 My name is James Acton. I'm co-director of the Nuclear Policy Program here at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. And the fact that we have well over 100 people in the middle of the beginning of July for a discussion on hypersonic weapons, I think gives you a sense of how live this issue is in Washington right now. I'm going to say it's a hot issue indeed. I'm going to do a touch more editorializing than I would normally do when I'm chairing an event. I've been writing about hypersonic weapons for seven or eight years now. Motivated primarily by the belief that the United States has not had a proper discussion about the benefits and risks of this technology. By far the most common argument you hear in favor of developing hypersonic technology. Particularly in Congress, is Russia is doing it, China is doing it, therefore we must do it. There are good reasons for doing this. There's good reasons for not doing it. There's good reasons for doing it, but to my mind the worst possible reason for pursuing a technology is because somebody else is doing it. What we ought to be having right now at a time when there's lots of money going into research and development, at a time when an acquisition decision maybe in the near future is a real discussion about the potential military benefits of this technology and the potential strategic risks of this technology. My own contribution to this discussion came out perfectly timed for the lull in interest in hypersonic technology. In the second half of the Obama administration, we have some copies of this outside. This is my book, Silver Bullet, asking the right questions about conventional prompt global strike. I think it's a bit dated now in terms of the programatics, but I think it's still in terms of some of the arguments. I hope it's still relevant and useful. You can download that free of charge. But today we're going to really use as our springboard an article by Jeff Smith, which appeared in the New York Times a week or two ago, which is an absolute phenomenal tour de force. Examining hypersonic technology is looking at the arguments for and against doing it. Jeff is currently, and let me get his job title right, managing editor for national security at the Center for Public Integrity. He's a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist who spent much of his career with the Washington Post. Jeff is going to kick us off in a couple of moments telling us about his article. And then I'm joined by two of the foremost experts in this technology as well. To my immediate left is Dean Wilkening. He's a physicist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, formerly of Lawrence Livermore Lab, and C. Sackert Stamford. One of the most informed, one of the physicists who has played the biggest role over the last couple of decades is in informing the policy debate. And to his left, Amy Wolf from the Congressional Research Service. Amy has been in forming Congress for 25 years now, at 31 years at CRS. And not just informing Congress about arms control, nuclear weapons, hypersonics, but also one of the most prominent voices at NGO events such as this. So let me start off handing the floor over to Jeff, who's going to talk for about 10 minutes or so. Then I'm going to hand over to Dean and Amy. Then we're going to have a bit of a panel discussion and then over to you. So please think up and save your question for the panel discussion. Jeff. It's lovely to see so many people here interested in this topic. Welcome to everybody. I'm just going to mostly read this through. I've got a few slides I want to show you as we go along. For about 70 years, as everyone knows, we've been living under the threat of an attack within 30 minutes by ballistic missiles that would loop over the North Pole. So have the Russians and the Chinese. In Washington, under this traditional threat scenario, the military would have about four minutes to report an attack, five to six more minutes to notify the president in a recommended option. And then the president would have about seven minutes to make a decision that would affect the lives and deaths of billions of people and possibly the fate of the planet. After that, it would take about six minutes for launch crews to actually execute a nuclear launch order. This is the way it is today. But guess what? It's not the way things will be tomorrow. Over the next five years, perhaps, and certainly over the next decade, this lovely leisurely 30 minute window to make momentous decisions about life and death is going to shrink to about half that time. Those seven precious minutes for the president to ponder what to do when military censors are reporting an incoming missile barrage, those will go away. The nine minutes the military can take to ensure the attack is real, that its censors aren't being misled or deliberately hacked. Most of that time won't be there. The six minutes that launch crews would take to authenticate a launch order and carry it out using a checklist and the ponderous two-man rule, well, that time is going to have to shrink as well. All this careful deliberating and acting will instead have to occur within the window of time that it takes for you and I to get in the elevator in an office building, walk down to the corner buy a candy bar or a bag of nuts at the drug store next to where we work. That might be all the time there will be 10 minutes, maybe 15 to decide our collective futures if things continue on the path that they're on. Why is this our fate? It's because of the persistent appetite of many militaries for faster weaponry. Faster, precise and unstoppable weaponry like fulfillment of a dream is finally about to be satisfied more fully than ever before and the meal that'll do it is called the hypersonic missile. Capable of traveling at more than 15 times the speed of sound hypersonic missiles start off atop a booster rocket and accelerate enormously and after a few minutes of flight they arrive at their targets in a blinding destructive flash before any sonic booms or other meaningful warning. They're being designed to be launched from bombers, from land, from ships and from submarines and they will hit their targets in many cases in less than 15 minutes according to testimony by General John Hyten head of the U.S. Strategic Amendment. Until the past few years we haven't been hugely interested in these weapons partly because making something that heats to more than 5,000 degrees while blasted through the atmosphere and retaining the ability to maneuver it just isn't easy. So we've thrown about $2 billion at the problem without too much to show for it until recently as I said but now we're spending more about 2.6 billion just in the next year alone and that's just in the United States according to present plans. So things are speeding up so to speak and according to Congress we will have a deployed working hypersonic missile by 2022 no matter what it's a matter of law. The Russians meanwhile so they have one now and the Chinese appear to have one but haven't boasted yet that it's deployed and the Indians are trying and the Japanese are working on their own model. The Trump administration is seriously gung-ho about all this. The acting defense secretary Patrick Shanahan in December spoke about industrializing hypersonic missile production. His undersecretary Michael Griffin who is overseeing all this work has spoken about America eventually having an arsenal of a couple of thousands prompt strike missiles and he and Shanahan this spring created a new space development agency of some 225 people tasked with putting a network of sensors in low Earth orbit that would track incoming hypersonic missiles and direct American hypersonic attacks. This isn't the network's only purpose but it will have quote a war fighting capability should come to that Griffin said in March. Let's look at a few hypersonic missiles. Let's see if I can make this work. The first photo is a wave rider glide vehicle to early prototype that traveled briefly at the relatively slow speed of Mach 14 or just 15 times, 14 times the speed of sound. The second one is a picture of the tactical boost glide vehicle a version being developed by DARPA and the Raytheon Corporation. The third picture is the Russian model which Putin claimed in February last year he has deployed it's called the Kinjal and the picture shows it's slung beneath the Russian bomber and the Victory Day parade last year. What do you want to bet that if President Trump gets re-elected you'll see it's US counterparts slung beneath the bomber flying over the mole on the 4th of July. Russia is developing another hypersonic which it says will be launched from a big new ballistic missile and is also working on a third hypersonic missile system designed to be launched from submarines that Putin said last February could be stationed in neutral waters within a short time, short flight time to quote the decision-making centers that are creating threats to us. Evidently seeking domestic acclaim he compared the effort to the Soviet Union's launch of its Sputnik satellite, the beeping silver ball that orbited the Earth for five months in 1957 and 1958 and transfixed the world. That achievement in the end didn't quite play out as planned because it provoked a space race and accelerated the Cold War but who pays attention to history anyway. Anyway, the third picture is of the launch of the Chinese version the Starry Sky II in August of last year. Some analysts I've spoken with say the Chinese are actually ahead of the Russians because the Chinese are trying to build shorter range hypersonics that don't have to endure high heating in the atmosphere for as long as the Russian ones might so they've set themselves a more easily achievable goal. What does it mean to launch a hypersonic missile? The United States versions are meant to fly at speeds between Mach 15 and Mach 20 or more than 11,400 miles per hour. That means if my rough math is correct and fortunately we have stocked the panel with people who can correct my math, a speed of around 31 miles per second. That means that if you're looking at a map of the Washington metropolitan region, a map showing the distance of about 38 miles from one end from one side to the other, a hypersonic missile would take about 1.2 seconds to traverse that entire distance. Did you just blink? It's already passed. I