Techno-Nationalism

Chapter 15Hypersonic Speed

During the COVID-19 pandemic, in August 2021, while China’s beleaguered citizens hunkered down under strict lockdown orders, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) announced that it had successfully launched a missile with a hypersonic glider that reached speeds up to five times the speed of sound.

This new kind of aerial vehicle travelled into Earth’s highest reaches and was said to be capable of firing both conventional and nuclear warheads at multiple targets. As the missile briefly exited and re-entered Earth’s atmosphere, it performed evasive manoeuvres. Due to its tremendous speed—over 6,000 kilometres per hour or more than 1.5 kilometres per second—China’s hypersonic missile would be virtually impossible to shoot down using the systems available to the U.S. military at the time.

This came as a total surprise to the American defence establishment. When the news broke, retired U.S. Four Star Admiral, William McRaven, was said to have called it a ‘holy shit’ moment.

Forget about any proverbial ‘Sputnik’ analogy here—I refer to the Soviet Union’s Cold War achievement of launching the world’s first artificial satellite in 1957, which caught the U.S. aerospace establishment flat-footed—this piled yet another layer of national security risk on top of the dangers posed by ballistic missiles.

More broadly, conversation turned to the strategic importance of propulsion technologies—not just of the hypersonic variety for missiles and aerospace applications ...