
Hypersonic Missiles Are Unstoppable - Osiris30
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/19/magazine/hypersonic-missiles.html#click=https://t.co/J86ypFjOaS
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jandrewrogers
This is the reason that the next generation of close-range active intercept
technologies that have been undergoing testing for many years now in the US
are (1) hyperkinetic and (2) have a detection-to-engage latency measured in
tens of milliseconds. Even if you are moving at hypersonic velocities, closing
several kilometers is a lifetime compared to the reaction speed of defensive
systems with these properties. The US has been experimenting with and studying
this particular defense problem for 30 years.

An interesting aspect of US military R&D is that whenever they design a new
type of weapon system they concurrently start design of a defense against that
type of weapon system. It creates a bit of an internal arms race but also
keeps their defensive capability balanced with their offensive capability.

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yardstick
I don’t see the MAD principle changing in light of these new weapons. The
major players will still rely on it, but to ensure they can hold ip their end
of the “deal” I expect we’ll see a lot more submarine based IBCMs.
Compensating for any early knockout of ground missiles like minutemen etc.

~~~
drevil-v2
Exactly my thoughts.

To fully neuter MAD you would need to be 100% sure and then some that you got
everything that the enemy had. Even a single missile getting through would be
mean multiple warheads get deployed. That's too high a price to pay. And I am
fairly certain that the decision to launch would not be obeyed without
resistance.

~~~
m_mueller
I guess that would change when underwater drones can be mass produced to such
a degree that they could detect and hunt down all nuclear subs within strike
distance almost instantly. It's unclear to me whether that's even realistic
based on raw materials required.

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erikpukinskis
If anyone is interested in what could happen during an actual nuclear war, I’m
reading a novel on the subject called Arc Light by Eric L Harry.

It’s quite good so far. Weirdly terrifying, given that the action and writing
is so clinical. So far it’s just fairly plain events. No drama or tears. And
yet... terrifying and somehow moving.

~~~
pmoriarty
There's an old movie called _Threads_ [1] that is probably the most disturbing
depiction of nuclear war I've ever seen. Highly recommended.

There's also an interesting, realistic simulation of how a conflict betweeen
Russia and NATO might start.[2]

[1] -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threads](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threads)

[2] -
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M0D3A5dnAqg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M0D3A5dnAqg)

~~~
RantyDave
So I was thirteen, and living in England when that came out. They advertised
it on TV with the shot of the woman pissing herself in the middle of the high
street. I was really, quite concerned about nuclear war for really quite some
time.

~~~
NeedMoreTea
I was twenties. The era government sent everyone the "Protect and Survive"
leaflet and showed the public information films, Threads gave everyone
nightmares. It stuck with you, unforgettable, people were talking about it for
ages after.

The grimmest, bleakest TV ever made. Quite remarkable considering it obviously
had a budget of pennies. Yet I'd also highly recommend it.

"The Day After" is a schmaltzy Hollywood feel-good family movie in comparison.

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pmoriarty
_" The weapons could even suddenly pierce the steel decks of one of America's
11 multibillion-dollar aircraft carriers, instantly stopping flight
operations, a vulnerability that might eventually render the floating
behemoths obsolete."_

Aren't they already obsolete?

~~~
adrianN
Yes:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002)

~~~
thunderbird120
No. The Millennium Challenge is typically cited as an example of a badly
botched exercise rather than a real world defeat scenario.

It had:

Navy ships constrained to small areas to prevent disruption to commercial
craft which would never be the case in an actual war

Small boats firing simulated cruise missiles weighing significantly more than
the entire boats supposedly carrying them.

Motorcycle based messengers "simulated" by just using radios except no one
bothered to add any kind of message delay or any other kind of constraint a
motorcycle messenger might have compared to radio communication.

USN ships in the simulation teleporting into the center of a massive armada of
simulated small boats due to a modeling error

All ship defenses being turned off during the engagement resulting from said
error because everything was in the wrong place.

None of the USN ships even knowing that they were supposedly under attack
until the "battle" was over.

Ships being "re-floated" as a result of the above screw up

It's generally unwise to try to draw any conclusions at all, positive or
negative, based on its results. Also, there's a reason countries all over the
world continue to build aircraft carriers. It's because they're useful. A
carrier group essentially controls a moving sphere of territory with a radius
of around 500nmi. Being able to launch dedicated AWACS[1] allows for far
superior battlefield awareness compared to any other naval asset and air
launched anti-ship missiles allow for striking range far greater than any
other naval asset. Carrier groups are also a lot harder to find than you might
think. Nuclear powered carriers are fast, faster than almost any other ships,
and don't stay in one place. Keeping tabs on them is difficult, even if you
have satellites. In the open ocean they're very difficult to confront because
they will almost know more about the locations of opposing forces than the
opposing forces know about their location thanks to real time aerial recon.
The horizon is as far as radars can usually see and if you're in a plane that
horizon is much further away. Carriers are not going away any time soon. They
provide far too much utility which is not offered by any other kind of ship.

[1][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northrop_Grumman_E-2_Hawkeye](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northrop_Grumman_E-2_Hawkeye)

