Surprising US Intelligence, China Tested a Hypersonic Missile (livemint.com) 146
"China tested a nuclear-capable hypersonic missile in August," reports Reuters, "showing a capability that caught U.S. intelligence by surprise, the Financial Times reported, citing five unnamed sources."
AFP explains what's uniquely threatening about hypersonic missiles: Ballistic missiles fly high into space in an arc to reach their target, while a hypersonic flies on a trajectory low in the atmosphere, potentially reaching a target more quickly. Crucially, a hypersonic missile is maneuverable (like the much slower, often subsonic cruise missile), making it harder to track and defend against. While countries like the United States have developed systems designed to defend against cruise and ballistic missiles, the ability to track and take down a hypersonic missile remains a question.
Business Insider highlights this assessment from the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), the US/Canada organization providing North America's aerospace warnings: In August, General Glen VanHerck, head of NORAD, said that China's advanced hypersonic capability would "provide significant challenges to my Norad capability to provide threat warning and attack assessment," the Financial Times said... Sources also told the paper that the Chinese weapon could theoretically fly over the South Pole, another cause for concern for the US military, whose missile systems focus on the northern polar route.
Bloomberg reports that the missile missed its target (by over 32 kilometers — about 20 miles), "and the test doesn't necessarily mean China will deploy such a weapon, the Financial Times said..."
They also point out that "Along with China, the United States, Russia and at least five other countries are working on hypersonic technology." (Reuters adds that "last month North Korea said it had test-fired a newly-developed hypersonic missile.")
AFP explains what's uniquely threatening about hypersonic missiles: Ballistic missiles fly high into space in an arc to reach their target, while a hypersonic flies on a trajectory low in the atmosphere, potentially reaching a target more quickly. Crucially, a hypersonic missile is maneuverable (like the much slower, often subsonic cruise missile), making it harder to track and defend against. While countries like the United States have developed systems designed to defend against cruise and ballistic missiles, the ability to track and take down a hypersonic missile remains a question.
Business Insider highlights this assessment from the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), the US/Canada organization providing North America's aerospace warnings: In August, General Glen VanHerck, head of NORAD, said that China's advanced hypersonic capability would "provide significant challenges to my Norad capability to provide threat warning and attack assessment," the Financial Times said... Sources also told the paper that the Chinese weapon could theoretically fly over the South Pole, another cause for concern for the US military, whose missile systems focus on the northern polar route.
Bloomberg reports that the missile missed its target (by over 32 kilometers — about 20 miles), "and the test doesn't necessarily mean China will deploy such a weapon, the Financial Times said..."
They also point out that "Along with China, the United States, Russia and at least five other countries are working on hypersonic technology." (Reuters adds that "last month North Korea said it had test-fired a newly-developed hypersonic missile.")
World Leaders Need A Common Threat (Score:5, Interesting)
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China is planning an asteroid diversion demonstration mission.
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Naah, it's actually really clever, China likes to show off an endless succession of one-off technology demonstraters and limited-production-run bits and pieces to scare the US, which then feels compelled to outspend it a hundred or a thousand to one each time. In the meantime it busily buys up the T-bills the US is selling to fund all this stuff, and focuses on the Belt and Road, which the US mostly ignores because it's not military and they can't see beyond war toys.
If I was plotting to become the world'
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Our species should be focusing on planetary defense from climate change that poses a threat.
Fixed that for you.
Re:World Leaders Need A Common Threat (Score:4, Informative)
Our species is focusing on planetary defense from climate change that does not pose a threat.
Fixed that for you.
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Bugs are dying, birds are dying, the world's biggest tropical forest is dying, everywhere the loss of wild space, and pollution is progressing, species are having a hard time. This is bad, add to that a climate change that is happening too fast to evolve, and with too little wild space to migrate, and the future is fucking bleak. Ecosystems can only resist for so long, when things start to really breakdown we won't have time to react.
