April 25, 2010 Hyperfast missile to hit anywhere in an hour Tony Allen-Mills in Washington HAUNTED by the memory of a lost opportunity to kill Osama Bin Laden before he attacked the World Trade Center in New York, US military planners have won President Barack Obamaâs support for a new generation of high-speed weapons that are intended to strike anywhere on Earth within an hour. Obamaâs interest in Prompt Global Strike (PGS), a nonnuclear weapons programme, has alarmed China and Russia and complicated nuclear arms reduction negotiations. White House officials confirmed last week that the president, who won the Nobel peace prize last year, is considering the deployment of a new class of hypersonic guided missiles that can reach their targets at speeds of Mach 5 â about 3,600mph. That is nearly seven times faster than the 550mph Tomahawk cruise missiles that arrived too late to kill Bin Laden at an Al-Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan in 1998. âThe ability to attack a wide range of targets at intercontinental range, promptly and without resort to nuclear weapons, is of central importance to US national security,â said Daniel Goure, a defence analyst at the Lexington Institute in Virginia. The White House has requested almost $250m in congressional funding next year for research into hypersonic technologies, some of which harness the shock waves generated by a fast-moving missile to increase its speed further. The new weapon could be launched from air, land or sea on a long-range missile travelling at suborbital altitudes above 350,000ft. The missile releases a hypersonic pilotless plane that receives updates from satellites as it homes in on its target at up to five times the speed of sound, generating so much heat that it has to be shielded with special materials to avoid melting. Depending on the version the Pentagon chooses, the warhead would either split into dozens of lethal fragments in the final seconds of its flight or simply smash into its target, relying on devastating kinetic energy to destroy anything in its path. As a precision weapon its effects would be quite different from the mass destruction inflicted by nuclear warheads delivered by intercontinental ballistic missiles that can reach 13,400mph. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/new...cle7107179.ece :eek:
In order to kill OBL there has to be the real will to kill him not the the smoke and mirrors we see. Do you really think we can't find him? Look we justified new military technology. Thanks for posting, it's interesting.
Nothing new if you are a military fan. Russia and China have been developing it for decades also. China Developing Scramjet Propulsion Sep 2, 2007 By Craig Covault http://www.aviationweek.com/aw/generic/story_channel.jsp?channel=defense&id=news/aw090307p2.xml Building on its ramjet experience, China is embracing the much more difficult task of developing Mach 5 air vehicle concepts in which propulsion and aerodynamics are highly coupled. As part of this effort, an integrated scramjet model is about to begin testing at up to Mach 5.6 in a new wind tunnel in Beijing. .....âChina has the greatest potential to compete militarily with the U.S. and field disruptive military technologies that could, over time, offset traditional U.S. military advantages,â the 2006 Pentagon Quadrennial Review said about overall Chinese military technology initiatives. And over the next several decades, the scramjet work could eventually provide China with a tactical hypersonic global-strike capability beyond the countryâs strategic ballistic missile force. The U.S. has similar goals for its own growing scramjet program. The Chinese allowed a peek into multiple aspects of their scramjet efforts at the recent American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics Joint Propulsion Conference in Cincinnati. Chinese engineers from several research facilities presented about a dozen papers on their scramjet developments, as well as details on the new wind tunnel. At the same forum, their papers revealed new rocket propulsion research, including work on hybrid systems that use a combination of propellants easier to handle and store than most propellants in wider use today. New insight also was offered on Chinese solid rocket motor technology work, important for both missile and space launch applications..... A scramjet (supersonic combustion ramjet) flies at Mach 5 or faster using hydrogen fuel and oxygen out of the air for oxidizer. The engine must combine an advanced ramjet that changes configuration to swallow supersonic flow above about Mach 4....
Seems like if they were tipped with nukes and how couldn't they be, it'd be next to impossible to verify their numbers or where they were. Like a shell game.
Of course in those scenarios everything is perfect for those missles to launch. I dont know about you, but when I see container ships i never see only 2 containers per ship. I see 100s. The missles would have to be lucky enough to be on top of all the other containers to be able to open up and launch, then after that there has to be no obstructions like on board cranes in the way. As for on the trucks, you have to take the driver into consideration. He sees a missle start to pop up, who is to say wont flip his truck on purpose to stop the missle. Not to mention that on most freeways there is an overpass no bigger than 18ft about every mile down the road. Unless they can get those things up in just a few seconds and then launch, they will be toppled the minute the truck goes to the overpass. Lets not forget that the minute one of these weapons are discovered coming out of port (a 1 in 50 chance of finding one which means if russia sends over at least 50 missles, the law of averages will determine we find at least one) Then Russia is over. its an act of war and we have alot mroe military bases near them than they do near us.