should mention here that once a hypersonic missile has been launched the only person to know for certain where it's likely to land is the person or the team or the country that launched it. The missiles are being designed to be so maneuverable that the perimeter of their potential launch landing zone could be about as big as Rhode Island. Officials might sound a general alarm but they'd be clueless about exactly where the missiles were headed. This seriously complicates the creation of an effective defense. You cannot obviously defend a whole state against swarms of small, screamingly fast missiles. When I started reporting this article I started wondering if you would actually see it coming if it was headed for you. And the answers I got were a bit squishy. Maybe a streak of light would etch its way into your brain as a final image. But it would probably be so fleeting that your brain would actually have trouble processing what was happening quickly enough to make any sense of it at all. One thing that's clear is that if you wouldn't hear it if you were on the receiving end because the sonic boom is trailing. So if you hear the boom you might actually relish the fact that it's aimed for something or someone else. But oops, there's this little issue about the volume of the boom. When the Navy conducted a hypersonic missile test in the Pacific one evening in October 2017 stretching between Hawaii and Kwajalei and Atoll it predicted the sonic boom would top out at 175 decibels. So if you have the good fortune to hear it go by because it's headed for someplace else your head might still hurt a lot. Somewhere between eardrums popping and instant death I think is what the 175 decibels rates out. Less list some of the potential targets of hypersonic missiles which at such high speeds can drill into their targets with a force of three to four tons of TNT. In theory the targets could be Russian nuclear armed ballistic missiles being carried on trucks or rails. Or the Chinese could use their own versions of these missiles to target American bombers and other aircrafted bases in Japan or Guam. Or the missiles could attack vital land or sea base radars anywhere or military headquarters in Asian ports or near European cities. Hypersonic missiles are also ideal for waging a decapitation strike. Assassinating a country's top military or political officials. Instant leader killers, a former Obama administration White House official who asked not to be named said in an interview. At the moment naval vessels are sitting ducks so to speak for this type of weaponry according to congressional testimony by Griffin and others. As an illustration one can recall what happened to the USS Stark. A guided missile frigate while deployed in 1987 off the coast of Saudi Arabia. Two French made exoset missiles equipped with small fragmentation warheads and fired from an Iraqi jet. Put large holes in the ship started an immense fire disabled its command center and killed dozens of its crew. But the exoset struck at less than half the likely speed of a terminal hypersonic missile and the kinetic energy behind such an impact increases the Dean and James will correct me if I'm wrong, quadratically with speed. So hypersonics could in short suddenly pierce the steel decks. One of America's 11 multi-billion dollar aircraft carriers instantly stopping its flight operations. Just how quickly could such an attack actually unfold in a crisis? It's a simple calculation of speed and distance. When fired by the U.S. submarines or bombers stationed at Guam hypersonics could in theory hit China's important inland missile bases like Dalenco in less than 15 minutes. President Putin has likewise claimed that one of Russia's new hypersonic missiles will travel at Mach 10 while the other will travel at Mach 20. If true that would mean a Russian aircraft or ship firing one of them near Bermuda could strike the Pentagon some 800 miles away in about five minutes. China meanwhile has flight tested its own hypersonic missiles at speeds fast enough to reach Guam from the Chinese coastline within minutes. What does all this mean for our security? For our military prowess, for international stability? It's clear in one sense that weapons that are as fast, precise and unstoppable as these are invitingly and understandably cool. They'll constitute a wondrous new way to attack a large range of targets almost anywhere in the world in just minutes, not hours. Bombers take hours typically and cruise missiles can also take in aching the long time to hit their targets. Suppose for example that our intelligence agencies in the early stages of a war or on the eve of a war spot a rogue dictator at a restaurant. This was Saddam Hussein, the beginning of the Iraq war where they spot an international terrorist leader on the mountaintop, this was Osama bin Laden where they see a single nuclear warhead being loaded onto a ballistic missile that could reach America, this could be North Korea. And those agencies are also saying that if we could just hit that target, immediately we could change the course of history and save a lot of lives. Who could easily say no, this is a bad idea. But this is where we are right now in our thinking. It hasn't progressed much beyond the, this is cool. This would be effective idea. That's kind of where things have stopped in Washington policymaking. But there's some drawbacks which don't appear to be getting the same amount of attention. Hypersonics at a minimum raise questions about the efficacy and wisdom of continuing to spend billions of dollars on missile defenses and aircraft carriers. That's another ship hit by a missile like the Exocet. They're far since around 1985, we spent about $200 billion on missile defenses and in March 2018, General Haydn, commander of the U.S. Strategic Command told the Senate Armed Services Committee that we don't have any defense that could deny the employment of hypersonic missiles against us. We've also spent about $39 billion just to build, just to build, not to operate, our 11 active aircraft carriers with the cost of each one rising from around a billion dollars a piece to more than $12.9 billion for the most recent one. Under Secretary of Defense, Michael Griffin said in March 2018 that we can't now see hypersonics as they approach at sea. And if you allow an attacking vehicle to get close enough to begin its terminal dive from 100,000 feet onto a carrier battle group, you're probably dead meat. We really want to give up aircraft carriers. Do they not serve, do they not serve some continuing, valuable purpose? And there are some second order effects which all have to do with something called strategic stability, a topic that academics discuss a lot, but militaries don't think about as much, and that rarely takes center stage in any international arms control negotiations. It boils down to this, in a crisis when two countries, or alliances, or at loggerheads, and the rhetoric is flying and everyone's getting tense. Have we done enough to create a set of conditions in our creation and exercise and deployment of military force to make political leaders say, hey, hold on, let's back down and look for some peaceful settlement here. Or have we done something to say, something to make those same leaders say, crap, I've got to use my weaponry now because I think the other guy's about to strike and if he does, I won't be able to retaliate. But here's the warning now being sounded by lots of these academics. Creating a sizable new arsenal of super fast weapons can make other nations jittery. Fearful that they might be robbed of an ability to respond effectively to a major attack. If a lot of countries are armed with missiles that arrived in minutes, their leaders' trigger fingers could become itchy. An accidental war might ensue if one or both sides see only risk from waiting to try to resolve it peacefully. Weapons analysts have long worried about the use it or lose it pressures on political leaders early in a crisis to launch ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads because an opponent's missiles could wipe out some of those weapons in just 30 minutes. But what if the time needed to complete a preemptive strike on opposing forces is cut in half? That period so short it might strip the ability of humans to act wisely and prevent a conflict they would prefer to avoid. There's a reason to be cautious it seems to me. The history of warfare is replete with examples of military scientists and the officers who support them predicting that a new technology will provide a crushing advantage or serve as an impeccable deterrent to someone else's attack. Some of those who worked on the Manhattan Project in the 1940s such as physicist Eugene Wigner imagined that its invention, the invention of the nuclear weapon would force the world to establish what he called a common higher authority in charge of all military forces. We all know what happened instead. Admiral James Foggo, a former director of the Navy staff who now commands naval forces in Europe and Africa was quoted yesterday expressing confidence that good missile defenses are a perfect deterrent to attack because they will make our enemies reluctant to strike. John Bolton, the national security advisor also subscribes to this view as we know and griffin does too. We actually don't know if this is how things will play out in a crisis and there are good reasons to think it might not. Play out this way. It's clear that Russia started or at least accelerated its hypersonics program to ensure it would get around any American ballistic missile defenses. Nobody wanted to listen to us about the strategic dangers of abandoning the treaty. Putin said last year with an aggressive flourish as he displayed videos and animations of his nation's hypersonic missiles. So listen now, he said. One thing that might happen is that rather than bringing us some new peace and stability, hypersonics are just going to instigate a new and complex arms race with unforeseeable consequences. Now one knows for sure what will happen once the United States, Russia, and China or nations entangled in a regional rivalry like India equip themselves with sizable destructive arsenals of fast flying missiles. The United Nations Disarmament Office has warned of height and risks to peace. Congress last year ordered the Pentagon to produce a report by