The Great Dying (Score:2)
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We're quite capable of that. If somebody started the nuclear conflict, we'd make the Permian - Triassic look like a mild joke. We'd probably wipe the planet's surface down to the level of microbes and possibly some insects.
Now, whether anybody will do that or we just keep the slow grind going until we mostly die off is a matter we'll determine through the next few decades / centuries.
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Good lord, species âoedyingâ or âoehaving a hard timeâ is not the conclusions of even the IPCC reports.
Good god, it is happening as we speak.
You are a scientific illiterate.
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Covid.
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Primary threat for all species on this planet is competition from the same species for the same ecological niche.
Not marginal threats like asteroids.
Re: World Leaders Need A Common Threat (Score:2)
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Let me try to answer that in a way that you can understand.
There is a small chance in your personal life at any given time that you will get hit by debris from an aircraft, likely fatally.
How much effort do you spend mitigating that problem on daily basis, vs mitigating things that carry far lesser consequences but are far more likely, such as for example looking ahead of you as you walk so you don't stumble and fall?
That is the reason why we spend as much effort mitigating massive external threats that are
Re: World Leaders Need A Common Threat (Score:1, Insightful)
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And the reason why common people despise the likes of you is because they don't like people who openly advocate for fascism for them "because it would be in their best interests".
But it's funny that you would talk about "consensual reality" after advocating in favour of fearmongering people into agreeing with you.
Re: World Leaders Need A Common Threat (Score:2)
Citation needed.
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Isn't the term "US Intelligence" an oxymoron?
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You have to be kidding. The biggest threat to human beings on earth is unchecked carbon release to the atmosphere. Politicians cannot even make an effective agreement to significantly reduce carbon emissions. It doesn't even require unobtainable advanced tech like fusion energy. But C.R.E.A.M. basically dooms humanity on planet earth.
Our species shouldn't be focusing on a planetary defense system from asteroids. It should be focusing on either eliminating fossil fuel use in our lifetime, or being able
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They're already got at least three going on the boil currently, and it's not working. And all you have to do is cast your eye a little further down the replies here to find out why.
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Minimize destruction (Score:2)
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Same CIA that Can't keep its agents alive (Score:3)
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/1... [nytimes.com]
“Counterintelligence officials said in a top secret cable to all stations and bases around the world that too many of the people it recruits from other countries to spy for the U.S. are being lost.”
Re:Same CIA that Can't keep its agents alive (Score:5, Insightful)
The CIA is a shitshow right now.
They can't even keep diplomats safe. How is it that they haven't figured out the "Havana Syndrome" yet?
Bin Laden won. The US has been so focused on the trivial threats from countries where most of the population are living lives little changed from a couple of hundred years ago, while ignoring the real threats from Russia and China.
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Probably doesn't help that many Americans are holding up what are blatantly Russian agents, like Snowden, as legends and heroes.
The US is destroying itself by celebrating the collapse of it's own intelligence apparatus. It's not a coincidence that someone who supposedly cares about freedom and privacy ended up in the most anti-freedom, anti-privacy major world economy - Russia - it's because it was bullshit, and the real goal was nothing more than to utterly cripple the NSA and GCHQ which the public obliged
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Bin Laden didn't really "win" as the end goal of the wars America has fought over the last century or more has been to funnel lots and lots of money from the pockets of America taxpayers into the pockets of the wealthy, and that went off without a hitch.
China is never going to attack America, because what could they possibly gain from doing so?
America will however need some new enemy, because the current crop of
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Nobody is getting rich looking for war in the US.
Do you think nobody remembers Dick Cheney and Erik Prince?
Smedley Butler explained how it all works in 1935 and those two used it as a user guide. Among plenty of others.
Missed by 20 Miles? (Score:5, Funny)
This is terrifying. I wasn't worried when I thought they could hit their targets, but I'm 20 miles outside of the closest major city. This clearly puts me dead center. My Sunday is ruined.
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It is accurate to under a mile (which is more than enough if you are nuking an aircraft carrier with 300Kt warhead) in that mode of operation and it is capable to bypass all forms of missile defence used by USA.
