It was the year 2018 when Russian President Vladimir Putin announced that the country had developed and tested a new arsenal capable of carrying nuclear warheads – and that it would not be intercepted by traditional anti-missile systems.
“I want to say to all those who fueled the arms race over the past 15 years, sought to take unilateral advantage over Russia and introduced illegal sanctions aimed at curbing our country’s development: everything you wanted to stop has already happened,” warned the Russian leader. on national network.
In his first official presentation of hypersonic missiles, the president stated that the weapon would render NATO and US defenses useless. “Nobody in the world has anything like that,” Putin warned in March of that year. And he was right.
Four years after the announcement, precisely last Friday (19), Russia claimed to have used its hypersonic Kinzhal missiles (the word meaning “dagger” in Russian) to destroy an arms depot in western Ukraine. The Russian state news agency TASS itself recalled that these weapons were deployed in 2017 on an experimental basis in the south of the country. At the end of 2021, China carried out its own tests and attested to the functionality of these projectiles. The war in Ukraine would have been, however, the first time missiles were used in the field.
how they work
Although they are considered high-tech weapons, the working principle of hypersonic missiles is quite simple: they are missiles that travel faster than the speed of sound (between four and 12 times) and can change their route along the route. This makes them virtually impossible to track and intercept: a common ballistic missile typically takes a parabola-shaped route through space. In the case of hypersonics, the journey is made within the atmosphere and is irregular. Another difference is that common missiles are usually launched from the ground; while hypersonics come out of warplanes.
These peculiarities give the wielders of these weapons a considerable tactical advantage. War analysts compare the moment to when nuclear missiles began to replace bombing, significantly reducing the response time of the attacked country. In short: with hypersonic missiles, one nation can attack another in a matter of minutes, “like a fireball”, as Putin himself described in 2018. The animation shown at the time showed a Kinzhal missile destroying a fleet of Navy ships. .
At the time, American security leaders did not appear too concerned about the announcement. “We recognize that we are in competition with countries like China and Russia,” Steven H. Walker, director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, said on the morning of the Russian president’s speech.
“I will not confirm or deny President Putin’s statements,” he said, “but I know that it has been widely reported that China and Russia are developing hypersonic equipment.” Walker said the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has also been developing these capabilities for decades.
The problem is that, until then, most tests carried out by the United States had failed. In October 2017, DARPA asked the Trump administration for additional funding to build supersonic missiles, to which the former Republican president provided $85.8 million. Still, the development of this technology has not entered the radar of priorities.
American delay
In an interview with Canada’s CTVNews, professor of aerospace engineering and director of the Center for National Security Initiatives at the University of Colorado, Iain Boyd, said that the United States is working slowly in this direction and is “definitely behind”. “These activities are at the very beginning, they are very, very expensive and will take many years to implement,” he explained.
For the co-director of the nuclear policy program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, James Acton, this does not mean that the United States does not have supersonic technology: according to him, even American-operated corporations such as Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos have prototypes of aerospace equipment. that reach the speed of sound.
“It is very common to say that there is an arms race in hypersonic technology and that the United States is losing,” Acton explained. “But in many ways, the United States is running a different race than Russia and China.”
Indeed, some experts understand that new and more advanced nuclear weapons, hypersonic or not, offer little strategic value. In practice, as any nuclear conflict would result in a major war, unless the new weapon can neutralize the equivalent, new nuclear equipment is just as efficient as an old one. “Strategic value can only come from a weapon that forces a change in your opponent’s strategy,” says a report from late last year.
Still, the US delay cannot be ignored. “The bureaucracy we’ve created in our defense systems and equipment procurement, not just in space but in other areas, has set us back a lot,” General David Thompson, deputy chief of space operations, recently told Politico.
“The fact that we didn’t need to move quickly for a few decades – in the sense of having a strategic competitor with those capabilities – didn’t motivate us or require us to upgrade quickly,” he added. Last year, on the occasion of the tests in China, General Mark Milley, Chief of Staff, admitted that the launch of hypersonic missiles by the Asian country was “very close” to the “Sputnik moment”: a reference to the launch of the first satellite by the Asian country. Soviet Union in 1957, leaving the United States behind. Russia’s announcement raised suspicions that, 65 years later, the “moment” will repeat itself.
#Khinzal #hypersonic #missile #doesnt