January, the end of January on the threat of accidental war once hypersonics are deployed but it hasn't been turned over. So far it seems those in charge of hypersonics have been focused on building them, not imagining the reactions they might inspire in others. So there's a Japanese movie, Ron. If you're wondering how could a war start accidentally? You need to take a look at Akira Kurosawa's masterpiece, Ron, and I'm gonna help you. Contains my favorite depiction of how a crisis can lead to accidental catastrophic conflict. It's the second great battle scene that graphically depicts how an accidental war might begun. Two rival sons of a warlord, each hungry for a title of land, initially agree to settle their dispute. Here he's getting advice. He doesn't wanna have a war, this particular warlord doesn't wanna have a war, he wants to avoid it. He's getting advice from, in this case, one of his advisors, his wife. Wars are won by powerful armies and strong leadership. We need to be, we need to project power, we need to make sure that other people are scared of us. He orders his troops to get ready for battle. They say this is a bad idea. There's some other warlords nearby, they're the ones on the hill. As long as we don't move from here, we don't pose any threat. Everybody's fine, we're just being, we're just sitting here. But their presence makes this warlord nervous. One false move could mean war, that worries me. His, one of his advisors says, let's not give the other people an excuse to attack us. He's worried that they look hostile when they're in formation like this. Everybody's trying to avoid things. Someone sends a messenger, they agree on a deal, they say they promise they're not to attack. But then somebody starts moving their forces around. And he orders, this warlord orders his troops to get ready for battle. They become convinced that war's gonna occur, there's no way out, so they accept it. And a terrible cataclysm of conflict ensues. We've lived with this approximately 30 minute nuclear destruction threat for a long time, as I said, but we don't like it. I mean, who really likes being hostage to the threat of overwhelming nuclear destruction? We cope mostly by not thinking much about it. By pretending such a cataclysmic outcome for our species isn't just around the corner. 30 minutes after someone in a minuscule group makes a truly bad decision. We have either an admirable or foolish belief that it'll all turn out fine, even though we have all these guns loaded in our fingers right near the triggers all the time. But now we're about to double down on the risks, it seemed to me, by halving the time we need to act smartly. Is that good? As a co-reporter at the Washington Post in the 1980s, covering national security, I became friendly with Freddie Clay, a sociologist and former MIT professor who studied the effects of the Nagasaki nuclear blast and later served as Undersecretary of Defense for Policy during the presidency of Ronald Reagan. I found him an interesting man. And I noticed at one point that in 1973 he'd written an article for foreign affairs in which he noted that everything around us is moving faster than it used to. Personal transit, computing, shifts in the earth's climate, stock trading, but not the speed at which, but not the speed at which humans can process a specific task. Time, Freddie Clay wrote, is the best healer of mistakes, whether technical or human. The insistence on speed leaves insufficient time for double checking. It denies the opportunity for correction. If rapidity becomes the overriding concern, independent monitors tend to get pushed aside. His remarks were echoed in May, perhaps not deliberately, by the Trump administration's Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, David Trochtenberg. During testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee about the virtues of relatively slow flying strategic bombers, Trochtenberg noted that because of their, quote, relative slowness compared to a ballistic missile, it gives decision makers additional time and space to try to negotiate or reduce in a crisis the opportunity for miscalculation or any unintended or potential escalation. Now to me, that does not sound like a ringing endorsement for the creation, deployment, and proliferation of thousands of fast-flying hypersonic missiles. It sounds instead like a call for reconsidering where we're now headed. Thank you. Yeah, thank you. Before I hand over to Dean and then Amy, let me put kind of three key issues on the table that Jeff has flagged up for us. Firstly, from a defense strategy perspective, what are the specific missions we want hypersonic weapons to fulfill? Secondly, from a defense economic perspective, what's the most cost-effective way to fill those missions? Is it hypersonics or is it another technology? And thirdly, what are the escalation risks associated with hypersonics? Be those associated with the perceived threats to nuclear forces that Jeff flagged up or the increasing pace of nuclear war? Sorry, or the increasing pace of any conflict? I'm going to give Dean and then Amy a chance to set out their stalls on that and then engage us in a bit of a free-flowing discussion before we do a Q&A. Dean, let me give you five minutes to set out your stall and kick off. Thanks, James. A couple points. First of all, hypersonic weapons are largely about conventional war, not nuclear war. Russia may be the only country that's thinking actively about putting nuclear weapons on their hypersonic vehicles, less so China and the United States. But that's not to say there aren't implications for escalation across nuclear thresholds, which we'll touch on later. Second point is there are three types of hypersonic weapons. Ballistic missiles are hypersonic weapons. In fact, they travel faster from launch to impact than the other two types, the new types, boost glide and hypersonic cruise missiles. So if speed is what you're worried about, ballistic missiles are among the worst weapons, then boost glide and then hypersonic cruise missiles next. In fact, piggybacking off of just later point, one of the trends in modern warfare is this increased speed. And it's not just hypersonic weapons. Cyber attacks take a long time to set in place, but once you pull the trigger, cyber attacks occur very rapidly. Artificial intelligence, some people are claiming is gonna increase the speed of decision making. Machines will be making a lot of lower level decisions, not the decision to go to war. Obviously there'll be humans in that, but a lot of other decisions. So AI, artificial intelligence, also will increase the speed, the tempo of warfare. Anti-satellite weapons, which the US and Russians exercise some restraint on during the Cold War, are becoming much more worrisome. And depending on whether it's a laser or if it's a direct descent ASAP weapon or if it's a co-orbital weapon, ASAP attacks can occur very rapidly and could be very detrimental to US reliance on space assets. And then of course, hypersonic weapons, ballistic missiles, boost glide, hypersonic cruise. The flight time is very short and that too increases the speed of tactical operations. We've seen a little bit of this. I mean, obviously the Gulf War, Operation Iraqi Freedom, very fast conflicts, at least for the major combat operations, not the counterinsurgency that followed for better part of a decade or more. But the main conflict occurred very rapidly. China, I mean, Russia's annexation of Crimea took about a month. So modern conventional conflicts occur much more rapidly than World War II, Korean War, some of the wars that at least some of us are familiar with. So this is a trend and like I said, hypersonic weapons are one aspect of this. The US is really not the moving party in hypersonic weapons. The US and Russia both have been invested in hypersonic technologies for about five decade, but at least in the US side and to some extent the Russians as well. It's been a hobby shop. We have not pursued offensive hypersonic weapons very rapidly. It's really the Chinese programs in the last two decades have taken off quite rapidly. First with ballistic missiles, the CSS5, the DF-26, medium and intermediate range, conventional ballistic missiles. The Chinese, their program is a little bit akin to, one way to frame it, is akin to the US space program in the 1960s. That's the level of effort they're placing on hypersonic weapons. Their test tempo, their infrastructure, the number of aerospace engineers going into hypersonic weapons outpace what the US is putting into it by factors of five or so. So the Chinese are really what I think is the pacing threat in the hypersonic domain. They're also the ones that are investing a lot in anti-satellite weapons, AI. You've heard the Chinese have made that a major program. They want to be world leaders in AI by 2030. So China's very active in all these fronts that are pushing the speed of conventional war. Why is Russia and China pursuing it? Well, the obvious reason is hypersonic weapons at least of the latter two categories, the boost glide and cruise missiles. They fly at high altitudes in the atmosphere. They underfly most US ballistic missile defense systems. So it's a great way to defeat US mid-course ballistic missile defenses. James asked earlier, why should the US get involved in it? It's not because the Russians and Chinese are doing it. To borrow a phrase from the Cold War, matching is mindless, and it truly is. That's not a good reason to pursue these weapons. In my mind, there are two very good strategic reasons why the US should pursue hypersonic weapons, especially boost glide and cruise. One is to defeat their integrated air defense systems. Both Russia and China have massive investments in very sophisticated air defenses and hypersonic weapons, boost glide, and hypersonic cruise, for that matter ballistic missiles, essentially would render those air defenses obsolete. So it's a very cost-effective competition for the United States to engage in because the offensive hypersonic weapons tend to be much cheaper than the air defenses that they would undermine. So it's just like the competition they're trying to get us involved in, where they're undermining our ballistic missile defenses, we would basically return the favor. The other reason is because a lot of the assets that say China is deploying to hold our