Hyperfast missile to hit anywhere in an hour

[fallstuff]

Hyperfast missile to hit anywhere in an hour

Tony Allen-Mills in Washington

HAUNTED by the memory of a lost opportunity to kill Osama Bin Laden before he attacked the World Trade Center in New York, US military planners have won President Barack Obama’s support for a new generation of high-speed weapons that are intended to strike anywhere on Earth within an hour.

Obama’s interest in Prompt Global Strike (PGS), a nonnuclear weapons programme, has alarmed China and Russia and complicated nuclear arms reduction negotiations.

White House officials confirmed last week that the president, who won the Nobel peace prize last year, is considering the deployment of a new class of hypersonic guided missiles that can reach their targets at speeds of Mach 5 — about 3,600mph.

That is nearly seven times faster than the 550mph Tomahawk cruise missiles that arrived too late to kill Bin Laden at an Al-Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan in 1998.

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“The ability to attack a wide range of targets at intercontinental range, promptly and without resort to nuclear weapons, is of central importance to US national security,” said Daniel Goure, a defence analyst at the Lexington Institute in Virginia.

The White House has requested almost $250m in congressional funding next year for research into hypersonic technologies, some of which harness the shock waves generated by a fast-moving missile to increase its speed further.

The new weapon could be launched from air, land or sea on a long-range missile travelling at suborbital altitudes above 350,000ft. The missile releases a hypersonic pilotless plane that receives updates from satellites as it homes in on its target at up to five times the speed of sound, generating so much heat that it has to be shielded with special materials to avoid melting.

Depending on the version the Pentagon chooses, the warhead would either split into dozens of lethal fragments in the final seconds of its flight or simply smash into its target, relying on devastating kinetic energy to destroy anything in its path. As a precision weapon its effects would be quite different from the mass destruction inflicted by nuclear warheads delivered by intercontinental ballistic missiles that can reach 13,400mph.

The development of PGS has won praise and criticism as the president seeks to reduce the strategic US nuclear arsenal in favour of tactical weapons that can be used swiftly to counter terrorists or rogue states. “Conventional weapons with worldwide reach ... enable us to reduce the role of nuclear weapons,” said Joe Biden, the vice-president, recently.

Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, warned earlier this month that “states will hardly accept a situation in which nuclear weapons disappear, but weapons that are no less destabilising emerge in the hands of certain members of the international community”.

General Yuri Baluyevsky, a deputy secretary of the Russian National Security Council, complained that US concessions at nuclear arms reduction talks were not because of America’s love of peace, but because “they can kill you using conventional high-precision weapons”.

US analysts have also warned of the risk that Chinese or Russian monitors might mistake a hypersonic launch for nuclear attack. “The short flight time ... leaves very little time for an assessment of the situation, putting an enormous strain on national decision-making mechanisms and increasing the probability of an accident,” argued Pavel Podvig of Stanford University.

General Kevin Chilton, the US air force commander supervising the PGS programme, told The New York Times that the Pentagon’s current options were not fast enough.

“Today we can present some conventional options to the president to strike a target anywhere on the globe that range from 96 hours to maybe four, five, six hours,” he said. “If the president wants to act faster than that, the only thing we have that goes faster is a nuclear response.”

The Pentagon has already begun testing missile systems that might be used in a PGS programme. Last week the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) launched a test flight of a prototype labelled the Hypersonic Technology Vehicle 2 (HTV-2), also known as the Falcon.

The prototype was launched from Vandenberg air force base in California on a solid-fuel rocket booster made from a decommissioned ballistic missile. There was no comment from US Strategic Command, which controls the programme, on either the success of the test or a timetable for future deployment.

“It is premature to discuss the actual implementation of this capability until the technology has sufficiently matured,” a Pentagon statement said.

The Washington Times reported last week that Darpa is building two Falcon vehicles, the second of which is scheduled for launch early next year.

US officials have sought to reassure Russian and Chinese authorities that the new weapons will be developed in small numbers and will be kept well away from US nuclear launch sites so there is no confusion that might trigger an accidental nuclear war.

The new arms reduction treaty signed by Obama and Dmitri Medvedev, the Russian president, in Prague two weeks ago also contains a provision that Washington will reduce its arsenal by one nuclear missile for every PGS weapon that it deploys.

Obama’s efforts to placate Moscow and Beijing have been criticised by US arms control hawks. Dean Cheng, a China specialist at the conservative Heritage Foundation, accused the administration of “pursuing a strategically incoherent policy, one that is ostensibly aimed at reassuring other nations but will more likely lead to greater instability and uncertainty”.

Cheng added: “This is not the path to another Nobel peace prize.”


Hyperfast missile to hit anywhere in an hour - Times Online

 

[Vassnti]

Not just one system planned there are a few pies in the oven.

