Vladimir Putin is a man who loves his toys. He’s never happier than when blasting away with his Kalashnikov Chukavin sniper rifle, chasing cranes on a motorized hang-glider, “hunting” endangered Siberian tigers with a tranquilizer gun, scuba diving for ancient relics in the Black Sea or, of course, cruising on his three-wheeled Harley Davidson with his biker gang, the Night Wolves.
Even so, the world was taken aback by his gumption last March, when the Russian president announced a host of new superweapons, including a nuclear-powered cruise missile with essentially endless range; hypersonic glide missiles able to evade any ground-based defense; a nuclear-armed torpedo; and a laser-weapon array, the Peresvet, named after a warrior-monk who drove the Mongols out of Russia in the 14th century.
The West was skeptical, and was tragically proved correct on Aug. 8: A preliminary test of the cruise missile went badly awry, killing seven and scattering radioactive material across the White Sea.
To get insight into the state of all Putin’s fantasy weapons, and other nations’ latest innovations in nuclear and conventional warfare, I had a conversation with Ankit Panda. Among other things, Panda is an adjunct senior fellow at the Federation of American Scientists, senior editor at the Diplomat - an indispensable website for those of us hooked on East Asian politics and security - and director of research at that publication’s consultancy, Diplomat Risk Intelligence. Here is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation:
Tobin Harshaw: In addition to being a deadly event, the Skyfall cruise missile disaster was a humiliating indication that Putin’s superweapons are a long way from being realized. Do you think this nuclear-powered cruise missile, the nuclear-armed submarine drone, and the other things he showed off in that crazy video are pipe dreams or realistic?
Ankit Panda: The nuclear-powered cruise missile is probably a pipe dream and a very dangerous dead end. The Russian defense bureaucracy is still sitting on years of mothballed Soviet ideas from the 1980s about how they might have countered some of the more fanciful promises of Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative. I strongly suspect some of these programs are dusting off those old plans. Obviously, given that Putin announced these systems himself to great fanfare last March, there is political buy-in at the highest levels of the Russian government, but I’m not sure that the leadership has been appropriately briefed about the risks of certain of these systems — notably the Burevestnik cruise missile.
The US learned its lesson early in the Cold War – the abortive Project Pluto nuclear-powered cruise missile never flew in the end. Russia is determined to push on, and it has now cost five scientists their lives and resulted in the not-negligible dispersal of radiological material. Some of Putin’s other new systems – such as the Poseidon autonomous nuclear torpedo, the Avangard hypersonic glider, the Kinzhal air-launched ballistic missile, and the Peresvet directed-energy weapon - are perfectly plausible technical concepts that can be seen through to implementation. Whether all of them will is an open question. Right now, the Kinzhal and the Avangard appear the most promising, with the former having been demonstrated in an airshow just days ago.
TH: Agreed that the hypersonic glide missile is a technology that does seem doable. (Although in a tweet you once called it “buzzwordy.”) Is the US way behind Russia and China in that race, as many say? And if hypersonics prove to be the real weapon of tomorrow and impossible to shoot down, how will that affect the global military balance?
AP: It is buzzwordy! The word hypersonic simply describes speed: If an object is moving at speeds greater than five times that of sound, it is moving at hypersonic speeds. Insofar as strategic nuclear weaponry is concerned, hypersonic projectiles have existed since the Soviet Union first deployed the intercontinental-range ballistic missile in the late-1950s. During atmospheric reentry, ICBM payloads would accelerate to speeds well in the hypersonic range. Every American ICBM and submarine-launched ballistic missile re-entry vehicle behaves in this way. Along these lines, even North Korea has “hypersonic” nuclear payloads.
But what most people referencing “hypersonics” these days are talking about are hypersonic cruise missiles and hypersonic boost-glide vehicles. Putin’s new Avangard is an example of the latter. These weapons are based on old physical concepts from the first half of the 20th century that are now becoming feasible due to advances in materials science. The hypersonic boost-glide vehicle replaces the traditional ballistic re-entry vehicle; instead of falling down to earth on a ballistic trajectory, it leverages aerodynamic forces to “glide” to its destination at great speeds, with some ability to maneuver. The low flight altitude as compared to ballistic missiles poses a challenge for existing US homeland missile defenses, which are designed to intercept ballistic missiles at the highest point in their flight, far outside of the earth’s atmosphere.