power projection assets at risk in the Western Pacific, our carriers, our naval forces, our air bases at Okinawa, Guam, the assets they're using to hold those at risk are these CSS5, DF-26 conventional ballistic missiles. They're mobile missiles, they hide in sites, they come out, set up their missile, launch them, and then scoot back to some hide site. The time during which they're vulnerable is that set up and launch time, which is relatively short. So if you want to hold those things at risk, if you want to destroy them before they can launch missiles at our carriers or airfields, you've got to get there pretty quickly, which means you either have to be close, or you have to fly at high speeds. So holding at risk their mobile missiles is another classic rationale for US hypersonic programs. Could be ballistic missiles. Now that we're withdrawing from the INF Treaty, apparently, we could deploy ballistic missiles to do that job. But hypersonic boost glide and cruise missiles also would be effective for that. Well, as Jeff mentioned, and also James, the speed of war is gonna make careful decision making very challenging. And so the risks of escalation, miscalculation, misunderstanding, misperception are gonna be much more difficult to deal with. US is pursuing hypersonic, conventional hypersonic weapons to hold at risk these medium and intermediate range Chinese missiles. If I can hold at risk or defeat or destroy a Chinese CSS5, I can probably hold at risk their DF-31 ICBM. So the very same capability that we're designing our hypersonic weapons for have a collateral effect of holding at risk their mobile ICBMs. And there's the linkage between a conventional capability and a threat to their nuclear forces. That's classic destabilizing. How the Chinese would respond to that. Who knows, there could be some very destabilizing ways they could respond, but chances are they would try to modernize their ICBM force to get away from mobile ICBM so that they're not as vulnerable. Certainly would stimulate an arms race. It may not be as crisis destabilizing as some might think. The main attribute though of hypersonic weapons is not their speed. As Jeff mentioned, it's their maneuverability. That's the unique aspect of hypersonic boost glide and cruise missiles as opposed to ballistic missiles. And the fact that they're maneuverable is why it's very hard for air defenses to shoot them down. That's on the plus side, if you're on the offense. The negatives aspect of that is it's very hard to tell where these things are going once they're inbound. You'll detect them shortly after launch and with the appropriate surveillance architecture you can track these things during their entire flight. So it's not the warning time so much, but you don't exactly know where they're heading because they can divert to targets that are hundreds of kilometers away from their flight path. So the defense is not gonna know exactly what you're threatening. We may be launching hypersonic weapons to try to hold at risk CSS-5 mobile ICBMs but if that DF-31 sites 100 kilometers away you could divert to that and so the Chinese would be very nervous. Again, attack assessment, the problems with attack assessment mean that escalation's gonna be a lot harder to control. So we are drifting into this brave new world where I think the potential for escalation is gonna be problematic. I don't see an easy way out of it. Obviously we should start talking about this and Jeff's article is a great start in that conversation. We should have started it decades ago. We should be engaging the Chinese, if not the Russians, in serious conversations about this but I'm a little pessimistic about any simple solution. I don't see arms control or confidence building measures that are gonna get us out of this situation. So for the time being we're gonna be in a fairly intense competition in this technology. Dean, thank you. Amy. I agree with everything Dean said and all of his comments are included in my comments so I could say nothing. But I'm going to wrap this instead of looking at where we are now and what the future holds for this, particularly these scenarios with China and the A2AD and the air defenses which actually makes perfect sense on both why we would want them and why they are crisis to stabilizing. I'll come back to that at the end. But as James said, he's been writing about this with seven or eight years. I've been writing about this for 15 years and when I started writing about hypersonics I wasn't actually writing about hypersonics. I was writing about conventional prompt global strike which was the program that birthed the U.S. move forward in hypersonics but at the time the concept was to put a conventional warhead on an existing trident missile because our goal was to shoot a conventional warhead very quickly around the world to hit a fleeting target like somebody sitting on a mountain in Tora Bora and I'm not kidding that was a significant piece of the rationale. So when James asked me to talk about the pros and cons of pursuing this I see it through several different lenses. First, I can't tell you pros and cons. I can tell you what other people have said are pros and cons and I can evaluate those. I have no opinion on what the pros and cons are but I start in the same place Dean started. Hypersonic is not a weapon. Hypersonic is a speed and the pros and cons of whether or not we should have weapons that travel at hypersonic speeds depends on what the weapons are. What your delivery system is. So looking back over the 15 years that I've been working this issue there are several ways to divide the different types of weapons that could travel at hypersonic speeds. Are they nuclear or conventional? Existing ballistic missiles which travel at hypersonic speeds are nuclear. Russia's hypersonic boost glide vehicle, hypersonic the avant-garde they're thinking about making it nuclear the rest of the hypersonic glide vehicles that we in the Chinese are thinking about are probably gonna be conventional. Second characteristic is it a boost glide system a hypersonic glider on top of a rocket booster or a cruise missile. United States is thinking about and looking at the cruise missiles but right now most of our effort is on putting a hypersonic glider on the top of a booster and the third characteristic is at long range or a medium range, intermediate range missile that would you use in a regional conflict. The United States when we started looking at this in the early 2000s although some parts of the program much earlier as Dean said goes back about 50 years we were searching for a long range boost glide or even just boost as the conventional trident would have been system with a conventional warhead and we were doing this to address the problem that if we want to deliver a weapon at a target halfway around the world in under an hour with great accuracy because we have Osama bin Laden sitting on a mountain top or we have a nuclear weapon being loaded on a missile or an airplane with chemical weapons sitting on a runway we can only do it with a nuclear armed missile. Right now all our missiles that can get halfway around the world with great accuracy are nuclear armed. And so the question was asked in some hallways in the Pentagon and think tanks will we do that with a conventional warhead? That would be a really good thing to do with a conventional war we could get there so there's a pro for doing this but that raised the question of why? Why do you need to hit something promptly at the start of a conflict that starts promptly because otherwise you might have forces in the region. Yes, an airplane will take longer to get there but if you deploy things into a region is that good enough or do you have to come from halfway around the world? And the enduring question, what really is the target? There was this purported benefit of speed, speed relative to aircraft or cruise missiles though as Dean mentioned not speed relative to other ballistic missiles. Other ballistic missiles could get there just as fast but they were nuclear. If you're looking at speed as being your primary benefit and your target is either movable or mobile then you need exquisite intelligence to tell you that that terrorist is sitting on the mountaintop right now and that's the mountaintop that he's on. We had a problem early in the debates about this and determining whether we actually had exquisite enough intelligence to come at it even in 20 or 30 minutes and be able to hit a target that could move. So if you don't have the exquisite intelligence to hit a mobile or a movable target from halfway around the world maybe you're really looking at fixed targets that present themselves. The mobile missile that is fixed for a while. You'd kind of need to figure out what your target is and whether, as James asked, is this the weapon system that solves your targeting problem? If you're shooting from halfway around the world can you actually get there fast enough? If not maybe you're talking about an intermediate range system. Something that can get there in 15 minutes or seven minutes or nine minutes but the United States when we started looking at it was long range systems. The second characteristic and Dean just made this point and I want to footstone it really hard. The real value of these different from other ballistic missiles is the maneuverability. How does maneuverability help you if you're coming from halfway around the world? Well first you can penetrate defenses. Nobody has ballistic missile defenses that can get the regular ballistic missiles right now but someday. It allows for you to attack targets that can't be reached on a polar trajectory because your regular ballistic missiles come over the pole. So maybe the Chinese have placed something on the south side of a mountain range and if you're coming over the pole it's under the shadow. Maybe you need to turn around and come back at it. It allows for the suppression and evasion of defenses. Dean just mentioned that. Chinese air defenses, we could get them with regular ballistic missiles if all we were looking for were speed but if we want to evade the defenses the maneuverability helps. The last point is maneuverability really helps you with precision and accuracy which when we were first discussing this in the 2000s some of the supporters argued would allow us to shift from nuclear weapons