It gets worse. China, India, France and others are all developing similar weapons. The age of hypersonics, when even medium-size powers can deliver unstoppable damage on an American (or Russian, or Chinese) city, is a whole new game.<\/p>\n
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For starters, hypersonics change the way we think about crisis management. Suppose the United States detected an adversary\u2019s launch of a missile \u2014 or mistakenly thought it had detected a launch, as American authorities had actually done in January 2018. At a moment like this, the stakes are high, and the time frame for decision making is extremely compressed. Throw in exhaustion, intense emotions and uncertainty about the other side\u2019s intentions, and you have a seriously volatile situation.<\/p>\n
If the contending parties are armed with hypersonic missiles, the time frame for deciding what to do is even shorter, and the uncertainty about what your enemy is targeting and the nature of an incoming warhead \u2014 is it nuclear or conventional? \u2014 is virtually total. In such a situation, the overwhelming incentive is to shoot first. Think of two gunslingers in a dark room.<\/p>\n
Moreover, hypersonics are a weaponized moral hazard for states with a taste for intervention, because they erase barriers to picking fights. Is an adversary building something that might be a weapons factory? Is there an individual in an unfriendly country who cannot be apprehended? What if the former commander of Iran\u2019s Revolutionary Guards, Qassim Suleimani, visits Baghdad for a meeting and you know the address? The temptations to use hypersonic missiles will be many.<\/p>\n
Hypersonics also push us toward a slippery slope. They blur the line between conventional and strategic weapons, and their easy, justifiable use \u2014 say, to kill a single terrorist leader in a crowded city \u2014 could make it easier to accept their widespread use, with much more destructive consequences.<\/p>\n
Hypersonics might look like just a zoomier version of existing weapons, but in fact they are game-changing. When the United States used nuclear weapons against Japan, they were thought to be a dramatic advance on bombs already in use, even those used to generate firestorms that had already devoured the cities of Germany and Japan. It was not until later that they were understood to be categorically different and ultimately too destructive to use.<\/p>\n
If past is prologue, deployment of the systems is going to take place well before their ramifications are fully understood. By 1950, as the Chinese Army was overrunning American and South Korean forces, the Truman administration had already grasped the dilemmas intrinsic to nuclear weapons; the Soviet detonation of a hydrogen bomb a few years later drove the lesson home. But between the exuberance of acquiring a new military capability and the sobering realization of its dangers, there is plenty of opportunity to use them.<\/p>\n
As someone who worked on counterterrorism on the National Security Council staff, I feel my pulse racing just to consider these possibilities. I\u2019ve been in too many situations where I know hypersonics would have been compellingly presented as the best possible response. The allure of such a weapon would be nearly irresistible.<\/p>\n
The biggest threat from hypersonics is that they come at a time when the world\u2019s arm control treaties are falling apart. We need a multilateral agreement to limit hypersonic arsenals and their use, but unfortunately, the United States, which would have to take the lead in orchestrating the negotiation of such an agreement, is uninterested in any deals that might tie its hands.<\/p>\n
President Trump, who declared that trade wars are easy to win, has also welcomed an arms race on the grounds that the United States would beat all comers. Congress has only rarely approved arms control treaties \u2014 and with the Senate in Republican hands, it seems scarcely likely that an agreement limiting hypersonic weapons would find favor.<\/p>\n
Beyond American politics, the multilateral nature of an agreement would in itself impose obstacles, because of the number of countries that would need to be involved and the frictions between them. Such agreements have been hammered out in the relatively recent past, including the Chemical Weapons Convention and the Missile Technology Control Regime, which imposed both range and payload limitations on a variety of missiles. But those already seem part of a different era, when the world agreed on the importance of investing in arms control.<\/p>\n
For the time being, it\u2019s more likely that with the Avangard\u2019s debut, other countries will want this capability for themselves. As national programs gain momentum, the development, acquisition, fielding and, ultimately, use of these systems will become very difficult, if not impossible, to stop.<\/p>\n
As at the dawn of the nuclear era, when the advent of nuclear weapons became intertwined with an emerging Cold War, a new and radical development in military technology is emerging just as post-Cold War realities give way to new ones. We need to channel the wisdom of the prudent arms controllers of the Cold War, who understood the urgent need to control weapons with terrifying implications.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Fuente:<\/strong> https:\/\/www.nytimes.com<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Las armas hipers\u00f3nicas cada vez m\u00e1s cerca de convertirse en una realidad. El anuncio por parte del Presidente de Rusia V. Putin, expresando que su… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5011,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[18],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fie.undef.edu.ar\/ceptm\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5010"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fie.undef.edu.ar\/ceptm\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fie.undef.edu.ar\/ceptm\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fie.undef.edu.ar\/ceptm\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fie.undef.edu.ar\/ceptm\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5010"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.fie.undef.edu.ar\/ceptm\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5010\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fie.undef.edu.ar\/ceptm\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/5011"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fie.undef.edu.ar\/ceptm\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5010"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fie.undef.edu.ar\/ceptm\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5010"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fie.undef.edu.ar\/ceptm\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5010"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}