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   Tests Close to a ‘Sputnik Moment,’ U.S. General Says

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   [10]Politics|China’s Weapon Tests Close to a ‘Sputnik Moment,’ U.S.
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China’s Weapon Tests Close to a ‘Sputnik Moment,’ U.S. General Says

   Gen. Mark A. Milley said China’s testing of a hypersonic missile “has
   all of our attention.”
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   Comments by Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of
   Staff, were the first official confirmation of how Beijing’s
   demonstration of its capabilities took American officials by surprise.
   Comments by Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of
   Staff, were the first official confirmation of how Beijing’s
   demonstration of its capabilities took American officials by
   surprise.Credit...Sarahbeth Maney/The New York Times

   By [13]David E. Sanger and [14]William J. Broad
   Published Oct. 27, 2021Updated Nov. 3, 2021
   [15]阅读简体中文版[16]閱讀繁體中文版

   WASHINGTON — [17]China’s testing of a hypersonic missile designed to
   evade American nuclear defenses was “very close” to a “Sputnik moment”
   for the United States, Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint
   Chiefs of Staff, said Wednesday in the first official confirmation of
   how Beijing’s demonstration of its weapon capabilities had taken
   American officials by surprise.

   The tests, which could revive fears of a Cold War-like arms race, come
   as Beijing is spending heavily to modernize its military and may be
   seeking to expand its nuclear arsenal.

   Two separate tests, [18]reported earlier by The Financial Times, took
   place this summer, conducted in a fashion that Chinese officials knew
   would be highly visible to American satellites. But United States
   officials remained mostly silent until General Milley spoke on
   Wednesday, talking about the tests on a Bloomberg Television interview
   show hosted by David Rubenstein, the billionaire investor and
   philanthropist.

   “I don’t know if it’s quite a Sputnik moment, but I think it’s very
   close to that,” General Milley said, making it clear he and other
   officials were surprised. The tests, he said, were a “very significant
   technological event,” and he said “it has all of our attention.”

   Hypersonic weapons have a long history, going back to the 1960s. But
   while General Milley did not elaborate, the surprise appears to have
   arisen from how China joined two different technologies — the launch of
   a missile that completed a partial orbit of the earth, and a hypersonic
   vehicle that could plow a suddenly shifting path, maneuvering in ways
   that would render all current U.S. missile defenses obsolete.

   At least one of the tests was not completely successful; it
   [19]reportedly missed an intended target by a wide margin. But the
   advances suggest that China might one day be able to arm a hypersonic
   vehicle with a [20]nuclear warhead, launch it into a low orbit, and
   release it from anyplace — including, perhaps, an evasive flight path
   over Antarctica.

   Existing defenses of the continental United States all point west and
   north over the Pacific, meaning they might fail in defeating an attack
   from the south. Even if there were antimissile bases pointed south,
   current antimissile technology is designed to intercept
   intercontinental ballistic warheads on predictable, parabolic paths in
   outer space — not hypersonic weapons that can zig and zag through the
   atmosphere.

   “We just don’t know how we can defend against that technology, neither
   does China, neither does Russia,” said Ambassador Robert A. Wood, who
   is retiring in a few weeks as the U.S. representative at arms control
   sessions in Geneva.

   Mr. Wood, a longtime American diplomat, [21]spoke before General
   Milley’s characterization of the test, but noted that hypersonic
   technology was “something that we have been concerned about” for a long
   time. “We have held back” from pursuing its military uses, he added, to
   avoid stoking a new kind of arms race.

   General Milley’s reference to a near-Sputnik moment was meant to
   resonate with a generation that remembers a long-ago Cold War. Sputnik
   was the launch, in 1957, of a Soviet satellite. It created fear in
   Washington that the Soviets were getting ahead in the space race, and
   led to President John F. Kennedy’s declaration that the United States
   would be the first to land humans on the moon, an accomplishment that
   was reached in less than a decade. But it also helped spur the nuclear
   arms race, which was only tamped down in the past 30 years, after the
   Soviet Union’s collapse.

   Now, the arms race could be revived, though in a new form.

   The United States has an active hypersonic program of its own, as does
   Russia and, among others, North Korea. But the U.S. program has run
   into its own technical difficulties, [22]including a booster failure
   last week.

   Both China and the United States have the resources to work out the
   bugs, and the concern of many arms control experts is that it could
   become a new form of competition — at the very moment that President
   Biden has been looking for ways to avoid a proposed trillion-dollar
   modernization of the American nuclear forces and delivery systems.

   The fact that the Pentagon was so surprised may explain why it stayed
   silent after the revelation of the tests. John F. Kirby, the Pentagon
   spokesman, declined to confirm the tests after the first report in The
   Financial Times.

   What apparently made the Chinese tests unsettling, [23]military experts
   said in recent interviews, was that — in a first — it combined two
   well-known military technologies that previously had been developed
   separately, starting a half-century ago.

