The Strategic Defense Initiative
Defensive Weapons
Air and Sea – Next to Space?
New Nuclear Devices
You may have seen stories about Putin announcing a new nuclear missile – or is it two? Claiming it can get through any defence, but how?
The key matter is Russia developing a miniature nuclear power plant. One that’s a hundred times smaller than submarine reactors. Not in fact suitcase-sized, which has circulated but is wrong and probably impossible: But it’s long been an area of interest:
“Russia has long experience with small reactors (e.g., Lenin reactor, marine reactors for submarines) and has developed compact reactors for remote power (e.g., Akademik Lomonosov floating plant). Russian industry also advertises small modular reactors (SMRs) and reactor units for icebreakers and submarines, which share technology with compact power units.” (Chatbot.)
What they now claim – not everyone believes them – is units that can be fitted to a drone and power it for months. A nuclear-powered, nuclear-armed cruise missile called Burevestnik, but NATO call it ‘Skyfall’. And Poseidon, an autonomous underwater vehicle. Each powered by a small nuclear reactor, and also able to carry a nuclear warhead.
The big advantage of these devices is that they can take long slow journeys, with the cruise missile maybe flying too low for radar. Get to a place and lurk there for future use. So existing missile defences would be of no use against them.
The Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI)
Having lived through the 1980s – born 1950 – I put these new devices in their historic context. What was commonly known as Star Wars, sometimes jokingly changed to Start Wars.
Ronald Reagan’s 1983 Strategic Defense Initiative shook up politics. It had nothing to do with the Star Wars science fiction films, but the name got attached. Attached despite missile defence having been speculated about from the late 1940s, and no evidence Reagan ever cared much about the films or their unrealistic physics.
Reagan’s promise was that his system could be shared with the Soviet Union and make everyone safe. And this was not believed: no system was ever likely to be that good. But there was real fear that a system could be good enough to give the USA what’s called First Strike Capability. The balance had been Mutually Assured Destruction – a surprise attack would leave the victim with enough power to wreck the aggressor. This contributed to Gorbachev’s sudden abandonment of Middle Europe and the complete collapse that followed.
“Declassified intelligence material revealed that through the potential neutralization of its arsenal and resulting loss of a balancing power factor, SDI was a cause of grave concern for the Soviet Union and its successor state Russia. Following the Cold War when nuclear arsenals were shrinking, political support for SDI collapsed. SDI ended in 1993, when the Clinton administration redirected the efforts towards theatre ballistic missiles.”
But the USA continued to develop missiles. NATO advancing eastward gives them a greater ability to hit Russia without warning, and to shoot down retaliatory missiles. Russia must have felt vulnerable, and been quietly working on these new systems.
As for China, there was brief talk of the USA building a China-Proof Missile Defence System – one that would only stop Chinese retaliation and not alarm the Soviets too much. It never happened. China remains content to have no considerable number of missiles. China produces vast numbers of consumer goods that the USA and Western Europe depend on, so attacking it would be an economic disaster for the West. Mass slaughter has so far been reserved for those who our leaders see as ‘surplus to requirements’.
Defensive Weapons
Russia in 1991 dropped the Leninist idea of a World Socialist State. It had already been transformed by Khrushchev and Brezhnev into a continuation of Russia expanding its empire in all directions. Middle-Europe had lost whatever belief it once had, with Czechoslovakia invaded when it had reforms in 1968 that might have saved European Leninism (https://labouraffairsmagazine.com/very-old-issues-images/magazine-001-to-010/magazine-007-july-1988-2/the-1968-invasion-of-czechoslovakia-doomed-the-soviet-union/.) The system was probably doomed when it could not control Poland, and when its invasion of Afghanistan led to an endless expensive war.
Russia abandoned the idea of being an empire, but remained a Great Power. I assume that all factions wanted weapons that would keep it safe against the USA’s ‘Star Wars’system, if it ever did what Reagan was promising. And the Iraq War confirmed that the USA intended to dominate, with the rest of NATO following.
The promise not to expand NATO eastwards may have been sincere, though Gorbachev and Yeltsin were fools not to get it enshrined in a binding treaty that the USA could not easily dismantle. But at the same time, Yeltsin blundered by trusting Western advice and trying out libertarian fantasies that the New Right never allowed to be tried at home. The Western media now pretend it did not happen, but it was real: see Yeltsin’s Final Election and the Near-Return of the Russian Communists(https://labouraffairsmagazine.com/m-articles-by-topic/m99-topic-menus-from-long-revolution-website/46-globalisation/1473-2/). Read other articles from people who saw what was happening before I did (https://labouraffairsmagazine.com/m-articles-by-topic/#_Toc23413137).
Russia declined from the comfortable stagnation of the Brezhnev era and became much poorer. The dreams of some Westerners of breaking up Russia and cheaply buying up its raw materials seemed realistic. But then Putin restored Russian strength. The Ukraine War was planned on the basis of out-of-date assumptions.
Don’t believe the lies about Russia being aggressive. The war with Georgia was to save a threatened Ossetian minority: Georgians have never been very tolerant. And what’s happening in Ukraine is simply taking back populations alienated by an anti-Russian government in Kiev (https://mrgwydionmwilliams.quora.com/The-Civil-War-in-Ukrainian-Minds, https://gwydionmadawc.com/my-blogs/ukraine-the-current-conflict/.
Russia initially hoped to tip the balance for the whole Ukrainian state, since in 2010 there was an electoral majority that was ready to be friendly (https://mrgwydionmwilliams.quora.com/Ukraine-Punished-For-Rejecting-US-Values-in-2010.). But when it became clear that anyone joining Russia was likely to be shut out of Western Europe for the foreseeable future, Russia pulled back to the more solidly pro-Russian areas.
Peace may involve accepting a partition of two of the five Oblasts they have now made part of Russia. The fight is mostly to take the whole of Donetsk, which along with Luhansk had been actively resisting Kiev’s power ever since Kiev’s parliament was won over to bitter hatred of Russia
Air and Sea – Next to Space?
When news of the small reactors broke, I immediately wondered if the old idea of nuclear-powered spacecraft would come next. A sudden return to Russians being the leading force in space.
I asked on Grok, the chat service attached to X (Twitter). It correctly pointed out that there were treaty and safety concerns. Also that the two Russian weapons can cool themselves, using air or water. In space, you’d need huge radiators to get rid of surplus heat, which would add mass. But Grok suggested that an adapted version might still be useful for the moons of Jupiter, Saturn, and beyond.
To me, good targets would be Uranus and Neptune, and all their interesting moons. All we have so far is a single flyby for both planets. But even better would be various Trans-Neptunian objects, not all of them strictly members of the Kuiper Belt. A strange world called Sedna may be from another solar system, and would certainly be a target. So the small new reactors may bring positives, as well as ending foolish Western dreams of carving up Russia, or keeping portions of Former Ukraine that have always had solid majorities friendly to Russia.
Copyright ©Gwydion M. Williams
30th October 2025
Labour Affairs 