If we extrapolate from under 1 mile at 1000Km to an around the globe flight (36000km) we get ~ 20 miles. About right.
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If you shoot nukes at the US, it doesn't matter if you hit the carrier or not, your country is now a sheet of glass.
And if your MAD capability holds up, so is the whole planet.
There is absolutely no utility at all in tactical nukes for use against aircraft carriers.
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Consider the scenario in a bit more detail. We have some kind of hostilities, perhaps an invasion of Taiwan. A carrier group is in the area running missions. A tactical warhead is used with hypersonic missile to take out the carrier.
What is the response? What are the debates going to be leading up to the response?
It would be possible to engage in a nuclear exchange with the mainland. But you would have to consider who would be left standing at the end, and with what available. The real beneficiaries o
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You don't understand.
If the military is hit with a nuclear weapon, they are the ones who immediately respond with a nearby submarine-launched counter-strike.
The idea that there is some sort of debate, of that the military seeks the permission of the President, this is blah-blah to make people feel more comfortable.
Remember during President Trump's term, when various members of Congress talked to the Joint Chiefs to make sure the country was safe in the event the outgoing President wanted to nuke something o
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Yes, I understand this. But are you arguing that the military, if a carrier group is nuked, will unilaterally take the decision to go for an all out nuclear exchange? That is so irrational a response that it seems implauslble.
Are they not far more likely, for the same reasons, to restrict their reply to local measures?
And is it not still true that Chinese planners, assessing the situation and all the uncertainties, are most likely to decide that time is on their side, so waiting it out has a better risk/r
Pilfered tech (Score:1)
Re:Pilfered tech (Score:4, Insightful)
This is why they were surprised. They always assume that China has to steal everything and so can't possibly be ahead.
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They always assume that China has to steal everything
To be fair, it's apparently an easy mistake to make, since China itself often seems to be assuming the same thing.
Re: Pilfered tech (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm not sure where the alleged surprise comes from, we've been talking about the potential threat of Chinese hypersonic weapons for a while, right here on Slashdot.
Someone was surprised they didn't know the exact date in advance?
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Indeed, Russia has them, India has them, and we know the Chinese were working on them.
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The surprise is that they have been working on it.
*sigh*
Well if it is such a surprise, then why has slashdot been talking about it from a decade? Fuck an A.
The supposed surprise is related to this single test. The did a test, and there are claims the US didn't know they were doing a test.
The test was an unmitigated failure.
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There's only one nation on the planet right now with this capability. Russia. Everyone else is still in early stages of development. And even Russian variant is only entering service.
As a result, there's simply no one to steal this technology from. And Chinese have been conducting a lot of hypersonic missile tests in last few years. Therefore, technology is likely at least in large part domestically developed.
Journalistic "Intelligence" (Score:5, Insightful)
They don't tell you what they know, or what they don't know. They do leak to reporters whatever they want you to report.
Just report on what you actually learned, don't report on what you think the intelligence community knew; you don't know.
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If they had a real source, and had been given real information, that source would be on their way to prison.
If they had a fake source, they'd post a story like this, and nobody would get in trouble.
If they had a real source who was feeding them propaganda, they'd post a story like this, and nobody would get in trouble.
If they had a fake source that was really propaganda from an adversary, say China, they'd post a story like this, and nobody would get in trouble.
We have no way to know where they got the info
US Intel services... (Score:1)
...for the last several years seemed to spend more time, energy, and effort undermining a president they found distasteful, and implicitly condoning 'leaks' and manipulating the (admittedly cooperative) media toward political ends, than say, doing their fucking jobs particularly well.
You know, in direct contravention of their ostensibly non-political stance and role.
This isn't surprising. Remember the astonishingly successful intelligence operation surrounding Saddam Hussein's nuclear capabilities?
Or their
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Hey moron, update on the story the next day, it turns out isn't the supposed test that supposedly surprised US intelligence. There was a subtlety missed in the reporting.
