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“U.S. President Joe Biden said on Wednesday he is concerned about Chinese hypersonic missiles, days after a media report that Beijing had tested a nuclear-capable hypersonic glide weapon… The Financial Times said [over] the weekend that China had tested a weapon in August that flew through space and circled the globe before cruising down toward a target that it missed.” Reuters
The right is alarmed by the test and calls for additional investment in missile defense.
“Some arms-control experts have argued that this isn’t a significant development, since Chinese ICBMs can already hit the continental United States. But an ICBM can potentially be defeated by our defenses, whereas we don’t currently have the means to shoot down a hypersonic missile, which will require, at the very least, better sensors and perhaps the advent of a laser defense…
“We need to do everything we can to enhance our missile defenses. With an eye to the China threat, we should push to base missile interceptors in Australia and sensors in India, and deploy more sensors in space. We need to work to develop a directed-energy or laser defense, a technology out of science fiction but one that is plausible and could more readily defeat hypersonic missiles…
“We also need to modernize our nuclear infrastructure and realize that the China threat will require a new generation of artificial-intelligence, space, unmanned, and cyber capabilities that may not suit the defense establishment or pork-barreling congressmen but are absolutely essential if we aren’t going to be left behind by a determined foe.”
The Editors, National Review
“The hypersonic news follows the discovery this year of hundreds of new missile silos in the Chinese desert, almost certainly for nuclear missiles. This isn’t the behavior of a nation merely interested in defending its sovereignty. China has global ambitions, and they include projecting military power as a way to assert its political and commercial interests…
“It’s also alarming if the reports are correct that U.S. intelligence was caught off-guard by the hypersonic test. The U.S. has intelligence agencies precisely to prevent surprises like this. The Intelligence Community is made up of some 18 organizations that received $85.8 billion in 2020. Congress should investigate what we’re paying for and what we’re getting.”
Editorial Board, Wall Street Journal
“While most U.S. companies would never admit to directly helping the Chinese military to imperil U.S. interests, the truth is that many are doing just that… Beijing’s near-total control of public and private research and data within its own borders—including every bit and byte of data generated by Western companies operating in China—means that the Chinese military is able to leverage this information for its own ends…
“Microsoft’s Beijing-based Research Asia Lab, for example, is the company’s largest outside of the U.S. and is credited as being ‘the single most important institution in the birth and growth of the Chinese AI ecosystem over the past two decades.’… It is time for U.S. companies to choose a flag.”
Klon Kitchen, The Dispatch
The left is skeptical of additional spending on missile defense and calls for a renewed focus on arms control.
The left is skeptical of additional spending on missile defense and calls for a renewed focus on arms control.
“In nuclear parlance, ‘second-strike capability’ is the nukes a country would launch after an initial enemy atomic attack. Possessing a second-strike capability is critical to mutual deterrence. A potential nuclear aggressor must believe it can’t escape largely unscathed in the event it launches an atomic sneak attack. To be deterred, the aggressor must believe it’s going to suffer a devastating second strike…
“It’s not hard to understand why Beijing is worried about its existing second-strike capability and thus is working on a new orbital nuke. The U.S. military since 2002 has spent hundreds of billions of dollars developing ever more sophisticated land- and sea-launched anti-missile missiles…
“Deterrence is all about accepting your own vulnerability in exchange for the enemy accepting his vulnerability… But that carefully calculated mutual vulnerability [is] anathema to many Americans’ worldview.”
David Axe, Forbes
"Our missile-defense system isn’t terribly useful at the moment, with or without China’s exotic efforts. According to the U.S. Missile Defense Agency’s latest figures (released just this past August), the one system designed to shoot down long-range missiles aimed at the United States—the Ground-Based Midcourse Defense system—has successfully shot down a mock warhead in 12 of its 19 tests. Moreover, the system has not been tested at all since March 2019. And three of its last six tests were failures…
“It’s also worth noting (and this is no state secret), the GBMD system has never been tested against more than one mock warhead at a time…
"Expect requests for much more money to counter China’s hypersonic missile… Speaking about the Chinese threat, Air Force Gen. Christopher Niemi, director of strategy, plans, programs, and requirements for U.S. Pacific Air Forces, told Defense One, ‘We should look at what is possible from a physics perspective, as opposed to what we think [China is] going to do.’ From that view, the sky is the limit on what threats our generals might imagine—and what new weapons they might conceive, at what outlandish cost, to deal with them.”
Fred Kaplan, Slate
“China’s pursuit of hypersonics is just one more reason the United States ought to continue trying to bring China to the arms control table and keep Russia engaged there. The potential topics should cover all kinds of weapons systems, including hypersonics and missile defenses. The climate is not very promising for negotiations, but the alternative is an arms race, or more than one."
Editorial Board, Washington Post