   The first of the two technologies was a weapon that circled the globe
   before speeding toward its target, an approach the Soviet Union had
   [24]pioneered in 1960s. Known as the Fractional Orbital Bombardment
   System, or FOBS, the Soviet concept was to send a nuclear warhead into
   a partial orbit of the Earth before it plunged back through the
   atmosphere toward a target.

   The system was seen as ideal for surprise attacks because the weapon
   could fly on any course, even over the South Pole, and in theory could
   evade radars and detection. However, the United States quickly lofted
   [25]early-warning satellites that could spot the bright flames of
   rising Soviet missiles and diminish the element of surprise.

   Separately, the Soviets and others worked to develop hypersonic
   weapons, which by definition could fly at more than five times the
   speed of sound, sometimes to deliver conventional weapons, not nuclear
   warheads.

Understand U.S.-China Relations
     __________________________________________________________________

   Card 1 of 6

   A tense era in U.S.-China ties. The two powers are profoundly at odds
   as they jockey for influence beyond their own shores, compete in
   technology and maneuver for military advantages. Here’s what to know
   about the main fronts in [26]U.S.-China relations:

   Pacific dominance. As China has built up its military presence, the
   U.S. has sought to widen its alliances in the region. [27]A major
   potential flash point is Taiwan, the democratic island that the
   Communist Party regards as Chinese territory. Should the U.S. intervene
   there, it could reshape the regional order.

   Trade. The trade war started by the Trump administration is technically
   on pause. But the Biden administration has continued to protest China’s
   economic policies and impose tariffs on Chinese goods, [28]signaling no
   thaw in trade relations.

   Technology. Internet giants have mostly been shut out of China, but
   plenty of U.S. tech companies still do big business there, raising
   [29]cybersecurity concerns in Washington. Mr. Xi has said China needs
   to achieve technological [30]“self-reliance.”

   Human rights. Under Mr. Xi, China’s confrontations with the U.S. over
   values and freedoms have become more frequent, including standoffs over
   Beijing’s [31]crackdown on pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong and
   [32]mass detentions of Muslims in Xinjiang.

   World leadership. China’s leaders see signs of American decline
   everywhere and they want a bigger voice in global leadership, seeking a
   greater role in Western-dominated institutions and [33]courting allies
   that share their frustration with the West.
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   The United States [34]began investigating that technology more than a
   half century ago, and [35]a RAND Corporation report in 2017 said more
   than two dozen nations, including China, were experimenting with
   hypersonic flight. The appeal was clear: With the United States
   deploying more missile defenses in the Pacific, largely aimed at
   containing North Korea, Chinese strategists wanted to demonstrate that
   they could easily evade the antimissile technologies that the United
   States [36]had spent roughly $400 billion over the decades to develop.

   Starting in 2014, Beijing [37]conducted a series of hypersonic flight
   tests, and it has since deployed with its armed forces [38]a
   medium-range missile known as the DF-17. The missile, topped with a
   hypersonic glide vehicle, has become a fixture in Beijing’s military
   parades and [39]images of it are widely available.

   For its part, China said the flight test this summer — it has
   acknowledged only one, though U.S. officials say there were two — was
   of a reusable space vehicle, not a nuclear-capable hypersonic missile.

   American critics [40]faulted the initial report of the claimed
   hypersonic feat as vague and unconvincing and, if true, unsurprising
   given the decades of work on the underlying technologies. It was, they
   say, a logical step forward for an aspiring nuclear power.

   “Any country that can put something into space could do this,” said
   [41]David Wright, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of
   Technology who has long studied space developments. “And we certainly
   should not be surprised that China could do this given the
   sophistication of its space program.”

   The tests may, however, have had a deeper resonance for Pentagon
   officials concerned with how China is [42]flying sorties inside
   Taiwan’s air identification zone, digging [43]hundreds of new silos for
   long-range nuclear missiles, building [44]an arsenal of antisatellite
   weapons and routinely firing [45]more rockets into space than any other
   country.

   At a press briefing on Wednesday, Mr. Kirby said that the combination
   of China’s actions and its intent would get “factored into” a series of
   upcoming reviews, including a national defense strategy that is due in
   the coming months. It will also presumably be taken into account as
   officials compile the Nuclear Posture Review, a document that every new
   presidential administration publishes, usually a year or so into
   office, to lay out its plans for managing the U.S. nuclear arsenal.

   Mr. Kirby made clear that the United States was competing in the same
   arena as China, saying “our own pursuit of hypersonic capabilities is
   real, it’s tangible, and we are absolutely working towards being able
   to develop that capability. But I won’t get into the specifics of
   testing and where we are going.”

   Then, just hours after General Milley had compared the tests to one of
   the defining moments of the Cold War with Russia, Mr. Kirby seemed to
   warn against using the same terminology in the case of China.

   “I don’t think it does any good for us to characterize this and put a
   label on it, this advancement of capabilities,” he said.

   David E. Sanger reported from Washington, and William J. Broad from New
   York. Eric Schmitt contributed reporting from Washington.

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