Pentagon official Fu Cong denies the Pentagon’s claims that China is massively increasing its firepower, saying the country continues to lag behind Washington.
Though Beijing pledged to use nuclear weapons only in self-defense as one of the five major nuclear powers, it says its stockpiles need to be updated.
But at the same time, disturbing information has surfaced that may make the danger from nukes take a second position: Chinese hypersonic weapons test ‘has all of our attention’, US General Mark Milley says.
By using hypersonic missiles able to detect, identify and lock on targets based on heat signatures, warfare could be transformed. Researchers say new developments in infrared sensors are advancing the country’s development of hypersonic weapons.
In the first generation of hypersonic weapons, fixed targets on the ground could be hit at five times the speed of sound or faster through missile defense systems. China and Russia had deployed hypersonic missiles, but other countries believed that these weapons were not practical-unless a nuclear war was being contemplated.
“China will continue to modernize its nuclear arsenal for reliability and safety concerns,” Fu Cong, the director general of the Chinese foreign ministry’s department of arms control, said on Tuesday.
He added that the US and Russia had the largest number of warheads and should therefore be the first to make cuts.
Five permanent members of the UN Security Council — the United States, China, Russia, Britain and France — published a joint statement on Monday reaffirming that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.”
The statement also restated the goals of preventing the further spread of such weapons and the ultimate goal of “a world without nuclear weapons,” as stated in the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.
The call to change China’s policy of not being the first to use nuclear weapons in a conflict has been heard, but Ma said Beijing will stick to its policy.
“China has always adhered to a nuclear strategy of self-defense, pursues a policy of no first use of nuclear weapons and maintains its nuclear power at the lowest level required to maintain national security,” he said.
A Pentagon report released in November estimated that China could possess up to 700 nuclear warheads by 2027 and at least 1,000 by 2030.
Beijing, however, has condemned the Aukus alliance, arguing that it could lead to an arms race and nuclear proliferation in Asia.
Niutanqin, a social media account affiliated with Xinhua, stated the joint statement reaffirmed that there would not be a nuclear war among the five nations.
“No matter how serious the confrontation between Russia and the US, and between China and the US, have become, there won’t be a nuclear war among them,” the commentary said.
In addition to stopping other countries from acquiring nuclear weapons, the five nations would work to prevent them from doing so. According to the statement, it is still possible that the P5 joint statement will not be implemented as intended, citing the Aukus alliance as an example.
Other countries that possess nuclear weapons are not recognized as nuclear states under UN law, Zhou said — citing North Korea, India, Pakistan and Israel — and there is little that can be done to reduce arms.
So, of course, Iran launches a new space rocket in the midst of the Vienna nuclear talks
According to a defense ministry spokesman, the Phoenix satellite launcher carried ‘three research charges’, but there is concern among Western governments that satellite launch systems share technologies with ballistic missiles capable of delivering atomic warheads.
At the same time, North Korea tells UN it is entitled to test nuclear weapons
Beijing-based researcher Zhou Chenming said the five were unlikely to change their policies.
“However, now that this statement was issued by top leaders from these five nuclear states, these problems are being evaluated and hopefully can kick off some necessary processes in the government’s bureaucracy. The joint statement sets a tone for denuclearization, but in reality in terms of how it can be carried out, all countries would have their own considerations,” Zhou said.
Unlike the other three countries, Israel has never formally acknowledged possessing nuclear weapons, but aside from South Sudan, which has been racked by civil war since independence, Israel is the only country that has not signed the nonproliferation treaty.
Zhou warned that “the permanent five do not actually have a good way to manage the spread of nuclear weapons currently,” as other countries have the “potential” to become nuclear powers, including Iran, Japan, and some European nations.
The Pentagon’s annual report on China’s military in November highlighted the country’s nuclear development and predicted that it would have at least 1,000 nuclear warheads by 2030 and up to 700 by 2027. Currently, the United States has 3,750 nuclear weapons.
Okay, to give a little info on why this is so troubling, even when compared to nukes:
“Precision guidance with infrared imaging technology is a force multiplier for hypersonic weapons,” Yi said in a paper published in the journal. “If one party takes the lead in processing mature hypersonic weapons, this party will have the absolute advantage of asymmetric attacks. With effective hypersonic precision strike weapons, the critical value of ‘strategic depth’ in traditional warfare will no longer exist. All the critical political, economic and military assets of a country will be at risk.”