for those precise attacks on hardened targets to conventional weapons that could get there in half an hour and be hyper precise because they've got this hypersonic live vehicle on the front end. So the complaint about that and the problem with speed is you need exquisite intelligence. The problem with that kind of maneuverability with a conventional warhead, you heard it often. Oh my God, the bad guys will think we're shooting nuclear weapons at them and they'll respond with nuclear weapons. That's not the problem. It's not the problem with the precision that you get from a hypersonic live vehicle. The problem is it's conventional. The Russians and the Chinese said this repeatedly. They were not afraid of our hypersonic programs because they thought we might be shooting nuclear weapons at them. They were afraid of them because they knew we could shoot conventional weapons at what previously would have been targets for nuclear weapons, as Dean mentioned, China's ICBM force and do so without crossing the nuclear threshold ourselves. They thought we'd be more likely to shoot at them if our missiles had conventional front ends. That is one of the destabilizing features of being able to put a very accurate maneuverable conventional front end on a missile that can get there in a half an hour or less. So it's the maneuverability. So if you're looking at the complaints about these or the risks of having missiles that can travel halfway around the world at hypersonic speeds and maneuver to attack a target very precisely which Jeff summarized as hypersonic missiles and they are, but I don't want to confuse the speed with the weapon. The speed can create crisis destabilizing risks in just the scenario that Dean presented. If China has air defenses or its A2AD capabilities, it's offensive missiles, vulnerable to attack, but we think they're going to use them first or they're threatening to use them first to keep our forces away from the Chinese coast. That's what the A2AD pushes the aircraft carriers back because as Jeff mentioned, they're vulnerable so you move them further away which means we can't get to those targets unless we take down those missiles and those air defenses and we're in a crisis with China and they see us starting to move systems and we see them starting to ramp up their air defenses. He who shoots first shoots best and if you're in a crisis, shooting first in that scenario can make a really big difference. That's your crisis instability. And I've sat in rooms with people talking about how we used weapons just as Dean just did and they didn't finish the conversation the way he did by pointing out that that can be crisis destabilizing. They just thought, as Jeff said, oh, that's cool, we can shoot at those things quickly and those two conversations, that's why we're here, need to come together. So that's your risk of speed and the risk of maneuverability. Yes, it confounds defenses. That's exactly why Russia and China are deploying or developing gliding vehicles that can go on the front ends of ballistic missiles that can maneuver because they saw us preparing to deploy defenses that could defend against their regular ballistic missiles. For Russia, it's the long range strategic systems. China saw it regionally and they both thought that maneuverability was a benefit to evading our defenses. Dean just said the exact same thing. Course, if we're maneuvering to hit a movable target, we still need that exquisite intelligence to tell us where the target is and where it's going and that still raises questions of whether we're really maneuvering to hit a movable target or maneuvering to be more precise against the strategic target so that we can shoot without using nuclear weapons. So there are a lot of questions about these systems that we've been asking in rooms like this for the few of us who've been paying attention for 15 years. Most of you have not, I'd assume. But we've been asking these questions and now because we are pumping lots of money into this over the next few years and the Russians and the Chinese are doing the same, now we need to take these questions into the halls of policy decision making. But I have one more purported risk of the way we are approaching hypersonic glide vehicles and hypersonic capabilities in general. That's more bureaucratic, but also from my seat on Capitol Hill, my role in helping people understand policy and budgeting decisions, I find this very unnerving. The administration and Congress have created a huge bucket of money for hypersonic programs. There's $2.6 billion in it this year, FY 2020. Just for the sake of comparison, in the around the 2006, 2007 timeline, the budget request was going to rise to $200 million. And Congress said, thank you, no thank you, kept it at $100 million. And a few years later, it dropped lower than $100 million because Congress passed the Budget Control Act. This was not a high priority. We'd had several missile test failures, which meant not a high priority, not enough money and the damn thing doesn't work. So the funding for this just a few years ago was under $100 million a year in one program area, Conventional Prompt Global Strike. A basket now holds $2.6 billion, and there's programs spread across the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, DARPA, all with the word, well not all, because I couldn't word search them all in the defense bill. I don't all have the word hypersonic in them, but most of them do because if you put hypersonic in the title of your program, you get dumped in this big basket of money. This is how the Strategic Defense Initiative and Missile Defenses evolved in the 1980s. There was this great excitement about this new defense program. So we created a bucket of money and all kinds of defensive programs were dumped into that bucket, along with the effort to develop the new defenses, and then they fell out of favor. And that bucket of money went away. And all these programs that had dumped themselves into this bucket on the theory that there's going to be a lot of money in this bucket, a lot of them went away too, even if independently they would have been admirable, reasonable, and justifiable programs. By making everything about this race with Russia and China to get hypersonic weapons, you're creating what could become a vulnerable bucket of programs and money. And when the crash comes, if it comes, and the bucket breaks and the money goes away, you may put at risk programs that right now look like they're golden and someday soon may still have a justification but won't have the political backing. Thank you. Okay, I'm gonna try and recreate a bit here the presidential debates in that we're gonna have a free-flowing discussion. I'm gonna give everybody- Don't make me raise my hand. I might just do that. I'm gonna give people, I'm gonna give one minute for answers here. And let's try to get through like kind of 10 or 15 minutes before we go to Q and A of some really free-flowing discussion here. And I'm actually gonna be fairly brutally cutting you off. Dean put two specific missions on the table that hypersonics could be used for, hypersonic missiles could be used for. And I think those are today the two most important missions guiding people's thinking about the program. Defender suppression, going after advanced air defenses, particularly in Russia and China, sending a few of these missiles into so-called kick down the door, defeat keynotes in enemy air defenses, so that less survivable weapons can follow on in larger numbers. And secondly, the mission of hunting mobile missiles. Putting aside the question of what the best way to do these missions are, we're gonna get onto that in a second. Putting aside that question, that any of the three of you think that we should not be pursuing either of those missions or do all three of you think that these are reasonable missions that the US military ought to pursue? Oh, do you want quick answers? Let me put it this way. If you think that one of these is not a reasonable mission, if you think the US should not be pursuing this mission, now is the time to say so. Having mobile missiles has been regarded as an element of strategic stability for a long time. The reason that countries develop mobile missiles is to ensure that they have retaliatory capability. If you're suddenly inventing a weapon that very effectively can denude that capability, get rid of it, you are creating a certain degree of anxiety in the target country that didn't exist there. Countries, we debate all the time here whether we should take our missiles out of silos and tunnel them around or put them somewhere in the land-based missile force, in land-based submarines in effect, things that could move around. And we go through a wrenching debate about whether that makes any sense. But it's born of anxiety that the missiles will get destroyed before they can get used. That makes people nervous. So if we're creating a new weapon system that can go after mobile missiles, that may not have such a calming impact in superpower interactions. As far as going after air defenses, your ambition there is to pave the way for bombers to get in, right? That's the purpose, if I understand correctly. And at what point in a conflict is that vital? If you're already in a superpower of war, you presumably, bombers are not gonna be the first arriving strategic systems. There'll be some other things that will have landed and impacted before then. So I'm just curious to know sort of how that scenario plays out. Why is that such an important thing? I don't actually know the answer. Let's focus on the mobile missile hunting initially. Both Dean and Amy acknowledge there was a trade-off hit, but both of you were very explicit that there are advantages to mobile missile hunting, but there are also strategic risks to doing so. Dean, let me bring in you here because you said the Chinese might respond by moving away from mobile missiles. I'm curious what you see them doing. I mean, the US and Navy is openly advertising that we're going after Chinese forces at sea. Their silos are not gonna be very survivable. You think, and I think you're probably right about this. Did you say there's subs or not gonna miss? Well, I said the US Navy is openly advertising that we're going after their SSBNs at sea. I'm not claiming, you didn't make a claim about whether we're effective or