Only Three Countries Have Been Able To Develop Hypersonic Missiles Which Are China, Russia and the US.
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| An animated image of hypersonic cruise missile [GVS] |
Hypersonic missiles are considered as the speediest weapons ever created in the history of human civilization. Defending these missiles is a fearful and trending question. We actually don't know how to defend against hypersonic missiles.
Flight speed is often compared to the speed of sound. The speed of sound, that's Mach 1. The sound travels through the air about ten times as fast as we drive on the freeway. Commercial airliners as for example fly subsonically right under Mach 1. A modern fighter can travel supersonically at Mach 2 or 3.Anything Mach 5 or above is called hypersonic speed. Mach 25 is the upper limit.
Space agencies do have space shuttles that go hypersonically at Mach 20 or 24. However, it's only flying hypersonically for a relatively short period of time. But technology is just now emerging which will enable sustained hypersonic flight.
There are three primary hurdles to the development of the hypersonic weapons. First, the aerodynamics and the flight control at hypersonic speed is the major challenge. The second has to do with material science. Think of it as flying into a blowtorch. The faster the vehicle flies, the pressure, the temperature rises exponentially. So engineers have to have materials that can withstand the high temperatures over a long period of time.
The third challenge involves the propulsion systems of hypersonic cruise missiles. Once the missiles reaches Mach 5, forces can't use traditional jets and just make them go faster. For hypersonic, it needs a completely different design to unclutter the flow path and sustain combustion of the supersonic airflow inside the engine. And the integration of all of these technologies into a weapon system is in itself a challenge.
However as time goes on, the knowledge related to these technologies is going to start proliferating. There really are two types of missiles emerging, hypersonic cruise missiles and hypersonic glide vehicles. Hypersonic cruise missiles are powered all the way to their targets using an advanced propulsion system called a scramjet. These are so fast that defenders may have six minutes from the time it's launched until the time it strikes. So hypersonic glide vehicles are very fast glider. The way it's launched as they put it on top of a rocket that's reentered then it flies on top of the atmosphere. It's like a plane with no engine on it and it uses aerodynamic forces to maintain stability to fly along and to maneuver. As it's maneuverable it can keep it's target a secret up until the last few seconds of the flight.
The faster the missile goes the more kinetic energy the missile gets. In some cases, the attacker may not need to put any explosives on it. The kinetic energy of the vehicle itself is sufficient to be able to cause quite a bit of destruction.
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| Another animated image of hypersonic missile [Collected ] |
The three countries that are getting close to being able to deploy hypersonic missiles are Russia, China and the US. It's probably less than a decade for these top three countries to develop these devastating weapons. Other countries are however much behind in part because of the technical challenges and the engineering challenges. For these weapons require massive amounts of investment. So developers from other nations would require extensive foreign assistance.
Hypersonic weapons can be destabilizing. It creates an escalatory environment. It increases the likelihood of a strategic conflict and decreases the ability to defend against it. It has been compared to lighting a match an of two thousand miles of an hour wind.
The current types of missile defenses are not adequate to defend against hypersonic missiles. Our whole defense system is based on the assumption that we are going to intercept the ballistic objects. A ballistic missile is like a fly ball in baseball, the outfielder knows exactly where to catch it because it's path is determined by momentum and gravity. It's a different scenario the combination of the different maneuverability and the speed makes hypersonic missiles unpredictable and extremely difficult to defend against.
Most countries use some form of what experts call a doodle-loop. When they are making decisions about weather to respond to a threat or not. Forces observe a threat, figure out where it's coming from the decision whether they need to respond and they act on that decision. How are defenders are going to shoehorn all those steps into six minutes?
There are two implications here. The first is that people will become more trigger- happy. The compressed time frame to make a decision makes people much more likely to want to be the first strike as oppose to the second strike because defenders can't preserve their second-strike capabilities. The Second implication is that if defenders can defend against a recapitulation attack then they have to devolve command and control of their weapons in the field. To the military rather than to the national leaders that run the risk of accidental strategic war. Another possibility is to disperse forces' strategic weapons that run the risk of weapons being teased by terrorists. Another possibility is to go to a strategic doctrine called launch on warning finally forces can't just decide in a crisis that there is going to be a full-scale strategic conflict. None of these options are very good.
The world would be more dangerous unless superpowers have some sort of agreement with each other to not share those technologies. The end state the superpowers should try to avoid the proliferation of hypersonic technology not just to rouge nations but also to nations with regional rivalries that could prove to be very destabilizing. Experts recommend that there should be a kind of addendum or amendments to the missile technology control regime.
This regime could be supplemented with some controls on hypersonic components. It would be a waste of time to do this if the US or Russia or China plan to export complete missiles. These three countries can start with a trilateral agreement which would be really an effective step. There's time to take steps, not a lot of time but a few years.
Sources: DARPA, MIT, Xinhua and other scientific and strategic journals.
Written by codegRay