~~~
EastLondonCoder
You are probably right, but the battlegroups seems vulnerable to quiet subs
though:

[https://web.archive.org/web/20071116120858/http://www.knbc.c...](https://web.archive.org/web/20071116120858/http://www.knbc.com/news/10116514/detail.html)

~~~
chipsa
Quiet subs are essentially mobile minefields. If the battlegroup runs over it,
yeah, it's going to have a bad day. But it's unlikely to do so unless you have
some chokepoint to make the battlegroup run over it. And that's the thing with
the exercises where it's been useful: it's been in relatively small areas, so
they can just sit and wait for the carrier to come by.

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salawat
These aren't unstoppable. The key is early detection, and filling the approach
path with as much debris as possible. The high relative velocity does the
rest.

Hypersonic weapons are a double edged sword. On the one hand, they are
incredibly fast. On the other, going fast highly constrains your trajectory. A
predictable trajectory equals a defensible approach.

~~~
tim333
The difference with these hypersonic missiles over ballistic ones is they can
manoeuvre at high G. Early detection is of limited use if the thing swerves
away from where your debris is.

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fit2rule
Doesn't all of this mean that we're nearing the limits of kinetic-energy based
weapons and are on the cusp of a new age of laser weapons? I mean, sure -
these missiles are hard to hit, but I'm guessing that something moving at the
speed of light is going to trump it, easily ..

~~~
anotheryou
can laser counter kinetic energy? I thought they just trigger any explosive on
board

~~~
hutzlibu
Well, photons do have kinetic energy as well ... but very little, so yes, the
idea is to heat up the explosive enough.

~~~
anotheryou
I somehow thought they might be purely kinetic at that speed

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banku_brougham
I had understood that regular missiles (such as ICBMs) are pretty much
unstoppable too. There are some anti missile programs but publicly available
test results are poor, even with extremely favorable test conditions.

Why is this topic in the news right now?

~~~
jandrewrogers
ICBM intercept has been a solved problem for (at least) a quarter century in
the US, the core capability is quite reliable. The practical gaps show up in
two tangential areas: upgrading systems designed for anti-aircraft
applications to also intercept ballistic missiles and enabling kinetic
intercept on hypersonic rocket platforms.

The first case, which includes examples like the Patriot missile system, are
making missile systems do something they were never designed to do. You can
only modify them so far but it is cheaper to modify them than to design an
entirely new system, if you can make it work. In practice though, many of
these are being slated for replacement as it was a stopgap measure.

The second case is more interesting. Conventional missile motors designed for
ballistic intercept can consistently hit the target. But they are too slow to
close the distance to the target, allowing the inbound missile to get closer
than the military would like. Hyperkinetic interceptors can close the target
very quickly, but the materials performance envelope required does not play
well with precise terminal guidance systems due to ablation of the missile as
it transits the atmosphere. Basically, the necessary precision of control
could not be delivered over the entire flight time due to materials
degradation. (This is related to why incoming hypersonic missiles have limited
maneuverability -- maneuvering destroys the structural integrity of the
materials it is made from.) The US appears to have solved the problem of
hyperkinetic intercept of hypersonic targets in recent years.

