China recently tested a nuclear-capable hypersonic delivery vehicle, although they deny it.
Gen. Mark Milley, America’s top military officer, called the test “very concerning” (see story here).
There are several things the Pentagon doesn’t like about these weapons in our adversaries’ hands.
Unlike ICBMs, which are lobbed into space, are visible on radar, and take 20 or 30 minutes to reach their targets, hypersonic missiles come in low and fast, can’t be intercepted with current ABM technology, and arrive so quickly you can’t react to the attack.
That makes them ideal first-strike weapons. That’s the problem.
That was the problem with Khrushchev’s attempt to put Russian medium-range nuclear missiles in Cuba. They could hit the eastern seaboard of the U.S., including Washington D.C., in minutes. That was intolerable for the U.S., and President Kennedy risked a nuclear war to get them out of Cuba.
In the 1970s, when the proposed D5 missile was being debated, opponents argued it was “destabilizing” because it could be used as a first-strike weapon.
When the U.S. began developing ABM systems capable of shooting down ICBMs, the Russians complained it was destabilizing because it altered the balance of nuclear deterrence.
The plot of the 1984 book and 1990 movie “Hunt for Red October” revolved around a Russian stealthy submarine capable of sneaking up on the U.S. and launching its nuclear missiles without warning, making it a destabilizing first-strike weapon.
Everyone living today has lived all or most of their lives in the nuclear age. We all understand deterrence, and believe that’s what has prevented World War 3 from breaking out. There certainly have been conflicts that could have triggered it. Consequently, anything that weakens deterrence, and makes a first strike more tempting, makes us nervous. And makes military planners very nervous.
Nuclear strategy is simple, yet poses fiendishly difficult problems. Since the dawn of the nuclear age, defending against nuclear attack has been technologically impossible or at least very difficult, so nations have relied on their offensive weapons to deter attack. Deterrence depends on the ability to retaliate. If an enemy launch is detected, you have to “use or lose.” Hypersonic missiles drastically reduce warning time. That compresses decision-time, and increases the chances of mistake (i.e., launching a retaliatory attack because of a false warning signal).
But hypersonics have non-nuclear uses, too, and therefore conventional strategy implications. This article argues they’re “mainly conceived for nonnuclear operations on a relatively limited scale,” especially in a role as anti-ship missiles. In a China – U.S. conflict, say over Taiwan, an obvious target would be U.S. carriers operating in the combat theater.
At the present time, there’s no consensus among analysts on whether China’s possession of hypersonic technology is a strategic game-changer, or what kind (and how serious) a threat it poses (see article here). General Milley would only say, “I don’t know if it’s quite a Sputnik moment, but … it’s a very significant technological event … it has all of our attention.”
All in all, it’s a piece of a larger picture that involves a rapid Chinese military buildup, a vast expansion of its military capabilities, and rising tensions over China’s extravagant territorial claims and increasingly aggressive behavior.