not, but the US Navy has done some things to indicate that we're interested in being able to hunt Chinese submarines. The Chinese are pretty convinced their silos are not survivable. And as you pointed out, or as you argued, building air defenses against hypersonics potentially puts them on the wrong side of the cost curve. So how do you see the Chinese likely responding to a perceived growing threat from our conventional weapons to their nuclear forces? Let me just make one short addition to the... It's not just mobile missiles that are the targets of interest. Mobility is a tactic that military has used for all critical military assets to make them survive on the conventional battlefield. So there's a whole slew of such targets, but mobile missiles are the ones that capture most people's attention. So the target set is actually much broader. If I have a small number of hypersonic weapons, then I use them like you said, you knock the door down for more conventional airborne strike assets. A lot of the talk in the Pentagon is not deploying tens or hundreds of these things, it's thousands in which case, you don't knock the door down. These are your primary strike assets going after targets that are heavily defended, whatever they are, be they mobile missiles or other assets. But there is this problem. If we go after, well, I think the US has decided that to allow China to have conventional ballistic missiles and conventional hypersonic weapons that can threaten our naval forces and our airfields in the Western Pacific at risk is untenable. So a standard approach is to destroy those assets that can threaten our carriers and our airfields. We go after their mobile missiles and they're hypersonic weapons. They could have aircraft launch hypersonic weapons, ground launch, naval launch hypersonic weapons. Wherever they deploy those, US is gonna target those things. The problem is it can lead to this instability where their mobile ICBMs now become under threat. So if this scenario unfolds, how would they respond? Well, first of all, they could go to sea. As you mentioned, anti-submarine warfare has been an enduring feature of military competition since subs were first invented. The US invests in anti-submarine warfare to go after tactical submarines. It has a collateral effect against strategic missile submarines as well. How well the Chinese ballistic missile submarines could survive USASW? Depends on how quiet they are. It depends on tactics. It depends on how many they have. It's a very complicated debate and one that is shrouded in secrecy because the US does not talk about anti-submarine warfare operations and adversaries don't talk about the tactics they use to ensure their submarines survive. Having said that, going to sea is a reasonable option. When the Chinese are doing it, the Russians have done it, we do it, the French and British have done it. Sea-based nuclear weapons, A, are not particularly vulnerable to hypersonic attack. They might be vulnerable to anti-submarine warfare, but I think, well, I think the US is confident that our subs are survivable. I don't know about the Russians and Chinese, but they're probably reasonably confident. Chinese, maybe not so much today because their submarines are still kind of noisy, but they are improving that technology quite quickly. So submarines is one option. Bombers is another one that Chinese have not invested in. Bombers, they don't have a triad. They have more of a dyad, land-based missiles and submarine. So they could go into bombers. Of course, bombers sit on runways. You can catch them before they take off. So they have to have warning systems in place to get those aircraft off the ground before you can hit them. So there are a couple options like that. If they want to keep land-based missiles, remember good old Cold War days, we talked about deep underground basing. We were going to put ICBMs in deep underground and we were going to burrow out after they've been attacked. Not a very attractive option in some respects, but that's technically possible. Deep underground missile basing. Other questions. Dumb, yes. Deep underground missile basing. I mean, let me, let me, I mean, I would, so what, as long as the answer, dear, one thing I would point out is I'm not convinced that U.S. anti-submarine capabilities against Chinese nuclear submarines is a collateral goal. I think that's a goal. I mean, the U.S. Navy has invited journalists on board U.S. SSBN, sorry, on board U.S. attack submarines, to witness drills for hunting down nuclear armed submarines in the Pacific from a country whose first letter was C. So I think that was a clear signal that going off to Chinese submarines is not just a collateral benefit. Amy, let me bring you in this. Let me bring you in here. Imagine you got a phone call from a non-ideological member of Congress who said, that's a no, sir. You know, I've, I've, I've, your words are not mine. I've read about, been reading about hypersonic weapons and you know, I kind of think there's real benefits to this technology in terms of going off the Russian and Chinese air defenses and I think there's real risks in terms of escalation. How do I weigh up these two incommensurable things? You know, how, how, how can I compare my own mind, the benefits and the risks? Can you help me do that in some intelligent way? What's your answer to that, B? First, it would be a staffer, not a member. The members just call and say, oh my God, Russia, China. Talk to my staffer, explain this to me. First, I wanna just touch on the mobile missile hunting idea. I don't support mobile missile hunting because I don't think we can do it but I do believe that the military has it as a mission so we've always tried to do it. In the Cold War, we would have barraged mobile missile deployment areas with hundreds of nuclear weapons and trying to take out the missiles. In the Gulf War, we did scunt hunting that didn't work and now we might want to use hypersonics to do missile hunting but I don't think we'd actually be hunting missiles. I think we'd be going after fixed targets that support the mobile missiles, I think in reality. And the military would never say, oh, we don't wanna do that because it's destabilizing. So when I'm asked how do I understand the pros and cons of these, what I can get out of it and what I could think about is the risks, I answer somewhat exactly what I just told you all here. There are military benefits of being able to strike promptly at the start of a conflict with high precision and maneuverability but unless you think about it as what is the other guy going to do after I do that, you're only having half of the conversation. So when I sit down and talk to people about this as I just did here, I would try to point out that war has two sides or conflict has two sides. So if you wanna think about what threat you are facing that you want to address, you have to also think about what threat the other side is facing and I cannot make that decision for members. I can only point out that you have to think about it through the eyes of both sides. The main point that I make when I have the conversations about strategic stability is for all the meetings I've sat through with the military on hypersonics, if the person in the room has a background in nuclear weapons policy, they understand the complications of crisis instability. If they have background in air operations or sea operations, they've never heard of crisis stability. So the very first thing that I would tell staffers and members is to have a briefing from the Pentagon and ask them about crisis stability. Don't just ask them about the offensive side, ask them about the reaction. That's great. Let me jump in here in just two seconds. I wanna highlight what Amy just said. People that think about conventional war, the objective of conventional war is to destroy the adversary's military forces as fast as possible, preferably even by preempting. If you think about nuclear war, it's just the opposite. You do not go after the opponent's nuclear forces because you'll either stimulate an arms race or worse still, you get in a crisis destabilizing situation. So there's a fundamental tension between people that think about conventional war, as Amy just said, and people that are used to thinking about nuclear war. And it's that tension which conventionally armed hypersonic weapons bring to the fore. It's not an easy tension to resolve, but I think it's an extremely important point that Amy just made. I wanna move the discussion on a bit to the question of costs and benefits. And here I wanna focus on the defense suppression mission. Hypersonics is argued, hypersonic missiles is argued to be one way to potentially suppress enemy air defenses, but there's other possibilities. Cruise missiles, which are almost certainly less effective on a missile per missile basis, but we may be able to afford many more of them. Their stealth is another possibility. Stealthy weapons potentially have longer travel times, but if the enemy can't see them, the warning time could be pretty short. Each one of these has costs and benefits associated with it. We worry about whether stealth will remain survivable. We worry about the effectiveness of individual cruise missiles. So I wanna put the same question to each of you. Are you convinced that hypersonic weapons are the best way of doing the defense suppression mission? And feel free to say that you don't know. This is where I am. Like my honest opinion is I just don't know. I think more analysis is necessary to compare the benefits and risks of other way of doing things. But I wanna ask each one of you, and please just keep this to a minute because I wanna move to Q&A. How do you evaluate the trade off between hypersonics for doing the defense suppression mission and other possible technologies? And let me go in reverse order here. So let me do Amy, then Dean, then Jeff. The good answer is it's not a trade off. In, you hear this from the military all the time. Why do we, or the arms control community says why do we need a bomber and a cruise missile? And the military answer is because it complicates the adversary's ability to counter you. So if I were in the military planner's perspective, looking through that perspective, it's not, do I want a hypersonic missile or a cruise missile or an aircraft? It's, which order do I use them in