The United States is trying to overtake Russia and China in handling this projectile so fast that radars fail to detect it
A new arms race is underway. It’s about becoming the hardest, fastest and deadliest ever. Supersonic speed is already obsolete. Now it’s about hypersonic missiles traveling at five times the speed of light, so fast that even radar can’t detect them. There is no way to avoid the impact. There is no defense system that protects.
Russia has started using them in Ukraine. China successfully tested them last year. And the United States took its second test this Thursday. They are elusive, can maneuver quickly and change heights. 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 gain a head start in the new generation of weapons of war, especially at a time when tensions are mounting in the Pacific and Ukraine’s war is consuming Europe.
“Frankly, the Chinese and the Russians have gone before us, plain and simple,” said Senator Angus King, a Maine independent who works with Democrats and chairs the Senate’s Strategic Armed Forces Subcommittee, earlier this year. “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, then we’re stuck.”
That left the Pentagon asking $4,700 million for its research on hypersonic missiles in this fiscal year alone, an amount already higher than the 3,800 million it spent on the case last year, according to the Congressional Investigative Services report. . The US military is expected to be able to count on that capacity next year.
The first test was conducted in October 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 that can withstand the heat produced at that rate. It was necessary to evaluate the functioning of the communication and navigation equipment in that environment and apparently we succeeded.
The missile, fired from a launch vehicle at sea, has undergone 11 experimental tests to collect information useful for the development of these weapons. These apparently differ from jet technology by compressing air before combustion to maintain hypersonic speed.
According to the latest National Security Strategy report published during Donald Trump’s administration in 2018, which was the first to shift Russia’s focus from the Cold War to China, hypersonic weapons are said to be the new threat, along with chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. the latter reinforced with new warheads, which are used for both tactical and conventional weapons.
In recent weeks, the Pentagon has deemed it “clearer” that Vladimir Putin’s commanders are preparing for a dramatic escalation of the offensive in Ukraine, with no one knowing whether the Russian president will deliver on his threats to use nuclear weapons.
Source: La Verdad
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