Francis Pike has narrated this article for you to listen to.
Two weeks ago, a bright light streaked through the night sky above Inner Mongolia. It was not an asteroid. The US Center for Strategic and International Studies, which released the footage, reported that it was China’s testing of a missile travelling at approximately 6,900 miles per hour.
When China’s DF-27 hypersonic missile was first revealed in 2021, the US military was shaken. General Mark Milley, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, described it as a ‘Sputnik moment’. Congress’s Nuclear Weapons and Arms Control Working Group was so alarmed that it wrote to President Joe Biden warning him that the development of hypersonic weapons ‘could fuel an arms race that we cannot afford and should seek to avoid’. Every senior US naval officer I’ve spoken to has expressed concern.
China’s hypersonic missiles come in three flavours. One, the scramjet, is propelled by an engine that mixes air and fuel at the right temperature, air pressure and density. It is manoeuvrable and can fly low, which makes it difficult to intercept. The People’s Liberation Army air force has also developed an air-to-air missile for fighter aircraft that has a range of more than 600 miles.
‘Glide’ versions – such as the DF-27 – consist of two parts: a ballistic missile combined with a bomb that detaches and glides toward its target at hyper-sonic speed (anything faster than Mach 5 or around 3,800mph). It can also shift direction, which makes detection and neutralisation extremely difficult.
Like China, Russia has a suite of hypersonic weapons. The deadliest is the Avangard glide missile, which has had four test launches.
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