Justice mattered in the minds of these leaders, but not quite as much as surviving the next great conflict to come.
While the world ached for justice, defense officials in both America and the Soviet Union already saw the Cold War looming large on the horizon. Nazi Germany’s war machine had torn through the continent, often on the backs of Germany’s state-of-the-art military technology, but geopolitics is a game of theater and pragmatism in equal measure. Operation Paperclip and the burgeoning Cold WarĪs World War II came to a close, the United States and Soviet Union’s relationship with one another was already beginning to sour. The X-20 was a 1950s science fiction fever dream born of the nuclear age and the earliest days of the Cold War… And according to some experts, it very likely would have worked. It would soar in the sky in the blurred line between earth’s atmosphere and the vacuum of space, bouncing along the heavens before releasing its payload over Soviet targets miles below. from over the South Pole, where Uncle Sam’s defenses are thinnest.īorn out of Germany’s World War II efforts to create a bomber that could attack New York and continue on to the Pacific, Boeing’s X-20 Dyna-Soar was to be a single-seat craft boosted into the sky atop American rockets. China’s new FOB follows no set trajectory, deploys a hypersonic glide vehicle that can defeat local missile defense, and can even approach the U.S. This is a serious problem for the United States, as the nation’s missile defense apparatus relies on early detection of an ICBM launch and then carefully calculating the weapon’s trajectory in order to intercept it. These weapons enter low earth orbit, but rather than following an arcing trajectory like an ICBM, the FOB can use thrusters to change course and choose when and how it will renter the atmosphere.
Air Force’s secretive X-37B uncrewed orbital vehicle than a hypersonic missile-like Russia’s air-launched Kinzhal missile.
In fact, the Soviet Union deployed a dozen and a half similar weapons during the Cold War, and the United States very nearly leveraged the same basic premise to field a hypersonic sub-orbital bomber in the 1960s.Ĭhina’s recent test was of something we usually call a FOB, or fractional orbital bombardment system, and it might be more prudent to compare it to the U.S. The weapon China tested a few weeks ago was not a missile, nor was it new technology. The news prompted a slew of headlines about China shocking the world with an advanced new hypersonic missile the problem is, neither of those assertions is true.
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