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China has tested the first hypersonic cruise vehicle of its own to become the third country after the United States and Russia boasting ultra-high speed missile vehicles. According to Chinese sources, the tested vehicle is of purely scientific importance. But it can eventually prove useful for building hypersonic cruise missiles and ballistic missile warheads capable of penetrating missile defenses, the Voice of Russia reports. 

China’s testing its hypersonic vehicle, as well as the resumption of efforts to that end by Russia a few years earlier amount to another spiral of the arms race that was not launched by Beijing or Moscow. Russia and China seek to create weapons that would prove a proper response to the US-developed systems. These are chiefly the missile defence system and the advanced high-speed strike weapons that are created in the framework of the Prompt Global Strike (PGS) concept.

PGS is basically different from modern-day strategic nuclear forces in that it is non-nuclear and therefore does not fall under the restrictions specified for strategic offensive weapons. But the ultimate goal of the programme is delivering high-precision strikes at targets anywhere on the Globe within one hour. The objective has not yet been attained, and may never be fully attained, but the change in the rules of the game did not go unnoticed.

China’s hypersonic cruise vehicle may eventually pose a military threat to the United States in the most sensitive area, - at the centre of the Indo-Pacific region. If guided hypersonic warheads are delivered by medium-range ballistic missiles to a sufficient distance, they may pose a major threat to both the US attack forces and the missile defence system, above all to the “advanced position” naval ships with the Aegis system on board.

The main asset of hypersonic manoeuvring warheads is precisely their in-flight manoeuvrability making it very hard for antimissile missiles to intercept them.

The most dangerous potential consequence of PGS development is that it may enhance, rather than reduce, the role of nuclear potential, prompting Russia and China to boost their nuclear arsenals, which Moscow and Beijing will see as the only means to inflict unacceptable damage on the US in the event of war.

A deployed national missile defence system together with the series-produced PGS weapons will leave Russia and China with no alternative to resuming the nuclear arms race as the only way to preserve the strategic balance, given that they lag behind the US in non-nuclear high-precision systems.

The problem may be maximally exacerbated in the early and the mid-2020s, when the missile defence system is created and the first PGS systems are passed into service. Given the growing political differences, there are reasons to believe that by 2023 the international situation will prove reminiscent of that of 1963 or 1983, although the standoff will be based on political and economic, rather than ideological contradictions. But then, there is still time to prevent developments from sliding into a direct standoff. Successful testing of hypersonic weapons can be used as a bargaining chip during the future talks on the limitation of nuclear and non-nuclear strategic arms.

But at the moment PGS is perfectly in line with the US tradition of gaining global military-technological superiority, which first became manifest when the US manufactured nuclear weapons in the 1940s. That superiority was again shown when the SDI programme was unveiled in the 1980s, and has now mutated into the combination of a missile defence system + PGS. But times have changed. The US was able to enjoy its nuclear monopoly for just four years, from the summer of 1945 to the summer of 1949. But the US hypersonic monopoly will hardly last for more than a day.