I think what confuses people is that the tests of new systems are _only_
designed to test the things that currently don't work well. They know they can
reliably discriminate decoys and do kinetic intercept, that is proven
capability and doesn't need to be tested. What they need to test is things
like precision terminal guidance when attached to one of these newfangled
hyperkinetic rocket motors that ablates itself mid-flight, which turned out to
be a much more difficult challenge.

~~~
banku_brougham
>ICBM intercept has been a solved problem for (at least) a quarter century in
the US, the core capability is quite reliable.

This is a bold claim (one might say absurdly bold) that demands extensive
support if you don’t want readers to dismiss your commentary completely. Let’s
start from here: the problem solution can only be inferred from tests, because
_no ICBMs have ever been launched at a target_.

Those tests must have provided overwhelming confidence for the real world
scenario. So how are those test result?

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Causality1
As far as I know ICBMs are still unstoppable once out of the boost phase and
are moving at mach 20 by the time they leave the territory of the launching
nation. The good news is that hypersonic missiles don't put us in any more
danger than we're already in. The bad news is that despite being worthless
we'll probably still spend a couple trillion dollars on them.

~~~
garmaine
Actually no, there is lots of tech to stop ICBMs, in launch, orbital and re-
entry phase.

Hypersonic flight basically avoids all the weaknesses exploited by this older
anti-ICBM tech.

~~~
gruez
>Actually no, there is lots of tech to stop ICBMs, in launch, orbital and re-
entry phase.

what's the success rate on those? afaik they're irrelevant, at least to
russia/us because you can evade them by simply launching enough missiles (you
only need a few missiles to take out all major population centers).

~~~
chipsa
The problem is launching enough missiles. Interceptors are expensive to
develop, but cheap to make more of, and have relatively low cost of command
and control (it doesn't matter if one gets launched by accident, right now).
ICBMs are expensive to develop, expensive to make more of, and are expensive
for command and control (because if one gets launched by accident, the world
ends). So it's always going to be cheaper to make more interceptors than
ICBMs.

But beyond that, interceptors make the entire targeting situation more
complex. If you've got 1000 warheads, and no defenses, you can hit 1000
targets (not actually true, because you have a certain amount of failure rate,
but anyway). If you're facing 10 interceptors, and some of your targets must
be destroyed, then you have to launch enough warheads at each target that must
be destroyed to still go through even if all of them are intercepted. So now
you have ~90 must destroy targets you can actually hit with your 1000
warheads, even though you're only facing 10 interceptors. Those 10
interceptors have effectively negated 900 enemy warheads.

~~~
gruez
>So it's always going to be cheaper to make more interceptors than ICBMs.

What's the source for this? Because I've also heard the opposite. Also, given
that interceptors have to travel faster and more accurate than warhead ICBMs,
you'd think they're more expensive to develop and have a higher unit cost.

>Those 10 interceptors have effectively negated 900 enemy warheads.

* The calculation you presented only really makes sense for very high intercept success rates. If the intercept rate is (conservatively) 80%, if the enemy sends 10 missiles, and you use all 10 interceptors on each, there's still a 91% chance of at least one missile coming through (1-0.8^10). The odds get better if you have double the number of interceptors (34%), but it's still unacceptably high. You'd need overwhelmingly more interceptors.

* I doubt there's 90 "must destroy" targets. If you spend all your interceptors protecting one target, even if that survives, your country is still utterly devastated that there's 0 hope of a counter attack. Does it really matter that washington, DC survived but the rest of the us is reduced to rubble?

~~~
chipsa
The price for aircraft and spacecraft is almost entirely related to how much
it weighs. A missile that's 10x heavier is going to be 10x more expensive,
generally speaking, for a given nation. GBI is approximately 21 tons. A
Minuteman III is approximately 33 tons.

But you exclaim "The warheads are different!" It's hard to find the price, but
an EKV is somewhere on the order of $20 million each. The W87-1 will cost
somewhere between $8.6 and $14 billion for the entire program... not including
the fissile pits that are being reused. This is still more per warhead than
the EKV.

Yes, the interceptors have to be more accurate, but they also use entirely
different guidance systems. They don't actually have to travel faster, because
they just have to be in the same place at the same time as the target, and the
target can't really do anything to stop them.

The problem with your statistical approach is that there's a chance that the
target survives. And these are defined as must destroy targets. Places like
launch control centers for ICBMs, Cheyenne Mountain for command control.
Places you need to destroy to avoid them turning your own cities into self-lit
parking lots. Because you aren't going to start a nuclear war to have a
Pyrrhic victory.

