
Hypersonic Missiles Are Unstoppable. And They’re Starting a New Arms Race - pseudolus
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/19/magazine/hypersonic-missiles.html
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kstenerud
The mechanization of war caused a lot of wars simply because of the speed of
attack it enabled.

As armies struggled to catch up to the new technologies, the mere act of
mobilizing your armed forces was enough to start an armed conflict, because
once your mechanized troops were massed somewhere, they could steamroll
through a neighboring country before there was any chance to react. And so,
countries began taking the mobilization itself as an act or war. This had
catastrophic effect in 1914 when Germany demanded that Russia demobilize its
troops (sent in support of Serbia) within 12 hours. This was a very short
timeframe for the era, leaving no time for negotiation or airing of
grievances, but it was a necessary one due to the newfound speed potential of
mobilized armies. The result was World War 1.

ICBMs rekindled this problem, which is why people were so shit scared during
the 60s, 70s, and 80s. Anything that allows you to neutralize your enemy's
defenses before they have a chance to react increases the chance of their
preemptively starting a conflict.

Unfortunately, the genie is already out of the bottle on hypersonics, and
we'll just have to hope that we can reach a stable equilibrium before certain
countries feel mortally threatened enough to start a huge war.

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bayareanative
Killer AI robots, self-replicating automata, denuclearization (as it makes
conventional wars palatable), renuclearization, rising nationalism and
climate-attenuated resources scarcities are moving humans to the brink of
genocide, civil/global/total wars and/or potential extinction.

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tanzbaer
Yawn. Always the same. The world hasn't been as peaceful as it is now in a
long time.

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ei8htyfi5e
As I understand, counter-hypersonics are the only defense to this, something
not mentioned in the article. These are being developed already, though I'm
unsure of success rates and what the odds really are of stopping a missile
like this. [https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/mad-scientists-
darpa-...](https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/mad-scientists-darpa-have-
plan-kill-russia-or-chinas-hypersonic-missiles-44427)

~~~
salawat
The key is really about detection, and having something capable of filling the
space in front of the missile with stationary debris. The faster something
goes, the more predictable the trajectory (due to the trumpet bell shape
created by high velocity and constrained ability to accelerate), and the more
vulnerable to damage from collisions with high relative velocity debris. There
is a maximum speed that the missile can afford to shed if it uses either
ramjet, scramjet, or ballistic via rocket based boosting + gliding to target,
which further constrains the munitions evasive potential.

Definitely isn't something I'd want to defend against unprepared, but it isn't
an unmitigable threat.

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toomuchtodo
Can you speculate on the composition of debris or other material one would
select to mitigate hypersonic threats? It seems that energy weapons would be
ineffective due to weather attenuation and limited dwell time on the target at
hypersonic speeds.

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salawat
Anything really. At the speeds we're talking about, you can basically look at
the interception as being a very low altitude anti satellite strike since you
have the same dynamics in play.

Any hypersonic projectile has to keep itself from cooking (heat shielding),
and keep itself controllable. Compromising any of those attributes with
current materials can be done with a bloody foam chunk (see the Columbia
disaster). Just about anything that isn't gaseous, and happy with behaving as
fluid is problematic at hypersonic speeds. Though I'd probably start at ball
bearings or other types of flak just because of ease of manufacture.

If there's anyone bored enough, a frozen chicken impact simulation would be
quite amusing to see.

The problem set you have to solve for successful payload delivery is basically
the same as a reentering spacecraft. No one has really looked at doing
something like this before, because the cost of slapping something like this
together just to blow it up in the end as a tactical weapon has always been
more on the prohibitive side compared to just finding better ways to get
conventional weapons in place.

The only great innovation here is the innovation with which missile
fabricators can dupe someone into buying yet more expensive missiles, and
maybe some supply chain/manufacturing wins for some of the more exotic
materials.

What I'm curious about is how good the navigation capabilities are, and the
structural limits of the frame. Drastic course correction at Mach 5÷ has got
to be absolute hell on the frame.

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tomatotomato37
Is the big advantage of these is that they accelerate to these speeds quickly?
Classic ICBM's are still faster on re-entry so these speeds aren't new but are
slow and obvious on launch; if these things don't take a half-hour
accelerating than they could prove revolutionary; however what I'm reading so
far these still need to be accelerated by a conventional ICBM or aircraft,
which means they are vulnerable to anything that can detect their launch
vehicle meandering to launch speeds

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credit_guy
> if these things don't take a half-hour accelerating

Ahem, a Trident II missile accelerates to 6km/s in less than 2 min, that’s
more than 50g, see [1]

“When the third-stage motor fires, within two minutes of launch, the missile
is traveling faster than 20,000 ft/s (6,000 m/s), or 13,600 mph (21,600 km/h)
Mach 18.”

[1]
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trident_(missile)#Trident_II...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trident_\(missile\)#Trident_II_\(D5\)_UGM-133A)

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aussiegreenie
Hypersonic missiles are unstoppable until that are stoppable.

