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Russia has hypersonic reentry vehicles, they are pretty much impossible to intercept (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/RS-28_Sarmat https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wi

Russia has hypersonic reentry vehicles, they are pretty much impossible to intercept (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/RS-28_Sarmat https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/RS-28_Sarmat), each of these MIRV contains 10-15 nuclear warheads or an unspecified number of hypersonic glide vehicles (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avangard_(hypersonic_glide_vehicle) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avangard_(hypersonic_glide_v... )with nuclear payloads. They figured out the hydrodynamics to make the hypersonic glide vehicles work, I believe the US is roughly a decade behind on that. Note that this requires genuinely hard math to do and the US funding on this was temporarily suspended because it was thought to be infeasible.

isatty 4y ago
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prompt_Global_Strike https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prompt_Global_Strike Suggests that the US is not behind. If Wikipedia has that information it is likely that we’re already several decades ahead, in fact.
- orbifold 4y ago
  The publicly known US tests of hypersonic gliders all failed or rather disintegrated, as I said there is a genuinely hard problem to be solved here and the US stopped research into it in the 80s for quite a while.
jandrewrogers 4y ago
There is nothing that makes hypersonic reentry vehicles uniquely difficult to intercept, I'm not sure why anyone would assume that. The US considered this a solved problem in the 1980s. As for the US being "behind", the US was developing and testing endo-atmospheric hypersonic missile platforms as far back as the 1980s. Russia et al designed hypersonic weapons with significantly compromised terminal guidance performance, a compromise the US will not accept in operational systems. Terminal guidance is the hardest technical problem when designing long-range endo-atmospheric hypersonic weapons. That the US is starting to move these systems toward production after 30-40 years of research suggests that they've solved the problem of terminal guidance to their satisfaction.

isatty 4y ago

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prompt_Global_Strike https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prompt_Global_Strike Suggests that the US is not behind. If Wikipedia has that information it is likely that we’re already several decades ahead, in fact.

orbifold 4y ago
The publicly known US tests of hypersonic gliders all failed or rather disintegrated, as I said there is a genuinely hard problem to be solved here and the US stopped research into it in the 80s for quite a while.

jandrewrogers 4y ago

There is nothing that makes hypersonic reentry vehicles uniquely difficult to intercept, I'm not sure why anyone would assume that. The US considered this a solved problem in the 1980s. As for the US being "behind", the US was developing and testing endo-atmospheric hypersonic missile platforms as far back as the 1980s. Russia et al designed hypersonic weapons with significantly compromised terminal guidance performance, a compromise the US will not accept in operational systems. Terminal guidance is the hardest technical problem when designing long-range endo-atmospheric hypersonic weapons. That the US is starting to move these systems toward production after 30-40 years of research suggests that they've solved the problem of terminal guidance to their satisfaction.