US missile defence warning systems and counter measures are designed to complicate ballistic missile launches against the US, though, so there is a foundation to expand if a decision was taken to counter growing Chinese capabilities." "US ballistic missile defences are not deployed or scaled to counter China's existing nuclear weapon capabilities. "ICBMs carrying nuclear weapons remain extraordinarily capable and threatening weapons of mass destruction that are very difficult to defend against," Michael Shoebridge, director of defence, strategy and national security at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, said earlier this week. The US nuclear stockpile stood at 3750 as of September 2020, down from 3805 a year earlier, the State Department revealed earlier this month in a reversal of the Trump administration policy to keep those numbers secret. China is thought to have several hundred warheads and has been building silos for ICBMs. Related articlesĮxperts have cautioned that the new tech is outmatched by China's existing nuclear arsenal. The rocket system is known as fractional orbital bombardment, a technology originally developed by the Soviet Union in the 1960s but later abandoned – "fractional" because it was not designed to go into a full orbit of the Earth. The glide vehicle then separates from the rocket and manoeuvres towards its target. US missile defence systems are designed to target the fixed parabolic trajectory of traditional intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), which launch up and down like a cannonball.Ĭhina appears to have taken the technology one step further by first launching a rocket carrying the hypersonic glide vehicle in low orbit.
Hypersonic missiles, like traditional ballistic missiles, can fly more than five times the speed of sound (Mach 5).īut they are more manoeuvrable than their ballistic counterparts and can trace a low trajectory in the atmosphere, making them harder to defend against. China has denied the reports, saying the launches were routine spacecraft tests.
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