Because the point of the US nuclear deterrent is to turn you into a self-lit
parking lot, on demand, in thirty minutes or less. And by making sure we can
do that, we keep other countries from thinking that they can start using WMDs.
Does it really matter that you destroyed Washington DC if you no longer have a
country? The biggest advantage of interceptors is not that you saved a city
that was targeted. Rather, you made the opposition make a choice on what would
actually get targeted. A city blown up by 3 nukes isn't much different from
one blown up by 1, but it's significantly different from a city blown up by
zero.

Example: back when the UK used V-bombers, they had 200 warheads targeted
across the USSR. As Soviet defenses got better, the number of targets being
hit was reduced. By the end of the Polaris program, all of the UK's warheads
were targeted on Moscow.

And I'd be surprised if there's only 90 must destroy targets in the US. Not
that Russia has 1000 warheads, but the US also doesn't have 10 interceptors,
because it was example numbers to make the math easy.

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3327
they will be stoppable, just like anything else.

radar arrays and space or ground lasers, etc. but essentially lasers.

but a new age of war will be upon us. When all of the weapons get used up and
the factories making them destroyed, and the radar installations and
satellites fried with EMP's, then again it will be up to 17 year-olds fighting
the fat man's war.

~~~
tuxxy
This is pretty ignorant of the capabilities of the nuclear triad.

At some point, any missile defense system is going to have to estimate damage
and pick some targets, but leave others. When there are multiple
vehicles,.you're pretty much fucked.

The idea that a missile defense system can prevent full-on nuclear warfare is
false. It's meant for one-off strike deterence, not for full on war.

If you don't stop a nuclear launch vehicle when it's on the ground or very
shortly after launch, your chances at stopping it are slim.

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bufferoverflow
ICBMs have been around since 1960's. They travel at Mach 20+. Nothing really
changed. MAD doctrine is still in play.

~~~
kstenerud
They can only reach that speed during boost (3-5 mins) and reentry (2 mins).
The remainder of the time (25 mins or so of suborbital flight) is very
detectable.

The issue with hypersonic weapons is that they can fly low enough to be
undetectable, and fast enough to reach their target before anyone knows what
happened. That's enough to make any nation feel insecure and vulnerable and
trigger happy.

~~~
bufferoverflow
We've had submarine nukes for a while too, they aren't really detectable until
it's too late. They can also be blown up off shore to cause a megatsunami and
wipe out the whole city.

~~~
AQuick
Just the idea that there are people who spend months underwater just in case
they need to help facilitate the end of the world gives me chills.

~~~
zaroth
Or you could think of it as people spending months underwater so no one will
be stupid enough to try to end the world.

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ncmncm
There's a special place in Hell for a guy who favors starting a new arms race
over stopping the worldwide climate catastrophe.

~~~
Netcob
Climate catastrophe, overpopulation, resources running out (especially water),
species being wiped out to the point where it will actually affect us, the end
of antibiotics, large areas becoming uninhabitable...

I wonder what happens to mutually assured destruction when the world is
guaranteed a number of huge wars over resources?

~~~
7373737373
Wouldn't "water running out" be the result of financial resource allocation
failure (towards energy production and desalination) caused by politics,
rather than the lack of resources per se?

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ganzuul
A hafnium isomer doped fiber optic that can refract gamma rays could possibly
meet this challenge.

~~~
ganzuul
Ah, getting downvoted by the ignorant and mute. Another beautiful day at
Y-combinator.

~~~
chipsa
You're getting downvoted because you don't explain enough in your one line
post.

~~~
ganzuul
That is a poor reason to downvote.

There exists a metastable isotope of hafnium which is able to undergo
stimulated emission, producing gamma ray laser light. There was some
controversy of wheter x-rays could also stimulate this emission but that isn't
a prerequisite for light amplificafion in this case.

Gamma ray optics is difficult because of the short wavelengths but refraction
has been demonstrated at very oblique angles. Fiber optics also has very
oblique angles for its total internal reflection. Doped fiber lasers is a
well-know field with lots of industrial application.

Producing metastable hafnium can be done with e.g. a cyclotron. It is not very
efficient, but for an extreme existential threat it is probably not
insurmountable. Hafnium produced in this way could be used a nuclear bomb
which isn't actually regulated by treaties, so there is even more controversy
to navigate than just that from academia. There is no neutron flux between
nuclei. All the energy is stored in the metastable structure inside the
nuclei.

Unlike regular fiber lasers there would be no pumping once the fiber is
installed. Instead it would come pre-charged and be single-use. Its shelf-life
isn't indefinite.

