China accused the United States on Wednesday of fomenting an arms race in Asia. The criticism came after the American announcement that the country and its military partners the United Kingdom and Australia will develop a hypersonic missile.
According to Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian, the war cooperation plans of countries within the known pact with Aukus (acronym from its initials in English) “not only increase the risk of nuclear proliferation, but also further intensify the arms race in the Asia-Pacific”. “Countries in the region need to be highly vigilant,” she said.
The reference to the issue of proliferation is due to the fact that the first declared objective of Aukus, founded last September, was to supply Australia with nuclear-powered submarines – but not to launch atomic weapons, but conventional ones.
On Tuesday (5), Aukus leaders, Joe Biden at the head, had announced their intention to deepen their military cooperation, including hypersonic missiles. The measure is aimed at China, the reason for the pact’s existence, but also at Russia.
In the Ukrainian war, Moscow tested for the first time in combat a model of hypersonic missile, the Kinjal (dagger, in Russian). From a military point of view, they would make no difference, given that Ukrainian anti-aircraft defenses do not have enough sophistication against the weapon, which flies at up to 10 times the speed of sound and can manoeuvre, according to the Russians.
So it was both a practical test and a show of strength. China, according to the US, tested a more sophisticated model of a hypersonic missile late last year, although it denies the test and says it was just a space experiment.
Even North Korea, another American rival and backed by Moscow and Beijing, jumped on the bandwagon and announced in January that it had launched such a missile. There is no independent confirmation of this, but it is clear that the issue has become a priority in the anti-Washington camp.
Americans had been skating on the subject, despite researching it for decades. On Tuesday, however, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) completed the announcement by Biden, Boris Johnson (UK) and Scott Morrison (Australia) saying that they had done a test two weeks ago of a new hypersonic models.
This time, unlike last year, the missile flew 555 km at 19.8 km altitude with speeds just over Mach 5, or five times the speed of sound. The test was not made public before because there was fear of heightening explosive tension with Russia due to the war.
Days before the conflict, Vladimir Putin tested hypersonic and intercontinental weapons from his nuclear arsenal. In the announcement of the war, he threatened without much subtlety to use atomic warheads against anyone who meddled in the matter, and soon after, he put his strategic forces on high alert. Suddenly, the risk of a Third World War came naturally to the speeches of politicians.
The American missile uses the so-called scramjet, which makes internal combustion with supersonic airflow. It is the same principle as the Russian Tsirkon (zircon), which is in an advanced stage of testing, but not operational. The Kinjal is basically a solid-fuel ballistic missile fired from planes, an older technology with the alleged maneuverability.
The US has set aside $4.7 billion in its budget sent to Congress for fiscal year 2023 (October this year to next September) for hypersonics, within a weapons development budget that amounts to $130 billion.
Aukus is one of the instruments of Biden’s aggressive policy towards China, which until the war had brought Putin and Xi Jinping closer together to the point of forming a rhetorical alliance in Cold War 2.0 between Beijing and Washington. Another is the Quad, a security pact with the same Australia and others of the Chinese rivals in the region, Japan and India.
