The United States tries to catch up with Russia and China in handling this projectile, so fast that radars do not detect it
There is a new arms race underway. It’s about getting the hardest, fastest and deadliest yet. Supersonic speed is already obsolete. Now it is about hypersonic missiles that travel at five times the speed of light, so fast that not even radar can detect them. There is no way to prevent the impact. There is no defensive system that protects.
Russia has started using them in Ukraine. China successfully tested them last year. And the United States made its second test this Thursday. They are elusive, can quickly maneuver and change altitude. At a NASA facility in the Wallops Islands, Virginia, the Pentagon successfully conducted its second test in a year.
Democratic and Republican lawmakers had harshly criticized the Joe Biden administration for allowing Russia and China to get ahead of it in the new generation of weapons of war, particularly at a time when tensions are rising in the Pacific region, and the war of Ukraine consumes Europe.
“We are in trouble”
“Frankly, the Chinese and the Russians have got ahead of us, plain and simple,” Sen. Angus King, an independent from Maine who teams with Democrats and chairs the Senate subcommittee on Strategic Forces, said earlier this year. the Armed Services. “If our strategy in the Pacific is based on aircraft carriers and those carriers are vulnerable to being hit by a missile traveling at 6,200 kilometers per hour, we are in a bind.”
That served so that in this fiscal year the Pentagon requested 4,700 million dollars only for the investigation of hypersonic missiles, a figure that already exceeds the 3,800 million that it dedicated to this cause last year, according to the report of investigative services of the Congress. The expectation is that the US Army will be able to count on that capability next year.
The first test was conducted in October of last year, but this is the first in which the Sandia National Laboratories have conducted what they call “a realistic hypersonic environment,” according to the US Navy statement. These are advanced materials capable of withstanding the heat that is produced at that speed. It was necessary to evaluate the operation of the communication and navigation equipment in that environment and, apparently, it has been a success.
Eleven experimental tests
The missile, fired from a launcher at sea, carried eleven experimental tests with which to collect information that is useful for the development of these weapons. These apparently differ from jet technology by compressing air before combustion to sustain hypersonic speed.
According to the latest National Security Strategy report published during the Donald Trump administration in 2018, which was the first to shift the Russian focus from the Cold War to China, hypersonic weapons would be the new threat, along with chemical weapons, biological and nuclear, the latter reinforced with new nuclear warheads, which are used for both tactical and conventional weapons.
In recent weeks, the Pentagon considers it “more evident” that Vladimir Putin’s commanders are preparing for a dramatic escalation of the offensive in Ukraine, without anyone knowing if the Russian president will make good on his threats to use nuclear weapons.
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