and against which targets? In some cases, one may be better than the other. So if I'm without hypersonic missiles and I just have airplanes and cruise missiles, then I have a time problem and they can be shot down problem. If I bring in hypersonic missiles, they can't be shot down, they can get there faster. So it's kind of a synergy amongst them not in either or. A model brevity, so thank you for that. Dean. There are four basic ways today to get through air defenses. As James mentioned, stealth is one. Actually the warning time with stealth can be quite long. They're hard to shoot down, but you can see them coming for quite a ways away with certain radars. Saturation is the other tactic where you deploy lots of cruise missiles and you come in with 10 weapons, not one. That's actually an expensive operation because you have to deploy so many of the lower speed ones. Electronic attack is another one. You jam the radars, you spoof them. The US got out of the electronic attack business after the end of the Cold War. Russia and China did not. So we're actually playing catch up in that arena. Some of these like electronic attack is always a bit of uncertain effectiveness which is one reason why US military sometimes doesn't like it because you never know whether your jamming is really effective or whether they've got some cute signal processing in their radar that can defeat your jamming signal. Hypersonics is just one other way. It's the high speed, high altitude and maneuverability that defeats air defenses. So is it cost effective? My own preference is you do all four approaches. How much money you invest in each one is a complicated debate because you have to figure out how effective each conventional cruise missiles stealth aircraft, they all have limitations. They all have different cost trade-offs but at this point without getting into the details of how you go through air defenses, hypersonic weapons are very simple. They simply render the defense basically ineffective and they're pretty cheap weapons. Let me move on to Jeff and then we'll have Q and A. I'm not the expert on this subject but I've talked to former admirals who say that in the Pacific, this is not a good race to be in that the ability of the Chinese for example to use hypersonics against our airfields and our air assets in that area is overwhelming and we won't win in a battle to build hypersonics. They can go after air defenses. They'll figure out a way to attack our air assets before they can be used using hypersonics of their own. Okay, let's go to Q and A from the audience. I'm gonna ask you to introduce yourself, your name, your organization and to actually ask a question rather than make a statement. And depending on demand for questions, I may take multiple ones at a time. Let me go first to Ed Levine but nonetheless Ed introduce yourself. And there's a microphone coming actually on both sides. You're being encircled. Edward Levine Center for Arms Control and Nonproliferation. I'm gonna ask a couple of embarrassingly stupid questions which will show that I have not done my duty of reading all of Amy's articles over these many decades. So it's embarrassing. First of all, how does the risk posed by hypersonics compared to the long standing risk that SLBMs have posed to us if the Russians were close to our shoreline and to the Russians from God knows how many countries that might have submarines in the Baltic. And are we upset over this merely because we're being exposed to something that everybody else has been used to for a generation or more. Second question, what will the payloads be on hypersonic weapons? Will they really be conventional? Will they be fuel air explosives or will they be nuclear? And will the United States be tempted in a serious way to add nuclear weapons? Can you fit something like an old honest John weapon onto a hypersonic vehicle? And final dumb question, could you go into a little more detail on how these weapons would affect Chinese strategy, which after all, traditionally has been no first use in the nuclear realm? Thank you. Thank you. I'm gonna ask everyone just to keep yourselves for one question that just try to get through as many as we can. Let me take another question in this round. I think that is Bruce, that moment may not be Bruce McDonald at the back, but yes it is. And there's a mic just to your right. Hi, great program. That Bruce McDonald, I'm at adjunct at Johns Hopkins SICE and formerly worked in the Office of Science and Technology Policy on National Security Issues. I wanted to say that one point that wasn't made or appreciated I think is that if you want to have highly accurate conventionally armed hypersonic missiles, you need to be able to do updates on your path and a hypersonic missile is that there's more technical challenge in developing these things than I think some people recognize. And so just keep that in mind and they won't be cheap. But I wanted to say one for nuclear weapons mobile ICBMs for example, when they're out in mobile they're very soft targets and that makes a lot of sense. For conventionally armed hypersonic missiles, I wanted to reemphasize the importance as a countermeasure by the other side of just moving and not moving that far or staying mobile because if you can be highly accurate then you're right but you need to be able to be updated on what the location is. And so that's gonna be a bit of a problem. One dimension of the problem hasn't been mentioned yet and that is that you need to be able to detect mobile missiles which is road mobile missiles which is not easy. And so an interesting question to ask is what's happening in the field of what's called overhead persistent infrared capabilities because it's great to have that capability if you know where it is but if you don't know where the missile is then speed isn't gonna help you with that. So how do you deal with the problem of overcoming the mobility during a crisis that the other guy might have? Let's try to avoid everyone answering every question. Dean can I bring you in on the technical questions of what would the payloads for hypersonics be and Bruce's question about ISR capabilities for spotting mobile missiles. Let's do those technical questions first. So you can put nuclear warheads or you can put conventional ones on hypersonic vehicles. It's true. Fuel air explosives are a conventional warhead. Actually you wouldn't put fuel air explosives on a hypersonic vehicle because they wouldn't work very well. So yeah, I think that certainly the US programs are all conventional and I don't see any enthusiasm for making them nuclear again because the mission is to go after those assets which are threatening US power projection forces, naval and air forces in the Western Pacific in the Chinese case, in the NATO area, in the Russian case. The ISR question's an important one because as Amy pointed out, if I don't know where the target is or it takes me an hour to find it, it doesn't matter if I can fly there in 10 minutes because especially if it's one of these mobile targets that's stationary for a short period of time, by the time the weapon arrives it's gone. So you do have to work the front end of the kill chain as the military calls it, the fine-fixed track piece of the problem. I can't say a lot about it because that's very sensitive stuff but that piece of the problem has not been lost on the Pentagon. It didn't work very hard. Just to add a little bit there, that's what the space development agency's task is to do is to figure out a way to attach sensors not only to dedicated satellites but also to satellites put up by others for other purposes which would essentially blanket the earth. They were talking about dozens and dozens probably hundreds of sensors that would be able to watch things so well and carefully in ways that are not being watched now that you could use them to direct or to defend against hypersonic attacks. So that problem is being worked. Now that Congress hasn't approved the expenditure of the money for all these sensors yet. It's being debated this year for the first time. Let me interject myself here. Three quick points. Firstly, we have a really bad record, frankly, in integrating ISR development, intelligence surveillance reconnaissance development with weapons development. There's a GAO, Government Accountability Office report. It's about 10 years old now but was looking at something called global strike which was a broader concept than just prompt global strike. And it pointed out that in the analysis of alternatives the personnel doing this analysis of alternatives did not have high enough clearances to know what ISR capabilities the US was developing. And so methodologically, their approach was simply to assume that all needed ISR capabilities would be available at the time the weapon was available. Which I would argue is problematic. Secondly, I'd point out there's a difference between the technology you want to track missiles after launch, which is the infrared stuff and the technology you want to track missiles before launch, which I think infrared is not going to be so helpful. And thirdly, in terms of China, I'd point out that NACIC, the Ballistic Missile Intelligence People, they've actually testified publicly that they believe that China's hypersonic program is associated with nuclear weapons. I don't know what evidence they're basing that on but they have said that publicly. Amy, let me bring you in here to answer the question about what effect you see hypersonics having on Chinese strategy and is hypersonics different from other forms of short warning attack? Yeah, let me start with the short warning attack. You have to be careful in public about being too cynical. But in December, when... You're not normally careful about being too cynical. Yeah, but you're webcasting, so. In December, when Russia tested the Avangard hypersonic glide vehicle on the front end of an SS-19, it was over the holidays. So I was home and I was watching the news and the news broadcaster on a network news was very upset. Oh my God, they tested this missile and we can't defend against it. And I banged my head on the kitchen counter. We can't defend against regular fast-flying ballistic missiles coming from Russia or China either. So from that perspective, the fact that Russia, and again, that's why you have to distinguish between the long-range