He said China had made huge advances, including the “potential for global strikes . . . from space”. Last month, Frank Kendall, US air force secretary, hinted that Beijing was developing a new weapon. China is not bound by any arms-control deals and has been unwilling to engage the US in talks about its nuclear arsenal and policy. US military officials in recent months have warned about China’s growing nuclear capabilities, particularly after the release of satellite imagery that showed it was building more than 200 intercontinental missile silos. “Even more disturbing is the fact that American technology has contributed to the PLA’s hypersonic missile programme.” “The People’s Liberation Army now has an increasingly credible capability to undermine our missile defences and threaten the American homeland with both conventional and nuclear strikes,” said Gallagher. Michael Gallagher, a Republican member of the House armed services committee, said the test should “serve as a call to action”. Tensions between the US and China have risen as the Biden administration has taken a tough tack on Beijing, which has accused Washington of being overly hostile. Mounting concern about China’s nuclear capabilities comes as Beijing continues to build up its conventional military forces and engages in increasingly assertive military activity near Taiwan. “Hypersonic glide vehicles . . . fly at lower trajectories and can manoeuvre in flight, which makes them hard to track and destroy,” said Fravel, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.įravel added that it would be “destabilising” if China fully developed and deployed such a weapon, but he cautioned that a test did not necessarily mean that Beijing would deploy the capability. Taylor Fravel, an expert on Chinese nuclear weapons policy who was unaware of the test, said a hypersonic glide vehicle armed with a nuclear warhead could help China “negate” US missile defence systems which are designed to destroy incoming ballistic missiles. But they do not follow the fixed parabolic trajectory of a ballistic missile and are manoeuvrable, making them harder to track. They fly at five times the speed of sound, slower than a ballistic missile. The US, Russia and China are all developing hypersonic weapons, including glide vehicles that are launched into space on a rocket but orbit the earth under their own momentum. “We have no idea how they did this,” said a fourth person. The test has raised new questions about why the US often underestimated China’s military modernisation. But two said the test showed that China had made astounding progress on hypersonic weapons and was far more advanced than US officials realised. The missile missed its target by about two-dozen miles, according to three people briefed on the intelligence. China tested a nuclear-capable hypersonic missile in August that circled the globe before speeding towards its target, demonstrating an advanced space capability that caught US intelligence by surprise.įive people familiar with the test said the Chinese military launched a rocket that carried a hypersonic glide vehicle which flew through low-orbit space before cruising down towards its target.
0 kommentar(er)
