{"id":53361,"date":"2020-05-18T08:45:40","date_gmt":"2020-05-18T13:45:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=53361"},"modified":"2020-05-18T08:45:43","modified_gmt":"2020-05-18T13:45:43","slug":"the-coming-nuclear-menace-hypersonic-missiles","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=53361","title":{"rendered":"The Coming Nuclear Menace: Hypersonic Missiles"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The Coming Nuclear Menace: Hypersonic Missiles<\/a><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

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Photograph Source: David James Paquin (attributed) \u2013 Public Domain<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The United States is seeking to acquire \u201cvolumes of hundreds or even thousands\u201d of nuclear-capable hypersonic missiles that are \u201cstealthy\u201d and can fly undetected at 3,600 miles per hour, five times faster than the speed of sound.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Why so many? A Pentagon official is quoted in the current issue of Aviation Week & Space Technology<\/em><\/a> as saying \u201cwe have to be careful we\u2019re not building boutique weapons. If we build boutique weapons, we won\u2019t\u2014we\u2019ll be very reluctant to\u2014use them.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The article in the aerospace industry trade journal is headlined: \u201cHypersonic Mass Production.\u201d A subhead reads: \u201cPentagon Forms Hypersonic Industry \u2018War Room.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On March 19, 2020, the U.S. conducted its first hypersonic missile test from its Pacific Missile Range Facility on Kauai, Hawaii.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cFast and Furiously Accurate<\/a>\u201d is the title of an article about hypersonic missiles written by a U.S. Navy officer which appeared last year on a U.S. Naval Institute website.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The piece declares that by \u201cspecifically integrating hypersonic weapons with U.S. Navy submarines, the United States may gain an edge in developing the fastest, most precise weapons the world has ever seen.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cHypersonic weapons,\u201d explains the article by U.S. Navy Lieutenant Andrea Howard, \u201ctravel faster than Mach 5\u2014at least five times the speed of sound, around 3,600 mph, or one mile per second\u2026.They are similar to but faster than existing missiles, such as the subsonic U.S. Tomahawk missile, which maxes out around 550 mph.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWhile hypersonic weapons can carry conventional or nuclear warheads, they differ from existing technologies in three critical ways,\u201d writes Howard. \u201cFirst\u2026a one-kilogram object delivered precisely and traveling multiples of the speed of sound can be more destructive than one kilogram of TNT.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Coming Nuclear Menace: Hypersonic Missiles Photograph Source: David James Paquin (attributed) \u2013 Public Domain The United States is seeking to acquire \u201cvolumes of hundreds or even thousands\u201d of nuclear-capable hypersonic missiles that are \u201cstealthy\u201d and can fly undetected at 3,600 miles per hour, five times faster than the speed of sound. Why so many? […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[5493,27865,13157,827,11226],"class_list":["post-53361","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geopolitics","tag-counterpunch","tag-hypersonic-missiles","tag-karl-grossman","tag-united-states","tag-us-pentagon"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53361","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=53361"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53361\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":53362,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53361\/revisions\/53362"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=53361"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=53361"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=53361"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}