systems that may or may not be nuclear but certainly are strategic and the shorter-range systems, it does not present a new threat to the United States and even in the missile defense review and in other discussions of hypersonics, General Hyten has said, well, we'd use deterrence to deal with that. So if you are well-schooled in nuclear deterrence and threats from Russia and China, the fact that they could do it with a maneuverable front-end is not new and is not scary. But I would argue that most of the people I work for and most of the people in this country are not schooled in those things. So they find Russian and Chinese capabilities in this area to be scary and new. Whether or not that motivates the programs or motivates the interest, this is the world we are living in where people think that this is a new danger. And it doesn't help that Putin gets up there with cartoons and movie videos and says, oh, look what I can do to you now. Well, you could do that to us last year, you're just doing it with something new. The intent is to make it look like something new and to make people concerned, even if I, having spent 30 years doing this, am not concerned. On Chinese strategy, this is part of the problem where it is not that they might think we're shooting nuclear weapons at them, it's that they know we're shooting conventional weapons at them. And James has a better history of discussing this with the Chinese, would they drop their no first use policy if they believed we could conduct a strategic attack against their nuclear weapons without using nuclear weapons on our part, which means they would have to retaliate with nuclear weapons with a first use. And to the best of my knowledge, their answers have been ambiguous on that. Would that be a good characterization? Yeah, I mean, look, it depends a bit who you talk to. I mean, not unlike U.S. declaratory policy, you can find U.S. officials in uniform or not who will say anything about U.S. declaratory policy. And you can find people from China who will be absolutely clear that they believe that no first use is the official policy and won't change and those who are more ambiguous. So I mean, it depends on how well informed you think your particular interlocutors are. Okay, I'm gonna take three questions this round. Please let's keep the question super brief and introduce yourself. Jan, I'll come to you in a sec, but can I just go to the gentleman there with his hand up? Alex Lund and I run the Washington Quarterly over the Elliott School at GW. For any or all of you, do any or all of the three types of hypersonic capabilities significantly improve one's ability to conduct an electromagnetic pulse attack? Does it matter? Fantasticly brief question, thank you. And then I saw, is that Miles somewhere at the back? Yeah, please. Hi, Miles Pomper from the Center for Nonproliferation Studies. I just wanted to clarify whether a conventional hypersonic weapon would be effective against a silo-based ICBM. And then Jan, please. There's a mic, just there, Jan. Hi, Jan Lodo currently at the Atlanta Council. Unfortunately, Amy answered my main question before I ever asked it, so maybe more brief, thank you very much. But the basic question is, how much does it really matter? And let me go to the second half of the question, which is, what can we really, how do we think about this in the broader policy sense? In particular, arms control. Does this change our models in thinking about arms control and what should be done, or could be done even, all apart from the politics of the situation with Russia right now and so forth? Because in principle, it's a question of stability and all the kinds of things, as Amy said, that we've all thought about for a long time. And nuclear deterrence is still there in the background, which has kept us safe, if you will, for a long time. And it probably will keep us safe from these things for a while, but it does add some new questions. Okay, let's do it this way. I'm gonna respond to Miles' question about silo-killing, which is, it entirely depends on the accuracy of the weapon. If you have a hit-direct hit or an almost-direct hit on a silo with something moving at Mach 20, you're going through that silo lid and nothing's gonna stop it. Whatever in the silo is gonna be killed. If you miss a little bit, you're not gonna have much effect on the silo, if any at all. So it critically depends on the accuracy of the incoming weapon, which is potentially a defense strategy. Dean, let me go to you on the EMP question, and then let me go to Amy and Jeff together on the broader policy question. So if by EMP, I mean nuclear-generated EMPs, so you're talking about a nuclear-armed system, it would be the same for any system that carries a nuclear weapon that can detonate it at 40 to 60 kilometers in altitude could generate a pretty big EMP. I would think ballistic missiles would be better because they're coming down through that altitude regime, whose glide and cruise missiles tend to fly a little bit lower in altitude. The deeper you get in the atmosphere, the less EMP you get. So if it's nuclear EMP you want, it's ballistic missiles, your best option. If it's non-nuclear EMP. So if it's conventionally-generated EMP, well, the first question you have to ask is how effective would such a weapon be? Because the EMP you get off of a conventional explosive is not very impressive unless you're very close to the piece of electronics you want to disable. So yeah, then I suppose any of the three weapons could be used for delivering conventionally EMP. Amy, Jeff, let me bring you on to the broader policy questions. The policy world is still, as we've talked about already today, divorced from the programmatic world on these weapons. So the policy world tends to see them as they're great or they're awful. There's no gray area in between and the programmatic world sees them as they're great. So before we can understand the implications for whether or not we can have a dialogue with other countries about the policy, whether we can have negotiated rules of the road or even real limits about policy, we kind of need to decide for ourselves what the policy implications are and we haven't done that yet. There's a lot of suggestions and Jeff talks about it in his paper and there's an article in Arms Control Today last month, a month or two ago, that we should start seeing this through an arms control prism. The problem I have with the arms control prism on looking at this is that we are not developing hypersonics because the Russians and the Chinese are doing so and they are not doing it because we are doing so. It's all at the best if it's an arms trade off an offense defense thing. They're doing it because we might have missile defenses and we're doing it at least for one reason because of their air defenses. And from an operational perspective that doesn't lend it to an arms control solution unless you include the missile defenses in the trade space. And if you want to do that you have to take it back to the policy world and say, are we willing to look at them as a strategic stability offense defense relationship weapon and the policy world hasn't started doing that yet. Policy world still sees them as a hypersonic on hypersonic on hypersonic. So before we can even think about whether there's a solution in cooperative policy, we've got to figure out what the policy is. Yeah, three quick points. First, there isn't any dialogue on this of any seriousness and that's a problem right there. I mean, it's just sort of the two superpowers which are investing all this money and energy and developing these new weapons. And everybody I think up here agrees that they pose new issues. Even though there are some similar weapons now, these pose new issues. That's not being addressed. And it's not being addressed by people who can start to think through what the long-term consequences are collectively. And there's usually people regard those kinds of conversations as productive. Not always. The second thing is that there are two ways to think about the arms control applications to this. One is what should the superpowers decide among themselves? Should there be limitations, for example, on the whether there's what kind of warhead you can put on these? And could that be verified? I have no idea. Should there be limitations on the number of these that can be produced? I have no idea if that could be verified. But that's the kind of thing that people could begin to address. The second issue was really addressed by this wonderful report done by Dick Spear last year. And that's the issue of proliferation of this technology to other countries, to third countries. It's one thing for the United States, Russia and China to have these that poses a certain set of issues. But there's another maybe more complex and more harrowing set of complications. If small regional countries and countries in regional conflicts have them because then we're talking about really seriously short time lines from launch to arrival of very precise and very effective weaponry that could be that wouldn't cross a nuclear threshold but would make the potential targets extremely nervous. And so the question is whether should the raised in the RAND report that Dick helped write? The question was should the superpowers be working very aggressively to prevent the proliferation of this technology into others' hands? And that question is hardly being discussed or debated much less acted upon. So there's fertile ground here, I think. Unfortunately, we've hit noon and it's my job as the moderator to end this on time. I have to say I have significantly more sympathy for the moderators in the presidential debates failing to keep their candidates on time. But I think it's a reflection of how deeply knowledgeable and informative all of our police speakers were. This is an issue that's not going anywhere or rather it's going somewhere very fast. And it's I think something that we're gonna hear a lot more about and something that certainly we at Carnegie are interested in contributing to the debate on. All that remains for me to do is to thank and congratulate Jeff on his excellent article and to thank Dean and Amy for their contributions to this discussion. To thank you all for coming and to ask you to join me in thanking our speakers. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.