At the surface of the missile, the skin and windows can become so hot that the heat signal of a target can be masked by background noise at high Mach (the speed of sound) numbers. Due to the extreme heat and shock waves, the infrared window might also crack.
Several scientists from around the world have proposed ways to lower the temperature, including splashing liquid over the window or installing cooling tubes beneath the glass. Yi and his colleagues found most of these ideas ineffective or too complex.
In order to reduce heat on the infrared window, Chinese scientists used an air-blowing device to generate a thin membrane of cold air. This approach had been attempted by some researchers in other countries, but they failed because the cooling air sparked strong turbulence, which resulted in a fuzzy, flickering and less accurate location of the target.
Yi’s team came up with a number of breakthroughs to solve that problem. A compact, lightweight device was developed that can generate an extremely cold stream of inert gas at a speed of three times the speed of sound to reduce signal distortion.
They managed to fit 40 micro-vortex generators into the air-cooling device to create airflows that could break up the turbulence. As missiles accelerate and home in on targets at wide attack angles, the new mathematical model helped them to better predict and eliminate optical distortion.
Researchers at the National University of Defense Technology in China have demonstrated how a hypersonic missile could find, identify and engage a target based on its heat signature when flying at low altitudes where the air is thicker, transforming conventional warfare.
It is estimated that 90 percent of all the aircraft lost by the US Air Force since the 1980s have been shot down by heat-seeking missiles, and stealth fighters such as the F-22 may be targeted because their coating materials easily heat up in flight. A Chinese military researcher told an academic conference in 2020 that an F-22 could be destroyed in a matter of seconds by a ground-to-air hypersonic missile.
Professor Yi Shihe wrote that China made “a series of core technology breakthroughs that proved effective in tests” in a paper published in the domestic peer-reviewed journal Air and Space Defense on December 15, 2011.
According to a June edition of the domestic journal Modern Defense Technology that introduced Yi’s work, hypersonic infrared missiles had already been used in a number of test flights — a feat that earned Yi’s team a top national award for military science and technology from the People’s Liberation Army.
Cui Jie, a researcher with the Beijing Power Machinery Institute showcased the JF12 hypersonic wind tunnel in Beijing it is the world’s first wind tunnel capable of testing a full-sized hypersonic missile through the critical stages of flight) in a conference paper released on the China Academic Journal Network Publishing Database last week.
The Chinese wind tunnel is not only large enough to house a fun-sized (read: actual size) hypersonic missile, but can simulate the different stages of flight in different hypothetical environments throughout the test.
The facility’s name, location and top Mach rating remained classified, and it is not clear how long the facility has been operating, but it appears to sidestep of the failures seen in the United States, according to scientists involved in the Chinese project.
As if we didn’t have enough to be worried about.
See what you can do when you don’t have White Supremacists in the ranks.
Gee, a hyper-sonic suppository? Who wudda thunk it? But it is real or Chinese hacker bandit propaganda?
Hmmmm…good question, that. Gonna have to nose around even deeper. I’ll get back to you in a few weeks and see what I can uncover.
Okay, so China is way ahead of us in things like hypersonic missiles. We’ve got them beat all hollow when it comes to important things like equity, diversity, inclusion, and social justice!
LOL!!
Yea, but it’s made in China. Besides, our forces know the perfect lipstick shade to go with the current camo pattern. Plus, we have more pronouns.
No offense, but my years in the military tell me that the author doesn’t have a clue what we have, when we got it, or what its capabilities are. I guess the author thinks that we put our secret capabilities in the press. Duh.
Well, I wouldn’t guess as to what we have (sheesh, the SR-71 would indicate that any wild guess I would have is miles behind where we actually are). And of course the military is keeping close-lipped about what we CAN do; but the question I guess is more about what WILL we do. I actually worked on high-pressure X-Ray laser development back in the ’80s; no one really seems to know about it and for all I know we might actually have the things. But I am substantially more concerned about whether we have the foresight to know if and when to use our technological expertise-having just given several billions dollars worth of equipment to the Taliban and totally abandoning Afghanistan I am more concerned about the decision making capabilities-and possibly motives- of our government…
The article emphasizes the crisis the ZuS and allied powers are in if they have to confront Chinese advanced technology, which appears to be years if not decades ahead of that the US currently has access to.
