National Security: As President Obama dreams of no nuclear weapons, Beijing and Moscow accelerate further ahead of the Pentagon on hypersonic weaponry. The day is coming when America can be blackmailed with the bomb.
On March 23, 1983, President Ronald Reagan made the speech that sounded the death knell of the Soviet evil empire.
"What if free people could live secure in the knowledge that their security did not rest upon the threat of instant U.S. retaliation to deter a Soviet attack, that we could intercept and destroy strategic ballistic missiles before they reached our own soil or that of our allies?" Reagan asked, acknowledging that his proposed nuclear missile defense was "a formidable technical task," but still "worth every investment necessary to free the world from the threat of nuclear war."
It drove Democrats crazy, who wanted those billions spent on domestic programs, but it led the Soviet Union to soften, then finally collapse, unable to compete militarily with a determined, innovative American defense.
Now, however, China and post-Soviet Russia are making continued progress on vehicles that can transport nuclear warheads at 10 times the speed of sound -- faster than the ability of missile defense to stop them reaching the U.S. homeland.
Last Friday, Beijing for the seventh time successfully flight-tested its DF-ZF hypersonic glide vehicle, traveling up to over 7,000 miles per hour.
House Armed Services subcommittee on seapower Chairman Randy Forbes, R-Va., told the Washington Free Beacon, "Beijing is committed to upending both the conventional military and nuclear balance, with grave implications for the stability of Asia.”
Three days earlier, Russia flight-tested its own hypersonic glider, launched from a ballistic missile.
The key difference pertinent to U.S. missile defense is that today's inter-continental ballistic missiles reach hypersonic speeds only while zeroing in on their targets from space, by which time a defensive missile would already have destroyed them. The new vehicles Russia and China are developing go hypersonic in mid-phase, and can maneuver at that high velocity, too fast for missile defenses to be effective.
The Defense Department’s Missile Defense Agency says it isn't funding any initiatives to counter hypersonic attack; a laser weapon that could shoot such weapons in flight won't even be tested until 2021, years after China is expected to be able to deploy the DF-ZF. And when the U.S. Army tested a hypersonic vehicle about a year and a half ago, it blew up. Moreover, the Pentagon has made a point of stressing that its hypersonic projects will not carry nuclear weapons.
Behind that intentional disadvantage, of course, is President Obama's policy that "to put an end to Cold War thinking, we will reduce the role of nuclear weapons in our national security strategy." He's even said "it is time for the testing of nuclear weapons to finally be banned." He got a premature Nobel Peace Prize for his "vision of and work for a world without nuclear weapons."
But someone forgot to send the memo about the coming nuclear-free world to China and Russia.