It was the story posted by the Financial Times that surprised them! lololol
So maybe.. (Score:2, Troll)
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Because China will not accept anything less than total surrender. Just like US accepted nothing less than total surrender from Soviet Union.
And believe me, that is not the path you want to embark on. As awful as US was to Russia after Soviet Union collapsed, PRC will be far worse to US should it surrender. Their ideology is simply far more cruel, far more enslaving and far more genocidal at its core and it will require them to act it out.
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As awful as US was to Russia after Soviet Union collapsed,
The first thing the US did was to give Russia $1billion USD.
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I don't want to give a long lecture on how the whole thing unfolded, but if that is the level of your understanding, I will simply point out that Hitler had a Jewish girl as a personal friend and a pen pal, and was on record being extremely annoyed when his staff started blocking her from answering his letters in late 1930s and early 1940s and he realised it.
So I would recommend looking in a bit more detail to realise that there was more to Hitler and Jews than his personal friendship with one girl from tha
Re: So maybe.. (Score:2)
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It's ok, the person I replied to did. Next time, instead of complaining, consider actually trying to comprehend. Maybe even looking at the rest of the discussion if it still eludes you.
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It's ok, the person I replied to did. Next time, instead of complaining, consider actually trying to comprehend. Maybe even looking at the rest of the discussion if it still eludes you.
Let's take your point to the next logical conclusion:
Godwin's Law
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Russians were expecting too much, but America had no obligation to do anything to help Russia. The $1 billion may have been stolen by corrupt politicians, but that's just more indication that the Soviet system needed to go.
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Notice that you just agreed with the point I made above.
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You said that the US was awful to Russia after the Soviet Union surrendered. That is patently false.
1) The Soviet Union didn't surrender.
2) The US wasn't awful to Russia, they helped them out.
3) Russia was awful to Hungary, Ukraine, and Germany for decades. Being part of the Soviet Union was only good if you were part of the "in crowd," like Cuba was.
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Like I said, I have no interest in writing up a long piece of US-Russia relations in 1990s, and how it unfolded. There are several good books written on the subject, including one from the experts sent by the US to help Russia transition to market economy.
I'm merely pointing out above that even in not knowing that, your statement above demonstrates a fundamental agreement with my point in noting both that "winner has no obligation to help the loser" and "loser's system needed to go".
Simply project those two
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Hitler had a Jewish girl as a personal friend and a pen pal, and was on record being extremely annoyed when his staff started blocking her from answering his letters in late 1930s and early 1940s and he realised it.
It wasn't his staff doing it, it was Office'45 that was sending her mail to the spam folder. Man, was he pissed when he found out. Got some dodgy Russians in on the cheap to fix it but there was some sort of misunderstanding and they turned up with more force than anticipated.
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Your attempts at ridicule would be valid if I wasn't talking about a well documented historical fact. Google it.
Re: So maybe.. (Score:2)
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Re: So maybe.. (Score:2)
https://apnews.com/article/cor... [apnews.com]
What did happen however, was Uyghur militants trained in Syria with US weapons so they could fight as separatists in China. The US even lied about Syria using chemical weapons against civilians. There was CI
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This is an example of one of the more advanced tactics of Western media: Tell a big lie, but equivocate. Keep your credibility by quietly publishing a retraction. People remember the lie and eventually it dilutes into the sea of lies and you're left with a looming impression of a threat in the East. Then when they decide to go to war, or decide it's time to spend more of our tax dollars on the military, we gladly ag
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Is that performance art, or are you really so far out in space you can see Pluto from your house? US has more prisoners than China despite having less than a third of the population. It's not China that has a
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I'm not understanding how your complaints about the US being the dominant superpower and guarantor of maritime trade worldwide for everyone, including PRC is relevant to the topic.
Please elaborate.
