nytimes.com Hypersonic Superweapons Are a Mirage, New Analysis Says William J. Broad 7-9 minutes
Two scientists find revolutionary claims about the evasion of detection and defenses to be “nonsense.” Military experts call hypersonic warheads the next big thing in intercontinental warfare. They see the emerging arms, which can deliver nuclear or conventional munitions, as zipping along at up to five miles a second while zigzagging through the atmosphere to outwit early-warning satellites and some interceptors. The superfast weapons, experts say, lend themselves to surprise attacks. President Trump has bragged about his “super-dupers,” even referring to the planned weapon as “hydrosonic,” a brand of electric toothbrush. Last year, his budget asked the Pentagon to spend $3.2 billion on hypersonic arms research, up $600 million from the previous year’s request. And as President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. takes command of the nation’s military, he will have to consider whether to sustain the defense work undertaken in the Trump years. Now, independent experts have studied the technical performance of the planned weapon and concluded that its advertised features are more illusory than real. Their analysis is to be published this week in Science & Global Security. In an interview, David Wright, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an author of the new analysis, called the superweapon a mirage. “There’re lots of claims and not many numbers,” he said. “If you put in the numbers, you find that the claims are nonsense.” Military officials called the paper insubstantial, saying it was based on outdated data. But they declined to disclose new findings. “Due to the classified nature of hypersonics technologies, we are not at liberty to publicly discuss current capabilities,” Jared Adams, chief spokesman for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa, said in an email. Richard L. Garwin, a physicist and longtime adviser to the federal government, called the paper “very good and important.” He added that he had provided his own similar criticisms of hypersonic warheads to defense officials. James M. Acton, a nuclear analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, called the paper “a serious, credible and important piece of work.” Dr. Wright is affiliated with M.I.T.’s Laboratory for Nuclear Security and Policy and did the analysis with Cameron L. Tracy, a materials scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a private group based in Cambridge, Mass., that often backs arms control. < - > https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/15/science/hypersonic-missile-weapons.html _______________________________________________ Infowarrior mailing list [email protected] https://attrition.org/mailman/listinfo/infowarrior
