For the first time, General Mark Milly, a senior US military officer, officially confirmed that China has conducted a hypersonic weapon test. Military experts say this seems to indicate that Beijing is seeking an earth orbit system designed to evade US missile defenses.
Although US President Joe Biden and other officials have expressed general concerns about the development of China’s hypersonic weapons, the Pentagon has been trying to avoid directly confirming China’s test this summer, which was originally reported by the Financial Times.
But Milli clearly confirmed an experiment and stated that it was “very close” to the satellite moment-referring to the first satellite launched by Russia in 1957, which put Moscow in a leading position in the space race during the Cold War era.
“What we saw is a very important hypersonic weapon system test event. This is very worrying,” Milli, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Bloomberg TV in an interview broadcast on Wednesday (October 27).
Nuclear weapons experts say that China’s weapons tests appear to be aimed at evading US defenses in two ways. First, hypersonic aircraft move at more than five times the speed of sound, or about 6,200 km/h (3,853 mph), which makes them more difficult to detect and intercept.
Second, the source told Reuters that the United States believes that China’s test involves a weapon that first orbits the earth. This is the Cold War concept referred to by military experts and is called “partial orbital bombing.”
Last month, Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall (Frank Kendall) mentioned his concerns about this system. He told reporters that a weapon that can enter orbit and land on a target.
“If you use this method, you don’t have to use the traditional intercontinental ballistic missile trajectory-directly from the launch point to the impact point,” he said.
“This is a way to avoid defense and missile early warning systems.”
Part of the orbital bombing will also be a way for China to avoid the US missile defense system in Alaska, which is designed to counter a limited number of weapons from North Korea and other countries.
Jeffrey Lewis of the Middlebury Institute of International Studies summed up partial orbital bombing like this: “The easiest way to think about China’s orbital bombing system is to imagine a space shuttle with nuclear weapons in the cargo bay and forget about the landing gear.”
Lewis said the difference is that China’s re-entry system is a glider.
The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs denies conducting weapons tests. It said it conducted a routine test in July, but added: “This is not a missile, but a spacecraft.”
The US defense system cannot withstand large-scale attacks from China or Russia, which may overwhelm the system. But experts say that the United States’ open pursuit of increasingly advanced missile defense systems has led Moscow and Beijing to study ways to defeat them, including hypersonic and apparently partial orbital bombing.
Both the United States and Russia have tested hypersonic weapons.
