Anti-ship cruise missile wins award

China’s latest anti-ship cruise missile received one of country’s top science and technology awards on Monday.

The missile, developed by the China Aerospace Science and Industry Corp’s Third Academy in Beijing, the biggest maker of anti-ship missiles in China, won the topgrade prize in the National Science and Technology Advancement Awards, according to a news release from the academy.

The release did not specify the missile’s designation.

It is the third time that the academy has won this award — in 1988 its YJ-8 anti-ship cruise missile was the first recipient, and was followed by the CJ-10 ground-based, landattack cruise missile in 2008, the release said.

It said the new weapon, which can be launched from a ship or a submarine, is a milestone in the academy’s development and will exponentially improve the Chinese Navy’s anti-ship capability.

As much as 70 percent of the technology used on the missile was applied to such a weapon for the first time in China, standing in stark contrast to the common practice of a maximum of 30 percent to keep technical risks at a controllable level.

Designers at the academy, headed by Zhu Kun, spent more than 14 years on the missile’s research and development, the release said, adding that it is “smaller in size but stronger in capability” compared with its foreign counterparts.

The Third Academy’s antiship cruise missiles include the YJ-12, YJ-62 and YJ-83, which are widely deployed by the People’s Liberation Army Navy and Air Force.

According to a research report released by the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission, based in Washington, in October 2015, the academy has also developed a cutting-edge supersonic anti-ship missile, which the report refers to as YJ-18, which can strike its target at a speed of up to Mach 3, or 1 kilometer per second.

The report said the YJ-18 has already been deployed on Type-052D guided-missile destroyers and Type-093G nuclear-powered attack submarines and will be installed on the Type-055 guided-missile destroyer that is under construction