A tip sets the plan in motion -- a whispered warning of a North Korean nuclear launch, or of a shipment of biotoxins bound for a Hezbollah stronghold in Lebanon. Word races through the American intelligence network until it reaches U.S. Strategic Command headquarters, the Pentagon and, eventually, the White House. In the Pacific, a nuclear-powered Ohio class submarine surfaces, ready for the president's command to launch.

When the order comes, the sub shoots a 65-ton Trident II ballistic missile into the sky. Within 2 minutes, the missile is traveling at more than 20,000 ft. per second. Up and over the oceans and out of the atmosphere it soars for thousands of miles. At the top of its parabola, hanging in space, the Trident's four warheads separate and begin their screaming descent down toward the planet. Traveling as fast as 13,000 mph, the warheads are filled with scored tungsten rods with twice the strength of steel. Just above the target, the warheads detonate, showering the area with thousands of rods-each one up to 12 times as destructive as a .50-caliber bullet. Anything within 3000 sq. ft. of this whirling, metallic storm is obliterated.

If Pentagon strategists get their way, there will be no place on the planet to hide from such an assault. The plan is part of a program -- in slow development since the 1990s, and now quickly coalescing in military circles -- called Prompt Global Strike. It will begin with modified Tridents. But eventually, Prompt Global Strike could encompass new generations of aircraft and armaments five times faster than anything in the current American arsenal. One candidate: the X-51 hypersonic cruise missile, which is designed to hit Mach 5 -- roughly 3600 mph. The goal, according to the U.S. Strategic Command's deputy commander Lt. Gen. C. Robert Kehler, is "to strike virtually anywhere on the face of the Earth within 60 minutes."

The question is whether such an attack can be deployed without triggering World War III: Those tungsten-armed Tridents look, and fly, exactly like the deadliest weapons in the American nuclear arsenal.

QUICK HIT
The military is convinced that in the coming years it will need to act with this kind of speed against threats -- terrorist leaders, smuggled nuclear or chemical arms -- that emerge and disappear in a flash. There may be only hours, or minutes, to respond. "We know how to strike precisely. We know how to strike at long distances," says Kehler, whose office is in charge of the Defense Department's Global Strike mission. "What's different now is this sense of time."

Sneak Attack
Click to enlarge
The leading candidates to deliver Prompt Global Strike's swift knockout punch are the sub-launched Trident II missile and the X-51, a cruise missile launched from a B-52 and boosted to supersonic speed by a rocket. A scramjet takes it hypersonic.Every strategist remembers Aug. 20, 1998, when the USS Abraham Lincoln Battle Group, stationed in the Arabian Sea, launched Tomahawk cruise missiles at an Al Qaeda training camp in eastern Afghanistan, hoping to take out Osama Bin Laden. With a top speed of 550 mph, the Tomahawks made the 1100-mile trip in 2 hours. By then, Bin Laden was gone -- missed by less than an hour, according to Richard A. Clarke, former head of U.S. counterterrorism.

The American military already has weapons that can destroy just about anything in a matter of minutes: nuclear missiles. That terrifying capability was designed to contain Soviet adversaries. But as the Cold War recedes into memory, U.S. strategists worry that our nuclear threat is no longer credible -- that we are too muscle-bound for our own good. Are we really prepared to wipe out Tehran in retribution for a single terrorist attack? Kill millions of Chinese for invading Taiwan? The answer is no.

Paradoxically, the weaker our enemies have grown, the less ominous our arsenal has become. Military theorists call it self-deterrence. "In today's environment, we've got zeros and ones. You can decide to engage with nuclear weapons -- or not," says Capt. Terry J. Benedict, who runs the Navy's conventional Trident program from a nondescript office a few miles from the Pentagon. "The nation's leadership needs an intermediate step-to take the action required, without crossing to the one."

In 2001, Defense Department planners began searching for something that could hit a foe almost instantly without risking a nuclear holocaust. Most of the solutions -- unmanned bombers, faster cruise missiles, hypersonic "glide vehicles" coasting in from space -- required a decade or more of development. The Navy, however, had been testing conventionally armed Trident II missiles since 1993. With a few hundred million dollars, strategists said, the first Prompt Global Strike submarines could be ready to go in just two years.

The $60 million conventional missile needs to be far more accurate than the nuclear version. But the multiple warheads can lock onto GPS coordinates while streaking through space. Upon entering the atmosphere, the warheads use flaps to steer to a target. With the Trident II's range of 6000 nautical miles, subs armed with the missiles could threaten a whole continent's worth of enemy positions. "Now," says Benedict, who leads the Trident conversion effort, "we've got the capability to hold all of these targets in all these hot spots at risk at one time."

In 1988, Lockheed Martin's Trident II D5 nuclear ballistic missile entered service on Ohio class submarines. In the Prompt Global Strike program, each sub would be armed with 22 nuclear Tridents, along with two retrofitted Tridents, each with four independently targetable warheads. here's how a conventional Trident II would work.

Hypersonic Cruise Missile: America's New Global Strike Weapon - Popularmechanics.com