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And it's impossible to make a communist understand that for every person US killed during that period, Chinese killed between ten and hundred. China troll that started this thread is on the record doing thing like claiming that there's no ongoing genocide Xinjiang and bitch about US and Vietnam war.
In case you missed it, Vietnamese had to fight a war against Chinese who tried to invade them after US withdrew. And if you ask Vietnamese about their relationship with US and China, they'll tell you that they ha
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I do enjoy the left wing pro-PRC genocide denial. It's always so nakedly ideological. To the point where ideological nutjobs doing the denial can't even admit to Sino-Vietnamese history or most recent war, or the fact that Vietnamese themselves openly state today that their war with US was merely a historic blip, while their definitional conflict is with China.
I'm not going to even bother with denials of cultural revolution, great leap forward, or mongol, tibetan and uighur genocides to name some of the rec
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The funniest part in this entire thing desperate shit flinging that is so typical for far left apologists, you actually think I'm American and attack me on that basis.
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Being anchored in reality, rather than the most genocidal ideology humans every adopted.
I'd ask what made you adopt this ideology, but honestly, I don't really care. Genocidal sociopaths don't really change just because you psychoanalyze them.
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So maybe we should find a peaceful resolution to our economic disagreements with China instead of trying to bully them into submission?
It's not an economic disagreement with China. China has declared that they want Taiwan to submit to their will, by force if necessary. Taiwan has asked other countries for help. The question is whether other countries will help keep Taiwan free from dictatorship, or Taiwan will go the way of Hong Kong.
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Taiwan has as much right to unilaterally secede from China as California or Texas have from the US.
Texas has the right to secede from the US. California does, too.
Forcing them to remain is creating an illegitimate power structure.
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Texas has the right to secede from the US. California does, too.
At least a Confederate position that is consistent.
Incidentally, I support the North in preventing the South from seceding as a slave-holding country. Ending slavery was the right thing, and the only reason the south wanted to secede.
Whereas Taiwan is very clearly an independent country, and the CCP has very clearly treated Hong Kong badly. That said, the CCP has also treated their own people badly, so at least they are consistent in that.
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Nobody thinks Taiwan is an independent country. Not the US, not its lapdogs in Australia and the UK, and not even Taiwan.
If Taiwan thought they could declare independence without China attacking them, they would have done it long ago. Everyone knows that Taiwan is a sovereign country.
ROK still claims to be the real government of China
ROK is the Republic of Korea and has nothing to do with this.
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CIA rent-a-mobs have very clearly treated Hong Kong badly.
Actually I'm really intrigued by your statement here, what CIA rent-a-mobs are you talking about? The CIA isn't competent enough to covertly destabilize Hong Kong.
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Wut. They've been a thing since at least 1953. [wikipedia.org] The US funded the proto-Al Qaeda not to repel the Russians from Afghanistan, but to lure them in. Destabilization repeated in Ukraine, Venezuela, Syria, Libya...
I see, you're making shit up. You have no evidence of CIA rent-a-mobs in China, so you just pretend.
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What am I looking at here? Where did this money go?
Lets not get ahead of ourselves here (Score:5, Interesting)
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Also, the US has submarines that can launch nuclear missiles.
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Close Only Counts (Score:2)
Close only counts in thermonuclear war.
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Eh, I suspect being 20 miles off target still matters in thermonuclear war. Just not from a global perspective.
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Tactical nukes are battlefield. I seriously doubt hypersonic missiles are built for battlefield. At least not right now. And even if, more like for special targets like aircraft carriers or other big targets. I think they are more likely to be used for deep penetration into cities and industrial areas, like what ballistic missiles are being used for now.
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even for an air craft carrier that moves and can hide under clouds when the satellites pass over.
No.
1) If we're talking ICHM with a "standard" 3 megaton yield, it will still fry the electronics of an aircraft carrier as well as the personnel on the deck, if not deform/crack the hull, and knock it underwater from the shock tsunami. I'd be more concerned about how the nuke that misses would still make the planet unlivable.
