Welcome to brain Stuff production of iHeart Radio. Hey brain Stuff. Lauren vogelbamb Here At a meeting in Arlington, Virginia in late one of the Pentagon's top officials told an audience of defense executives that the US is locked in a tight race with Russia and China to develop a new game changing weapon that could fly at many times the speed of sound and could be used to launch a deaf stating attack upon an enemy in a matter of minutes.
The assemblage was told by Michael D. Griffin, the Department of Defense is under Secretary for Research and Engineering, that of all of the technological marvels that the Pentagon hoped to create, developing a hypersonic missile was his highest priority. It's not hard to understand why hypersonic missiles a technology that could be deployed as soon as the mid twenties. It sounds like the sort of exotic menace that a
villain would dream up in a James Bond thriller. If we could get them to work, hypersonic missiles could have the ability to fly and maneuver its speeds between five and twenty five thousand kilometers per hour at a range of altitudes up to a hundred kilometers above Earth's surface for our non metric friends, that's about three to fifteen thousand miles per hour and up to sixty two miles
high at the edge of orbital space. These capabilities could make it a nightmare to defend against them, because they would be moving so fast that it would be difficult to predict where they were about to strike until the last few minutes before impact. And because the missiles travel at such a high speed, their sheer kinetic energy alone would enable them to wreak destruction without carrying any conventional explosives or nuclear warheads. There are different potential methods of
attaining that fantastic speed. One approach is to fire a conventional missile that would in turn release a smaller hypersonic glide vehicle, which would fly up into the upper layers of the atmosphere. Another approach would utilize a rocket or
an advanced jet engine, such as a scram jet. Military vision areas have been contemplating hypersonic weapons for decades, but it wasn't until recently that the concept began to seem close to fruition due to any one specific breakthrough in technology, but rather due to a combination of progresses and political motivation. We spoke via email with Eon D. Boyd, a professor of airspace engineering at the University of Michigan. He explained, to develop a missile, you first have to show that
the platform can fly. Emission of interest that was demonstrated in the US by scramjet powered demonstration flights. While a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency or DARPA's to flight tests of their HTV to boost glide vehicle ended in failure, significant progress was demonstrated and important lessons learned. In an overlapping time period. The Pentagon demonstrated longer range hypersonic vehicle
capabilities in their conventional Prompt Strike program. DARPA and the Air Force then partnered to mature many of the systems needed on a platform to make it into a weapon, as such as the guidance, navigation and control materials, structures,
and rocket boosters. But the US wasn't alone and interest in developing high personic capabilities, Boyd said, China was watching and learning and at some point started investing in hypersonics since it became evident that significant progress was being made that at least in numbers of flight tests conducted appeared to show China outpacing US efforts, and in Russia, where they've worked on hypersonics for decades, like the US, they also seem to have had recent successes with test flights.
In response to the Chinese and Russian progress, the Trump administration is pushing to develop hypersonic weapons as soon as possible, and as requesting funding of two point six billion dollars for hypersonic research by the Air Force, Navy, Army, and
DARPA in its budget request for the financial year. The managing editor for National Security for the Center for Public Integrity one Our, Jeffrey Smith, reported in the New York Times magazine that spending on developing hypersonic weapons could rise to five billion dollars a year as the US pushes to develop a deployable hypersonic missile system in the next
two to three years. Though hypersonic missiles could carry nuclear war heads, the missiles being developed by the US will only be equipped with conventional explosives, but they'll still be plenty fearsome. As Smith wrote in the Times quote, the missiles function like nearly invisible power drills that smash holes in their targets to catastrophic effect. They'll impact their targets with a force equivalent to three to four tons of TNT,
according to Smith. In some ways, hypersonic missiles presented different and perhaps even scarier threat to peace than present nuclear arsenals, because they could enable a nation to launch a surprise attack and cripple an enemy's ability to retaliate, leaving it helpless against the threat of a nuclear attack. They'd be
difficult to defend against for a number of reasons. Their speed, the fact that they fly in an area between aviation and space flight that we've never had to defend in, and they're maneuverable, a meaning that have to be tracked throughout their flight with accuracy. Boyd explained another issue quote this class of missiles is not covered by any currently
valid weapons treaty. This poses a number of concerns, including the that the nations primarily involved, the US, China, and Russia do not have established protocols in place for the use of these systems. Finally, the potential for a hypersonic weapon to carry either a conventional warhead or a nuclear warhead means that a nation under threat wouldn't know whether
a nuclear response should be considered. That all means that in the near future, hypersonic missiles could lead to a continuous atmosphere of hyper anxiety, in which nations might be afraid to not strike first, or to instantly launch a counter attack at the first hint of trouble, or at the very least, it could prompt nations to spend even more money on not just counter attacks, but defense measures. Today's episode was written by Patrick J. Kaiger and produced
by Tyler. Playing brain Stuff is a production of iHeart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more in this and lots of other military topics, visit our home planet, how stuff Works dot com and for more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.