A national security official under Joe Biden who reviewed the document is said to have turned pale on realising Beijing had “redundancy after redundancy” for “every trick we had up our sleeve”, The New York Times reported.
Last year, Pete Hegseth, the defence secretary, said that “we lose every time” in the Pentagon’s war games against China, and predicted the Asian country’s hypersonic missiles could destroy aircraft carriers within minutes.
I don’t mean to belittle the force projection that a super carrier can bring to bear, but these hypersonic missiles are pretty scary, if they work
An Aegis missle can knock it down tho…
They cost 4.7 mil a pop, which isn’t much to the US military. And don’t even need launched by the carrier, it’d be launched by ships between the middle and the carrier.
Apparently China claims they have hypersonic rockets made out of concrete for the low low price of 99k each, but that’s not exactly believable. Especially since they’re claiming 99k and not 100k. I mean, even that they’re using “round” US dollars.
That’s pretty common propaganda to claim something is cheaper and more widely available than it really is. It’s why we split our uranium into two bombs in WW2. Because a country might use all of it at once as a bluff. But only idiot would make just two and then use them both days apart. It made it look like we could have a bunch. Not enough to keep up the pace, but how many? 5, 12?
It was more psychological warfare than anything. So is China claiming these are so cheap and mass producible when if that was true we’d see the same cost savings in commercial spaces.
No other country would be able to compete
We split our PLUTONIUM into 2 bombs because one was gadget, the test. Little boy (Hiroshima) was a uranium gun design and fat man (Nagasaki) was plutonium implosion.
Edit: To be clear your point about our bluff absolutely stands. It would likely be months at best before we would be able to drop another fission weapon of any design
Huh TIL the nuclear bombs used two different technologies