The United States can defend itself against enemy hypersonic missiles by spreading a cloud of dust over a large area where the projectile is expected to fly.
Launching a missile through such an area at high speed will degrade and potentially destroy the weapon.
The idea was discussed in a document published this week by the Center for Strategic & International Studies (CSIS), a Washington-based think tank.
The authors emphasize that this was made possible by support from Raytheon Technologies and Lockheed Martin, the defense giant that develops anti-missile technology for the US military.
The idea is no different from what US strategic planners devised during the height of the Cold War with the Soviet Union.
The proposal at the time was to place nuclear payloads around areas where US intercontinental ballistic missile silos were located. In the case of a mutual attack, the bomb would explode a few minutes before the Soviet nukes would hit.
With hundreds of thousands of tons of radioactive dust in the air, enemy vehicles reentering at high speed would be damaged by the particles, saving American missiles for a counterattack.
Modern incarnations would use the same concept to subdue fast-flying weapons into clouds of dust that were not designed to defend.
"Without severe mitigation measures, disruption of the hypersonic flow field could lead to a progressive decline in performance or mission kill, if not catastrophic failure," predicts the report as quoted by Russia Today, Wednesday (2/9/2022).
The particles will be engineered to remain suspended in the thin upper atmosphere, through which hypersonic gliders travel, for tens of minutes, requiring lower accuracy in countermeasures.
Artificial dust can be metal, fireworks, or made of other materials, and is spread by missiles or aerial platforms.
"Given the higher initial flight speed of a hypersonic glider, the 'dust wall' will be more effective earlier than later in its flight," the report suggests.
The white paper explores other ideas on how to handle hypersonic weapons, not only gliders but cruise missiles as well.
These range from deploying anti-missile assets in a way that will force the enemy to plot a less favorable path of attack, to using powerful microwaves to "fry" the missile's electronic components, to trying to destroy it with laser weapons.
Hypersonic weapons are considered a game changer in the strategic balance of power, as the speed with which they travel and their ability to maneuver unpredictably mid-flight make them much more difficult to intercept in traditional means than older intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), which fly in long trajectories. predictable.
Russia is fielding what it claims is a functional hypersonic launcher called Avangard as part of its nuclear deterrence force.
China is also known to have very advanced prototypes of this kind of weaponry. The US has invested heavily in its national anti-ballistic missile system since 2002, when it withdrew from a treaty it had signed with the Soviet Union that prevented the two countries from developing the relevant technology.
Moscow says it should develop hypersonic capabilities to rebalance its nuclear deterrence degradation due to increasing US anti-missile capabilities.
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