Weapons

Inside the race for hypersonic weapons

Russian president Vladimir Putin’s chest-thumping March 1st Moscow speech has gotten a lot of attention for its claims about a nuclear-powered cruise missile, its video showing warheads raining down on Tampa Bay, and its braggadocious tone likely directed at one very braggadocious American. Mostly overlooked, however, have been its provocative statements about an entirely new class of weaponry that nuclear nations are racing to build: highly precise, long-range, hypersonic missiles.

Long a dream of military engineers in the United States, Russia, and China — each of which points to the other’s work as justification for their own — hypersonics by all accounts pose a risk of altering the strategic calculations that have helped push off any direct conflict between nuclear powers.

Hypersonics are defined as weapons that can fly at more than five times the speed of sound, travel much lower in the atmosphere than traditional ballistic missiles, and maneuver midflight. The potential advantages are clear: hypersonic missiles would allow a nation to strike an adversary in a matter of minutes. The weapons’ low trajectory allows them to travel much farther and more stealthily than other missiles, and their maneuverability allows them to evade missile defenses that nations might spend billions of dollars to create.