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US Army Completes First Test Flight of Mach 6 Weapon
Stirling Newberry writes "In a terse press release, the U.S. Department of Defense announced the first test of the the Advanced Hypersonic Weapon, which launches on a staged rocket and then glides to its target, in a manner similar to the Space Shuttle's re-entry. Earlier, ABC News posted a story with a video animation of the concept. Over at DefenseTech, they argue that the trajectory being different from an ICBM is meant to show that it is not a first strike device, but even the commenters don't think that explanation flies. The speed of deployment and the ability to strike targets without going high enough to be seen by many advance warning radars makes it a precision surprise attack weapon, a kind of super-cruise-missile for surprise, asymmetric attacks."
The summary was off, as usual. It is clear that this it not a NUCLEAR first-strike weapon. The idea obviously being it won't scream ICBM and, presumably, if you were going to launch a nuclear first strike, it wouldn't be started with just one or two of these. Sure, if you want to take out the leadership of, say, Iraq, at the start of a war, you could consider it first strike, but that's not the concern.
I don't see how my side having the capability to make "surprise, asymmetric attacks" could be considered a bad thing on its own.
It's a cold war thing: The theory is that, as long as you have two or more nuclear powers who potentially would like to see the others enjoy a dose of thermonuclear holocaust; but definitely don't want one themselves, the situation is stable so long as two rules hold:
1. Launching a nuclear delivery vehicle is visible and attributable.
2. It is not possible to neutralize(either through surprise strike on launch sites, or through anti-missile defenses that actually work) another party's nuclear delivery capability.
If those two hold, everybody just announces that they are far to nice to perform a first strike; but they will second-strike like a crazy motherfucker if anybody tries anything funny. You then keep your finger on the button and stare nervously at one another for the indefinite future, which is expensive and hard on the nerves; but has so far kept global thermonuclear war to a minimum.
Any time somebody starts working on a system that upsets these two conditions, people start to get a touch twitchy.
The thing about "Wack A Mole" is that your success depends almost solely on speed.
The thing about this missile is its SPEED.
This is not a big hammer it is a really fast hammer.
Exactly the type of thing you want for "Wack A Mole".
Sorry if these facts screwed up your trite cool sounding anti government post.
But I really think you do still need some more coffee.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
these may get seized, but I imagine part of having them is that we can give them to our creditors very quickly, delivery free of charge, in less than an hour!
And indeed, this would be the perfect weapon for initiating a nuclear war - launch and strike the opposing forces command structure before they are aware (as you note), just as the plan was with the B-2 Spirit - but much quicker.
And of course that lead to the USSR developing headless launch capabilities which, if it wasn't for Stanislav Petrov would have killed us all.
Watch this Heartland Institute video