It would NOT spew chunks of anything on anyone. It would spew superheated air that would be pretty damn bad if you were right behind the thing but should be relatively harmless to those on the ground. The only thing that stopped the project was the fact that there was no way to recover the vehicle. By the time it was done with its mission of orbiting the Atlantic or Pacific the only way to dispose of it was by crashing it in the ocean far from anyone and hoping the whole thing sank.

If you were using it to bomb the crap out of someone why would you send it to the ocean? thats stupid.
Just ram it into a final target, that would take care it and spew radioactive chunks.

Arfo: the article that I read years ago in the Smithsonian aviation magazine said that the design of the reactor was such that reaction by-products would be mixed with the propellant (in this case, air). Other sources have confirmed this. A related project was Project NERVA, which was intended to be a spacecraft, rather than a weapon. Same idea, but carry your propellant with you, rather than make a ramjet.

Something else that is extremely interesting was Project Orion, a nuclear pulse rocket weighing 4000 tons, carrying over 1000 tons into orbit. Basically, throw smallish nuclear bombs (approx 1 kton yield) behind a large metal plate connected to the ship with shock absorbers, blowing one up every half-second or so. Isp and thrust are both extremely high, which is usually not the case. They dreamed big in those days.

Quoth the Article:

"Ruptured eardrums, of course, would have been the least of your problems if you were unlucky enough to be underneath the unshielded reactor when it went by, literally roasting chickens in the barnyard."

" 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.)"

Also, since the rocket was a doomsday device, recovery would be the last thing on their minds.

Run for the hills. It's the Attack of the Atomic Comment Pedants!

For anyone that's interested, the novel 'Footfall' by Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle uses a spaceship like that described in Project Orion.
Goto http://www.up-ship.com/apr/michael.htm for an artistic impression.

For anyone that's *really* interested, the BBC did a good documentary about Project Orion a while back which you may still be able to find as a torrent at www.uknova.com

There was a documentary on Pluto on the Discovery Channel about three years ago. It showed how they fabricated and assembled the thousands of plutonium fuel elements that went into the engine for the prototype. (I think there were going to be 500,000 fuel elements in the final version.) The final version was to be the size of a steam locomotive and would glow red-hot as it cruised toward its target. One of the things that stopped them was they didn't know how to test it. One suggestion was to tie the missle to a tether and fly it in a circle in the desert. I imagine the end of that test would have been very exciting.

For anyone who'd like design comparisons, history, theory, and basically everything there is to know about atomic rockets, try Winchell Chung's Atomic Rocket Web Site. (Try other subsites under projectrho for classic sci-fi art, retro models, starmaps and other fun stuff.) http://www.projectrho.com/rocketstub.html

The reactor did distribute radioactive debris along the flight path.(or would have had the thing been flown) This was an evolution of the NERVA project. NERVA had fuel rods break off and get spewed out the back when they ran it. The acoustic and vibration loads were more than the fuel rods could stand so they sometimes broke. Since the flow was directed out the nozzle, thats where the broken fuel rods went.
After every NERVA test, they had to go scrape the desert floor and collect all the radioactive junk and burry it in a deep deep hole. It is reasonable to assume a flight version of the motor would do the same.

Great site, DaveToo!

Reminds me of all of the nightmarish cold war hubris that used to be on display at the late, great UFX.org (RIP).
They had a feature on atomic powered bombers that had to deposit their power plants in a trench on the runway upon landing, lest the groundcrew become contaminated.
It seems in that era they wanted to use atomic power for everything: one plan was to use a-bombs to dig canals and another was to set of nuclear explosions underground to percolate oil up to the surface. Horrifyiing.
Brings to ind that episode of the Simpson's where Homer gets a handgun and uses it to do everything, even use it as a remote control.

I saw on Discover/History channel that Russia planned to build their own doomsday device--a tanker ship full of fissionable material. Essentially a nuclear bomb the size of a tanker. It would float around and if it detected nuclear explosions it would detonate. Nice human interface there.

The Wayback Machine might be your friend: http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://UFX.org

Glory be to the bomb and the Holy Fallout

Here is some info on the reactor for the S.L.A.M. (Supersonic Low Altitude Missile or "Slow Low And Messy" to its detractors.)

http://www.vought.com/heritage/special/html/sslam3.html

And here is a link to “The Flying Crowbar”, article by Gregg Herken on Project Pluto from Air & Space Magazine, April/May 1990, Volume 5 No. 1, page 28.

http://www.merkle.com/pluto/pluto.html

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Amen

All things bright and beautiful
All creatures great and small
All things wise and wonderful
The Lord Bomb made them all

-Beneath the Planet of the Apes