HYPERSONIC MISSILES AND RISING TENSIONS FUEL THE PROSPECT OF A NEW COLD WAR
▶ The US, China and Russia are among several countries that are modernising their nuclear arsenals
At 3am on 3 June, 1980, the world came within minutes of nuclear war.
US national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski was woken by the news that more than 2,000 Soviet nuclear missiles had been launched at the US. Estimates said it would kill 70 per cent of the American population.
Washington had six minutes to decide whether to launch a retaliatory nuclear strike.
Thankfully for humankind, there were no missiles and no mistaken retaliation.
Computer software at Norad, the North American Aerospace Defence Command, had malfunctioned and sent a false missile-launch warning.
A recently installed early warning radar system, combined with new US satellites, confirmed that no Russian missiles were inbound.
This was only one of several close calls during the Cold War, the terrifying superpower standoff that is back in the news after US President Joe Biden’s November summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping, during which the American leader said he hoped that “both sides could avoid veering into conflict”.
The next day, Russia revived the Cold War tactic – never used in anger – of shooting down satellites by carrying out a test, drawing international condemnation.
As China-US competition heats up, both sides – along with France, Russia, North Korea and India – are modernising their nuclear arsenals.
The US accuses China of building up its nuclear stocks, aiming for 1,000 warheads by 2030, something China denies.
The US is also upgrading some weapons in its arsenal of 3,750 nuclear warheads, working on new fuses that maximise explosive power.
On November 2, France’s Maj Gen Frederic Parisot said that Paris is working on a nuclear-armed cruise missile that could fly at Mach 6 – six times the speed of sound.
Anything above Mach 5 is classed as hypersonic.
That follows India’s work on the potentially nuclear capable BrahMos II hypersonic missile and China’s reported test of a nuclear missile on October 16.
This renewed nuclear weapon development follows the collapse of the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty in 2019, after the US and Nato accused Russia of several breaches.
The treaty, which mainly focused on controlling the range of nuclear weapons, was credited with bringing the first big reduction in nuclear arms, paving the way for more treaties including New Start, which limits US and Russian active warheads at 1,550 each from a combined Cold War peak of 70,000. Moscow and Washington are already working on a successor agreement to New Start, which is due to expire in 2026. But more tension lies ahead – on November 23, Russian Defence Minister Sergey Shoigu said that US aircraft had been practising a nuclear attack on Russia.
And the race to build better nuclear weapons continues.
In December 2019, Russia announced that its Avangard nuclear missile was operational, capable of flying on an unpredictable path after reentering the Earth’s atmosphere and detaching from a rocket at Mach 20.
The weapon “would be counted under New Start automatically”, said Michael Klare, senior visiting fellow and board secretary at the Arms Control Association.
“China and Russia appear to be seeking a relatively small number of long-range, nuclear-armed hypersonic weapons that can be used to evade US anti-missile defences,” Mr Klare told The National.
Unlike traditional ballistic missiles that travel on a fixed arc through the upper atmosphere, hypersonic weapons travel closer to the contours of the Earth, below the point where early warning radars can easily detect them.
That cuts the time available to identify and respond to a launch, potentially putting not only world powers, but also other nuclear-armed countries such as Pakistan and India, on higher alert.
Satellites could detect the launch of a hypersonic missile – but Russia, China and the US are believed to be reworking Cold War technology to shoot down satellites.
But not everyone is worried that technology is making things more dangerous.
“I think that there is a lot of hyperbole about new nuclear delivery vehicles that is complicating the narrative on Russian and Chinese military modernisation,” said Aaron Bateman, a former US Air Force intelligence officer who has worked with Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. “In short, I don’t see hypersonic weapons as a fundamental game-changer.”
“They offer certain operational advantages that could also make a conflict situation more dangerous. But I don’t think there is enough information in the public sphere at present to come to firm conclusions about China’s alleged test of a Fobs-like system,” he said, referring to the a Fractional Orbital Bombardment System, a Soviet-era concept the US claims China has worked on.
A Fobs nuclear weapon was designed by the Soviets to go into orbit, “brake” and then re-enter the atmosphere, attacking the US from the Southern Hemisphere, where radar coverage was thin.
“US missile defence is already ineffective for a large-scale nuclear attack, so Fobs is largely unnecessary,” Mr Bateman said.
“Are we in a more dangerous strategic arms situation now than before? In short, I would say that the fundamental difference today is the fact that we have two capable military competitors and our understanding of their intentions is as limited as our understanding of Soviet intent during the Cold War,” he said, referring to China and Russia.
That limited understanding of intentions not only applies to nuclear weapons but also to conventional military operations, including recent naval exercises in contested parts of the Pacific by Russia, China, the US, Japan, Australia and the UK.
Mr Klare worries that in the current atmosphere of high tensions in the Pacific, the risk of conflict could be elevated by new hypersonic weapons that could be fitted with either conventional or nuclear warheads, raising the risk that a clash could escalate owing to fears of a nuclear launch, something called “warhead ambiguity”.
“Yes, we have to worry about a hypersonic arms race, as the major powers – the US, China, and Russia – are all racing to add new hypersonic weapons to their arsenals and justifying advances by the others to secure funds for such endeavours,” Mr Klare said.
“Many arms control advocates have called for talks between the US and China, but so far this has not occurred.”
The Natural Resources Defence Council has calculated that a US attack on China with 789 nuclear warheads would kill 320 million people in the initial blasts, or about a quarter of China’s population, in 368 population centres.
A similar attack on the US with 124 warheads would kill about one quarter of America’s 330 million citizens.
Our understanding of their intentions is as limited as our understanding of Soviet intent in the Cold War AARON BATEMAN
Former US intelligence officer