Tupolev Tu-119: Enough Madness.

As the Americans, the Russians were taken by the nuclear fever of the 1950s. All could be nuclear powered back then, submarines,ships,cars….and yeah, aircraft too.
The first Russian step was a Tupolev Tu-95 (the LAL) equipped with a nuclear reactor (functional, but that did not a power plant of the plane) used to test reactor operation and crew radiation hazards. The positive results of that test program encouraged the Tupolev Bureau to propose the “logical” next step: The Tu-119, a test aircraft powered by two Kuznetsov “direct( read dirty)-cycle” nuclear turboprops.
In the end the project came to nothing -gladly, I guess-, because the lost of interest in the matter by the eternal enemy, radiation risks, and the wondrous costs.

In this drawing we can observe the basic construction details of the Tu-119. A reactor in the fuselage (as in the Tu-95LAL) connected to the two inner “direct-cycle” NK-14As engines.