I wouldn't pick this nit if my link wasn't so awesome [1]. Nuclear-powered aircraft are workable if you don't care about shielding. Who in their right mind wo

I wouldn't pick this nit if my link wasn't so awesome [1]. Nuclear-powered aircraft are workable if you don't care about shielding. Who in their right mind would design a flying, unshielded nuclear reactor? A Cold War weapons designer who wanted to build: ... a locomotive-size missile that would travel at near-treetop level at three times the speed of sound, tossing out hydrogen bombs as it roared overhead. The article at the other end of the link is the most tooth-curling engineer porn I've ever read. It's horrible. But also strangely awesome: Pluto's designers calculated that its shock wave alone might kill people on the ground. Then there was the problem of fallout. In addition to gamma and neutron radiation from the unshielded reactor, Pluto's nuclear ramjet would spew fission fragments out in its exhaust as it flew by. (One enterprising weaponeer had a plan to turn an obvious peace-time liability into a wartime asset: he suggested flying the radioactive rocket back and forth over the Soviet Union after it had dropped its bombs.) [1] http://www.merkle.com/pluto/pluto.html http://www.merkle.com/pluto/pluto.html