Earlier this month, Russian president Vladimir Putin announced that he had pulled ahead in the latest arms race between his country and the United States. In a speech in Moscow, Matt Stroud reports in The Verge, Putin touted a new hypersonic weapon, the Sarmat, an intercontinental ballistic missile that, he said, would be able to strike either of the Earth’s poles with a nuclear warhead. The Sarmat is expected to be ready around 2020, but another hypersonic missile, the Kinzhal, is said to be in trial service already. The Kinzhal, Stroud notes, is carried by an aircraft and can carry either a conventional or nuclear warhead.
Meanwhile, the United States’ own experiments with hypersonic weapons have been slow-going. A test in 2014 ended in failure when the Army had to destroy a test missile mid-flight, for example. Even after a successful test late last year, the weapon is nowhere near ready to use.
The stakes in this arms race are clear. Hypersonic weapons travel at least five times faster than sound, and they fly lower in the atmosphere than ballistic missiles. These features make them much harder than other missiles to track and destroy with traditional defense systems. Even more worrying for the United States, although it has been focusing on hypersonic weapons that carry conventional warheads, the Russian versions are equipped for nuclear ones. No wonder, then, that DARPA got $108.6 million for hypersonic funding in the 2018 budget and has asked for $256.7 million next year.
Though hypersonic weapons still have a way to go, we need to brace ourselves for a world in which they are ubiquitous. For most of American history, we have been shielded from rival powers by the vast expanse of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. The advent of the nuclear age brought our splendid isolation to an end, yet the logic of mutually assured destruction afforded a kind of security. One wonders how hypersonic weapons will change the landscape. It is often said that war with North Korea is unthinkable, as Seoul is within range of North Korean artillery. Soon, hypersonic weapons might see to it that we are all in the same boat — living cheek by jowl with those who have the power to destroy us. Preserving our military edge in such a world will be more than a little challenging.