2) Aircraft carriers can't hide under clouds anymore. Infrared sensors, plus being able to detect the radio communications epicenter. I keep trying to explain to the last victoriou
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"No one would be stupid enough to launch a nuke at seal vessel"
Uh?
I'd really like you to explain this one.
1) China declares War on the US
2) China Nukes Carrier fleets heading to China, in International Waters
What prevents that? Nothing. And it is perfectly legal.What am I missing?
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If you hit the suburbs instead of the downtown with a 5MT missile (what China has on their ICBMs), it will be close enough. 3rd degree burns for 40+km radius.
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You're not getting it. Thermonuclear weapons is a (war) "game" of "Russian roulette". If used, everyone loses. But then the question becomes "Who loses more?" If China standardizes on hypersonic missiles that can't be "effectively" intercepted, but can't be accurate, I'd fully accept their choice.
Yet more 20th century weapons (Score:2)
Nuclear weapons remain a real threat, but I think mostly from accidental use (or maybe rogue states), I can't imagine any major nation intentionally starting a nuclear war where everyone loses. (just some lose more than others?)
Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (Score:2)
This is what happens when you pull out of Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty [wikipedia.org] and you deploy Terminal High Altitude Area Defense [wikipedia.org] close to other countries borders.
If it went around the globe a couple of times and only missed it's target by a dozen miles the success of the test can only be measured by the potential yield of the weapon it is carrying. The blast radius my make such a margin of error irrelevant.
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China was never a party to the Intermediate-Range treaty. That was USA and Russia only.
The only failure was the US and Russia didn't pressure China to become a party to the treaty. Instead the US ripped up the treaty. Diplomacy seems to be too hard, so crying about China building a weapon that politicians were too lazy to regulate on the international treaty level is pathetic.
Now the US is committed to billions of dollars worth of military spending that could have been avoided by inviting them to the table with Russia and hammering out an update to the agreement.
It shows a real lack of l
Silly Jingoistic Anti-China FUD (Score:4, Interesting)
Cold war era ballistic missiles - you know, the kind that everyone has been hoarding since the 60's, are already hypersonic (mach 14+). They just aren't hypersonic in their pre-terminal phase.
Early-intercept systems (ground and sea based) have been the biggest threat to BMD's yet invented, mostly by being close enough to the launch sites with missiles that are capable of hitting BMD's before re-entry. However, they are a threat in a hypothetical sense, in the same way that US helicopters have defenses with flares and DIRCM. They still get shot down, mostly due to the practical nature of combat.
In a true nuke-u-lar war scenario, these early warning systems are nothing but a feel-good stroke. A true nuclear war scenario would occur with the attacking country firing a large number of missiles from many different sites located across a massive area of geography. No defending country would have enough interceptors to hit even half. Maybe a quarter of the total launch. As we all have seen and heard, the defending country would launch a counter attack as well. Therefore, no change to the nuclear detente status quo.
Hypersonics in the current military context are being developed for two purposes:
1. To attempt to counter the early-intercept threat.
2. As a rationale for developing better early warning radar.
Neither of these scenarios really change the status quo. If one country were to launch a nuclear attack on another country, even with hypersonic launch and glide bodies, the receiving country would just launch all their nukes post-haste.
Get real (Score:2)
More worrying are the anti-ship ones. (Score:2)
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Thing is Taiwan is an island. Anti ship missile batteries would make a sea based invasion exceedingly difficult. Good SAM batteries would make an airborne invasion exceedingly difficult too. Of the latter there has only been one successful airborne invasion of an island in history. It was touch and go even then and it succeeded because we (aka the British) cocked the defence up.
Basically all Taiwan needs is just large numbers of ASHM and SAM missiles to make any invasion so costly it would be utterly imprud
Newspeak (Score:2)
Incorrect premise (Score:2)
At no point in the article did they demonstrate that this "surprised" intelligence services.
It did not.
Next canard?
China? (Score:2)
"China tested a nuclear-capable hypersonic missile in August,"
Huh, that was fast.
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