Russia’s super-missile test shows a new, expensive technological race—with dire outcomes

F ingers dancing over the black-and-white keys, physicist Theodore Merkle accompanied the bawdy songs being belted out by his crew on the piano perched on the back of the truck, lurching into the village of Mercury, Arizona. Their elation could be shared with no one: Earlier that afternoon, on 14 May 1961, on a great arid plain called the Jackass Flats, Merkle’s crew had fired up a giant, bright red device that was roughly the size and shape of a steam locomotive . It was designed to power a cruise missile flying at tree-top level for thousands of kilometres at three times the speed of sound.

The project’s leadership had code-named it Pluto, for the Roman god of the dead, who was devoured by his father, Saturn, and then vomited out with his siblings into the uni