Another arms race is shaping up, and this time around, the race is to develop hypersonic missiles. A discussion of this was the centerpiece of a panel at a Carnegie Endowment for International Peace panel on July 9.
According to R. Jeffrey Smith, managing editor for National Security at the Center for Public Integrity, China, India, and Japan are all working on the technology, in addition to the United States. Russia is the only country to announce that they have the technology.
Currently, the United States and Russia are both fast tracking the hypersonic technology. Hypersonic missiles are a mix between ballistic missiles and cruise missiles, meaning that they maintain accuracy and can reach speeds up to 15 times the speed of sound.
After being a point of emphasis for the United States, the capabilities are quickly approaching and will be in use in a couple years, according to Smith.
Smith went on to say that the United States plans to spend $2.6 billion on technology development of hypersonic missiles and will have a working missile by 2022.
Dean Wilkening, a physicist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, doesn’t see America as the hypersonic leaders.
“The U.S. is really not the moving party in hypersonic weapons; the U.S. and Russia have both been invested in hypersonic technology in about five decades, at least on the U.S. side and to some extent the Russian side, it has been a hobby shop, we have not pursed offensive hypersonic weapons very rapidly,” Wilkening said.
Instead of the long-time rivals leading the technology, it’s China, according to Wilkening.
“Their program is a little bit akin to the U.S. space program in the 1960s,” Wilkening added.
The panel also discussed the motives behind the progress that the United States has made in in hypersonic technology.
According to Wilkening, one of those reasons is cost effectiveness.
“Hypersonic weapons tend to be much cheaper than the air defenses than they would undermine,” Wilkening said.
Another reason that Wilkening presented was the fact that the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF), which was signed in 1987 during the Cold War. The treaty required both the United States and Soviet Union to eliminate their nuclear and ballistic missiles.
The INF Treaty expired Feb. 1, 2019.
Despite Wilkening seeing benefits of the improvement in hypersonic technology, Smith had his concerns.
“By far, the most common argument in favor of developing hypersonic technology in Congress is ‘Russia is doing it, China is doing it, therefore we must do it,’” Smith said. “There are good reasons for doing this; there are good reasons for not doing it … to my mind the worst possible reasoning for pursing the technology is because somebody else is doing it.”
Another concern from experts is the speed of the missiles. Hypersonic missiles travel approximately15 times the speed of sound, or around 11,509 mph.
“The speed of war is going to make careful decision making very challenging,” Wilkening said. “The risk of escalation, miscalculation, misunderstanding, and misperception are going to be much more difficult to deal with.”
Wilkening further explained his concerns about escalation.
“We are drifting into this brave new world, where escalation is going to be problematic; I don’t see an easy way out of it, obviously we should start talking about this,” Wilkening said. “We should have started this decades ago.”
According to Smith, the response to an attack would have to be under 30 minutes.
“In Washington, under this traditional threat scenario, the military would have about four minutes to report an attack, five to six more minutes to notify the president of the recommended option, and then the president would have seven minutes to make a decision that would affect the lives and deaths of billions people and possibly the fate of the planet,” Smith said. “After that it would take about six minutes for launch crews to actually execute a nuclear launch order.”
As quick as that may seem, Smith anticipates that as the technology improves, the response time will also become quicker.
“Over the next five years perhaps, and certainly over the next decade, this lovely, leisurely 30-minute window to make momentous decisions about life and death is going to shrink to about half that time,” Smith said.
Trenton Abrego is a staff writer for Homeland411.
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