The Pentagon’s overreaction to China’s new weapon tests

Back in the 1960s, a senior Pentagon official would greet incoming recruits to his department with a cheery announcement: ‘Welcome to the world of strategic analysis, where we program weapons that don’t work to meet threats that don’t exist.’ The recent media excitement over Chinese tests of a hypersonic nuclear weapon which, anonymous Pentagon officials told credulous reporters, overcomes even the ‘constraints of physics’ shows that not much has changed.

Hypersonic missiles fly at five times or more the speed of sound. While ballistic missiles follow a fixed trajectory up into space and down again, so their course can be tracked soon after launch, hypersonics are designed to manoeuvre through the upper atmosphere, so that defenders cannot plot their course and thereby intercept them. The Chinese weapons test in the news is reportedly a ‘boost-glide’ variant, launched to the fringes of space by a conventional rocket before being boosted on a high-speed glide to its target, manoeuvring erratically through the upper atmosphere along the way.

The concept has a long, albeit uninspiring history, dating back to Germany in the second world war and imported to the USA by a graduate of Hitler’s weapons programme drafted to our cold war defence effort. Dyna-Soar, a US hypersonic nuclear bomber project consumed a billion dollars in the 1950s and early 1960s (which was a lot of money in those days) but never left the drawing board.

The idea lived on in nooks and crannies of US defence budgets, before it received a powerful boost in 2018 from none other than Vladimir Putin. That year the Russian leader unveiled ‘Avangard’, a nuclear-armed hypersonic missile, boasting that it was ‘absolutely invulnerable to any air or missile defence system, [flying] to its target like a meteorite, like a ball of fire’.

In reality, this was a Soviet-era programme, originally and aptly named ‘Albatross’, which — despite a history of test failure — was revived by Putin in an effort to show the world (especially his domestic audience) that Russia was still a superpower.