A report on a Chinese “nuclear-powered tank” concept became a hot topic on a 5channel (5ch) Science News+ thread. [5ch is Japan’s largest anonymous forum network, the successor to 2channel.] The idea is a tank powered by a nuclear reactor and armed with a cannon that has a 450km range, but the thread quickly filled with pushback — pointing out that the Soviet Union researched something similar decades ago, so it wouldn’t be a “world first,” plus a string of technical questions about cooling methods, radioactive contamination if the vehicle is hit, and the risk of being taken out cheaply by drones. The discussion eventually broadened into a debate over whether giant weapons are simply obsolete, using the WWII battleship Yamato as a reference point.
China dreams of the world’s first “nuclear-powered tank”… to be armed with a cannon with a 450km range
The Soviets already built a nuclear tank, so it's not a world first.
4AnonymousSep 21, 2026 22:55
They should name it 'Xi Jinping,' obviously.
5AnonymousSep 21, 2026 23:04
If it's a steam-turbine setup, there's a limit to how small you can make it. If you're cramming it all into one vehicle, wouldn't it end up more like a giant self-propelled gun? And if you slap tank-grade heavy armor on the whole thing, it'll be so heavy the roads will crack or it'll just sink into the ground.
6AnonymousSep 21, 2026 23:29
The government's about to go down in flames, so of course pie-in-the-sky wonder-weapon plans start popping up now.
7AnonymousSep 21, 2026 23:59
If it rolls into enemy territory and takes a hit, the crew basically becomes their own nuclear weapon. That's about as bad as it gets.
8AnonymousSep 22, 2026 02:04
If they're doing this, I want them to go all the way and build something with the romantic scale of the Maus. [Nazi Germany's abandoned 188-ton super-heavy tank prototype.]
9AnonymousSep 22, 2026 03:57
It'll just get taken out by a drone in seconds. Is contaminating enemy territory with radiation actually the point?
10AnonymousSep 22, 2026 05:49
Reactor makes electricity, motor drives the thing, railgun fires all day long, powerful electromagnetic pulses fry incoming drones — and its sheer weight sinks it into roads and collapses bridges.
11AnonymousSep 22, 2026 06:03
Humanoid robots as infantry — now that's the scary part.
12AnonymousSep 22, 2026 06:15
The infantry robots can recharge on the move via a socket on the tank!
13AnonymousSep 22, 2026 06:18
'Let's go — anywhere at aaaall~ ♪' [Lyric from a well-known Japanese theme song.]
15AnonymousSep 22, 2026 06:42
Well, I guess it beats the Soviet nuclear tank-shell idea? They've probably never thought through details like 'it can't leave flat ground' or 'what actually happens when it gets destroyed.'
16AnonymousSep 22, 2026 06:47
China's manufacturing base is the strongest in the world right now anyway… and weapons are disposable.
17AnonymousSep 22, 2026 06:48
Like the battleship Yamato [Japan's iconic WWII super-battleship] — aren't they just failing to read which way the times are moving?
19AnonymousSep 22, 2026 07:49
Re: #17
Even with the naval treaty limits of the era, every major navy kept building battleships. Among them, the Yamato class was an outstanding weapon riding the cutting edge of that era's trends.
By a quirk of fate it never got the chance to fire on an enemy battleship (the US Navy actually dispatched battleship task forces twice to try to intercept it), but its armor proved tougher than even the design called for.
Most follow-on programs never got finished for economic reasons, but the fact that the major naval powers kept building battleships even after the war validates the Yamato's existence.
Aircraft only became the true all-purpose weapon some time after the war, once jet range improved dramatically.
If you want to call something 'outdated,' consider this: the Yamato class went to considerable lengths to shorten its overall length just to reduce the chance of being hit. By contrast, the US Navy's final battleship design, the Montana class — meant as the culmination of American battleship design — dropped the Panama Canal size restrictions entirely and had a far more sprawling hull. That long hull is thought to have become a serious liability when facing air attack.
18AnonymousSep 22, 2026 07:48
Sounds like there won't be any surviving generals left, either.
20AnonymousSep 22, 2026 08:03
What's the point of building a giant moving target? It's basically a self-punishing weapon that says, 'if I get hit and break, I'll spew radiation everywhere.'
21AnonymousSep 22, 2026 08:06
In boxing or anything else, speed is what matters most for taking down an opponent. In war too, it's about spotting the enemy fast and striking fast — there's nothing else to it. What are they even thinking?
22AnonymousSep 22, 2026 08:35
So basically… a nuclear bomb, then.
