."

Nonetheless, as a foreign policy research organization observed the corresponding time, the nation confronts considerable difficulties in achieving operational status.

"Its induction into the nation's stockpile arguably hinges not only on surmounting the substantial engineering obstacle of securing the reliable performance of the reactor drive mechanism," experts wrote.

"There were numerous flight-test failures, and a mishap resulting in a number of casualties."

A armed forces periodical cited in the report states the missile has a operational radius of between a substantial span, allowing "the projectile to be based throughout the nation and still be able to reach goals in the United States mainland."

The corresponding source also explains the missile can travel as low as 50 to 100 metres above the earth, rendering it challenging for air defences to intercept.

The missile, referred to as Skyfall by a foreign security organization, is believed to be powered by a nuclear reactor, which is supposed to activate after primary launch mechanisms have sent it into the sky.

An examination by a news agency last year located a location 475km from the city as the likely launch site of the armament.

Utilizing satellite imagery from the recent past, an expert informed the agency he had detected several deployment sites in development at the facility.

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