Christopher Kirchhoff: evaluation

Transcript context

…Now, I never understand what I read about hypersonic missiles. I see in the media, “China has launched the world’s first nuclear-capable hypersonic, and it goes 10x the speed of sound.” And people are worried. If mutual assured destruction is already in place, what exactly is the nature of the worry? Is it just we don’t have enough response time? It’s a number of things, and when you add them up, they really are quite frightening. Hypersonic weapons, because of the way they maneuver, don’t necessarily have to follow a ballistic trajectory. We have very sophisticated space-based systems that can detect the launch of a missile, particularly a nuclear missile, but right then you’re immediately calculating where it’s going to go based on its ballistic trajectory. Well, a hypersonic weapon can steer. It can turn left, it can turn right, it can dive up, it can dive down. But that’s distinct from hypersonic, right?…

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