A nice succinct article in Mother Jones, with links about why that:
a) can’t/won’t work,
b) is a REALLY stupid idea (because, you know… SCIENCE & the laws of physics!)

Can You Nuke a Hurricane?

The Soviet/Russian military is not known for its “Safety First” philosophy. Their rocket and torpedo fuels are not known for stability. If they attempted an Orion drive it wouldn’t be out of line for Russians. They have a tendency to believe in a lot of flaky concepts. That’s why Rasputin was part of the inner circle of the court of Tsar Nikolai II.

I don’t see a solution for the weight problem. Missile carrying submarines fill the same role. With half the US population living within 50 miles of the coast, submarines would seem to be a better choice for an adversary.

If you *are* going to try it, plutonium is the obvious choice, because it won’t go critical in an air-cooled reactor unless you have so much plutonium that your rocket won’t get off the ground. Highly enriched U-235 on the other hand can go critical if you drop it. But… I’m still highly skeptical. This has been the holy grail of long range aircraft and rocket design since the 1950’s, and the laws of physics haven’t changed between then and now.

The JATO/RATO-Ramjet system is common for long range anti-aircraft missiles like the US BOMARC and the Soviet Ganef systems, so it would be a known starting point for development. Using a plutonium reactor to heat the air to provide the thrust in a ramjet is a great concept on paper. The problem is how to keep the reactor from going critical. The problems with the radioactivity are ignored for later. Ramjets are much happier at Mach 2 than subsonic, and staying “below the radar” at Mach 2 is not easy when you are lighting your trail with a radioactive plume that will be tripping sensors around the world and in orbit.

From the video it looks like the auxiliary rocket(s) exploded and breached the nuclear container. It looked like a liquid-fueled rocket explosion, which is a terrible idea in these hybrid systems.

Right now I’m thinking this is a combination of Russian sabre-rattling trying to seem like they’re more advanced than they really are, and U.S. military complicity in that sabre-rattling to pump up the Russian threat so they can get a bigger military budget. But that’s just based on what I know about the technological basis of what they’re trying to do. Unless they’ve made some sort of breakthroughs in physics or materials science, what they say they’re doing, and what they’re actually doing, can’t be the same things.