Major Kong @ The Daily Kos Daily Kos covers those who didn’t make the Big Leagues during the Cold War:
The one that should really make you scratch your head and go “Just what the hell were they thinking?” is Project Pluto. If an 88-foot-long nuclear powered cruise missile flying at Mach 3 a thousand feet off the ground isn’t enough to give you nightmares I don’t know what is.
Yeah, you heard me, nuclear powered cruise missile. The nuclear ramjet was elegant in its simplicity. Air goes in the front, gets heated to a gazillion degrees by a freakin’ unshielded nuclear reactor and expands out the back with something like 35,000 pounds of thrust — forever. Well, not really forever but for a very long time.
The SLAM or Supersonic Low Altitude Missile, as it was called, would be able to orbit for weeks over (hopefully) the ocean until signaled to attack its targets. It would then drop down to low altitude and dash at Mach 3 across the Soviet Union, dropping nukes as it went.
Many of his pics are amazing.