Scientific American recently published an article that the hypersonic weapons were essentially impossible due to the Physics involved, followed within weeks if not days of the Chinese hypersonic missile test utilizing a suborbital flight envelope.
There was essentially no response by Scientific American, which is primarily a climate crisis rather than a defense oriented publication, but it probably is good at indicating the place where the American and allied defense establishments are presently, flat footed to say the least.
Such technology requires commitment from policy makers over years, if not decades, and administrations from both parties, however rather than building up the military capability, the Obama administration cut back military spending while expanding social services.
We will likely be unable to confront China on a future battlefield, which has been the Chinese intention all along, considering their lead in hypersonic weapon targeting technology. I expect issues in the South China Sea and over Taiwan to come to a head over the next year and likely either a diplomatic solution or military confrontation before the current Presidential term is up. This could happen even sooner, possibly days, especially if the Chinese see weakening resolve on the part of the US.
Russia spends 1/10 of what the USA spends on Defense. Russia has had Hypersonic weapons for longer than the Chinese and Russia has the ability to deliver these weapons anywhere in the world. The US has none of these advanced weapons. The US has NO defense against these advanced weapons, none. The US taxpayer is being bent over. Signed, a US Vet.
Unfortunately, Russia appears to have discovered the ultimate weapon-our own government. I speak Russian, and am aware of some recently (well, 20 yrs ago) docs that detail how scared the “Russkies” were of our super-sonic coast to coast space plane that some private group was developing in the ’80s. So, they decided that the best way to quietly counter it was to get our own Government involved. They threw together a bunch of bolts, called it “Sputnik” (this literally means “satellite”; how’s THAT for original) and embarrassed the Government. Voila; the Sputnik Crisis kicked off the cold war’ worse, it embarrassed the US so badly that they decided the main thrust was to nationalize the space plane group, rebrand it as “NASA”, and put its efforts into slapping a lawn pixie on the moon. Problem solved; we thought we were embarrassing the Russians, but they played us from the beginning by changing our focus. And they are GOOD at it; take a look at Brezhnev addressing the UN back in the ’60s; he is so pissed that he is pounding his shoe on t eh podium. But if you look at subsequent pictures you will see that he still has his shoes on; it was a a theatrical act. And everyone in the room bought it. The biggest danger from these guys is that they know how to use political Judo and make us fall over our own feet.
The “Cold War” started when WWII ended not when their Sputnik was launched.
I disagree-we were already in a limited Cold War with Russia, hence the reason Sputnik stung us publicly so badly. A great deal of our space program was developed not only to get our lawn gnome on the moon, but with an eye toward eventual militarization of quite a few of the developments-including the ideas of space based weapons, military bases on the moon, ICBMs, MIRV warheads, and the initial concept of an upper atmosphere EMP tuned nuclear blast. Most didn’t really pan out, although we DID get LCD watches out of the program so there’s that.
I HATE ‘autocorrect”. The plane was being developed in the early ’60s; not the ”80s.
China is beating us like a drum on military technology and unless we get rid of senile little girl fondling feckless cowardly clown Joe Biden and the rest of the cowardly democRATs you children and grandchildren may be speaking Chinese. WE NEED TRUMP, he is the only one with the guts to stand up to these communists both in China and here in the U.S. Government.
The Chinks steal technology from the USA. They are a danger to the world.
China this that the other. Our sh*t works really well too. Everyone so afraid. So dumb.
These “hypersonic” missils, whichare supposedly this new military threat are not faster than the speed of light are they?
With simple highly portable laser systems from 100 watts to 1,000,000 watts output and computer targeting systems, no physical missile system is safe.
Say the CCP launches hundred of these expensive fuel consuming rockets and USA knocks every single rocket out of the sky via multi million watts lasers in aircraft, ships, satellites, ground based fixed and mobile platforms. Withing fractions of a minute, a single laser weapons system could destroy hundredsof missiles en transit.
This entire hyprsonic missiles “scare” is totally silly in the face of laser weapons.