23AnonymousSep 22, 2026 08:43
With a 450km range, it wouldn't even need to reach the front line. The Taiwan Strait is 200km wide, and Taiwan itself is 150km east-to-west — that range would cover Fujian all the way to Taiwan's Pacific coast. It's also about 450km from the 38th parallel to Busan. Makes you wonder if that's the scenario they have in mind.
24AnonymousSep 22, 2026 08:44
Like those Russian tanks Ukrainian drones turned into scrap metal.
25AnonymousSep 22, 2026 08:57
For a cannon with a 450km range, does the shell really fly that far without some mechanism built into the round itself? And if the round needs its own propulsion anyway, I feel like you wouldn't even need the cannon to launch it.
26AnonymousSep 22, 2026 09:08
[Q] Was Japan's navy the only one building 'outdated' battleships?
[A] Not at all. Japan commissioned only two battleships during the war — Yamato and Musashi. The US Navy commissioned a full eight.
——
★US Navy: battleships commissioned by year★
1942 — 4 ships: South Dakota, Indiana, Massachusetts, Alabama
1943 — 2 ships: Iowa, New Jersey
1944 — 2 ships: Wisconsin, Missouri
1945 — 0 ships
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ship_commissionings_in_1943
29AnonymousSep 22, 2026 09:20
Build a thing like that and it'll just get reduced to scrap in one hit by some Chinese-made drone bought off Amazon with an RPG warhead duct-taped to it.
31AnonymousSep 22, 2026 09:22
Re: #29
Sure, sure, uh-huh… good luck with that.
30AnonymousSep 22, 2026 09:21
A giant weapon that's just an extension of old-school thinking is completely useless in actual combat.
32AnonymousSep 22, 2026 09:25
It's basically a nuclear-powered robot.
33AnonymousSep 22, 2026 09:38
If they're picturing an era where power-hungry railguns and laser weapons are actually practical, reviving the railway gun would be more realistic. [A railway gun is a massive cannon mounted on and fired from rail cars.]
34AnonymousSep 22, 2026 09:57
Sounds like a superweapon straight out of the Ace Combat series — one of those annoying stages where you're forced into nonstop evasive maneuvers.
36AnonymousSep 22, 2026 10:02
Re: #34
It shows up right at the start of Ace Combat 8, doesn't it? A land battleship.
35AnonymousSep 22, 2026 09:58
Yeah, if something like that came rolling in during an invasion, it wouldn't be easy to just casually take it out.
38AnonymousSep 22, 2026 11:19
This is the idea of someone who hasn't thought about where it would actually be used. Sure, if you just make something big enough, you can cram in a reactor or a battleship-sized gun, no problem. But battleships work precisely because there's an environment where something that huge can move around freely. Now suppose you mount some absurdly huge gun but still force the hull to be small — then you won't have room to carry shells. Or are they planning to give some peashooter an absurdly long range instead?
39AnonymousSep 22, 2026 12:21
Just riding inside the thing, the crew probably wouldn't come out unscathed.
40AnonymousSep 22, 2026 12:23
Nuclear submarines and nuclear aircraft carriers are just fine, though?
41AnonymousSep 22, 2026 12:28
I can see the logic on one point at least: you wouldn't need refueling depots spread across some huge area. Plus near-unlimited power, and if the crew were AI robots, that'd be even better, no?
42AnonymousSep 22, 2026 12:32
How would they even handle cooling? Nuclear subs and carriers work because they can cool the reactor with seawater, right? That's not going to fly for a tank.
43AnonymousSep 22, 2026 12:33
Nuclear submarines and nuclear aircraft carriers are just fine though, lol.
Background and Key Points of the Discussion
The source for this story is a report out of China about a “nuclear-powered tank” concept — worth noting that this is still a proposed idea, not a fielded weapon. A nuclear-powered tank isn’t itself a new idea: the former Soviet Union is on record researching nuclear-powered tank concepts during the Cold War, which is why several commenters pushed back on the “world’s first” framing. Nuclear aircraft carriers and submarines work because they can be cooled with seawater; a land-based tank has no equivalent cooling method, so how to handle the risk of scattering radioactive material if the vehicle is hit or destroyed becomes the single biggest technical hurdle. The “450km range” figure also drew geopolitical readings, with several posters noting it lines up suspiciously well with distances across the Taiwan Strait or the Korean Peninsula — showing the discussion wasn’t purely about hardware. Meanwhile, the exchange invoking the WWII battleship Yamato turned into a surprisingly detailed historical back-and-forth, extending the debate into a broader question: in the age of drone warfare, are giant weapons platforms simply obsolete?
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