China fired a bullet from a hypersonic armament as it approached a target during a test in July, the Financial Times reported, adding the Pentagon was surprised because no nation was known to have the capability.
A hypersonic glide vehicle launched by China fired the gunshot over the South China Sea while moving at five times the speed of sound, the review reported, citing people familiar with the intelligence.
Some military experts believe an air-to- air bullet was fired, the review said. Others allowed it was a countermeasure that could hurt the capability of bullet defense systems to knock out the hypersonic armament, which can carry a nuclear warhead, in a battle.
The Financial Times reported last month that China conducted hypersonic munitions tests on July 27 and again onAug. 13, raising concern in Washington about Beijing’s advancing military capabilities. China’s Foreign Ministry said the nation had tested”a routine spacecraft”to see if it was applicable.
Still, it would suggest that President Xi Jinping may be exploring orbital strikes as a way to fight American advancements in shooting down ballistic dumdums before they can hang the U, If China’s tests of hypersonic munitions areconfirmed.S. motherland. Last time, theU.S. Navy successfully interdicted a mock multinational ballistic bullet.
“I clearly can not suppose of any specialized precedent to a hypersonic glide vehicle releasing some kind of cargo– inferred to be a bullet by the FT story,” said Ankit Panda, the Stanton elderly fellow in the nuclear policy program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
“I do wonder, still, if this’ bullet’may have been some other kind of cargo, maybe a countermeasure or some other kind of support medium,”he said. Panda added there are questions about the military mileage of such a demonstration, and the transnational community should not assume China intends to emplace such a armament in the field.