The new Russian weapon, as long as it remains nuclear, shouldn’t be a major strategic stability concern, I think. American missile defenses are mediocre and every Russian strategic missile is capable of penetrating them handily. The Avangard is likely to be deployed in limited numbers and give Russia an extra degree of assurance, I guess, about the ability to penetrate missile defense. A common misconception, though, is that hypersonic gliders are very difficult to shoot down. Given that they travel slower than many ballistic missile payloads, it may be possible for point-defense systems (i.e., missile defenses with a short-range) to still deal with them.
TH: With the demise of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty between the US and Russia, there is a lot of talk about the Pentagon developing and deploying intermediate-range missiles, especially in the Pacific. Is that a dangerous move?
AP: It’s true that 100 percent of the violations of the INF Treaty were committed by Russia, but I’d say around 80 percent of the impulse driving American withdrawal was concern about China. China’s missile arsenal is overwhelmingly composed of missiles that the US and Russia had been banned from developing for 32 years — ballistic and cruise missiles, nuclear and conventional, with ranges between 500 km and 5,500 km. Now, we’ll be developing a few missiles in that class. Given that China has hundreds of these missiles today and the US has zero, Washington isn’t necessarily about to enter an arms race, but rather it’s catching up.
My concern is that there’s very little thinking that’s been done on how these missiles would be used strategically and, more importantly, where they’d go. A map of the Pacific reveals, of course, very little land, and INF was primarily a basing-mode treaty: concerned with missiles that went on land. It did nothing to prevent the US Navy, for instance, from deploying cruise missiles on its destroyers. Our allies too are skittish about the idea of accepting American missile deployments and turning themselves into Chinese targets without a well-thought-out concept. Much remains to be seen on how the post-INF future will play out, but there are real dangers that may arise from an ill-thought-out rush to build the missiles first and then wait for a strategy to materialize around the capabilities that we’ll spend probably billions acquiring.
TH: Is there any hope for reviving the INF, or renewing New START? Either under the Trump administration or a successor? Likewise, what are the prospects of China joining trilateral or multilateral nuclear arms-control agreements? Or of India and Pakistan joining one of the latter?
AP: Before they violated INF, the Russians in around 2007 had proposed multilateralizing the treaty, having seen the Chinese missile arsenal grow - and the quick progress of India and Pakistan. That was a nonstarter then and it remains so now. Countries assent to arms control for reasons of mutual benefit. The way I see it, if I’m sitting in Beijing, there’s no reason for me to join something like INF without getting something very valuable in return. What precisely that might be is unclear. Maybe American limitations on missile defense, but good luck selling that in Washington.
The idea of adding China to New START is coming from people who don’t know what exactly they’re talking about. We think of the US, Russia, and China as the three “great powers” today, and while everyone’s been obsessing over “great power competition,” they’ve lost sight of the simple facts. The US and Russia have nuclear forces that are an order of magnitude greater than China’s stockpile. Moreover, under the counting rules implemented in New START for deployed strategic warheads, China’s total would likely be … zero or a very low number.
Sure, the idea of all these countries reducing their nuclear arms in tandem is a useful aspiration, but it’s hard not to feel that this idea of trilateralizing New START is a poison pill to prevent the treaty’s five-year extension in 2021. That extension absolutely has to happen; it would be folly not to.
TH: Do you see any way of negotiating away, or at least freezing, North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs? If not, is there any option other than just living with it?
AP: This is what I’ve spent most of my time thinking about for the past three or so years. I don’t think we’ll be convincing a nuclear-armed North Korea to part with its nuclear weapons. For instance, for all the talk of us - and Russia and China - giving Kim security guarantees, it’s very difficult for me to imagine any security guarantee that the North Korean regime would see as equally or more credible than its own nuclear weapons. This is a country that has enshrined self-reliance at the center of its ideology: I think they’d prefer to look out for themselves with their own nuclear weapons. Certainly, for Kim Jong Un, these weapons are the best chance of regime survival, which is why the regime has frequently cited both Saddam Hussein and Muammar Qaddafi’s fatal errors as being their willingness to view disarmament overtures with rose-tinted glasses.
TH: So we just live with it?
AP: We absolutely, however, need to work toward a freeze of North Korea’s qualitative and quantitative nuclear force expansion. This was something we should have worked toward before North Korea demonstrated its ICBM, and I spent much of 2016, while Kim really ramped up the tempo on missile testing, insisting that this should be the way forward. Three years later, we’re at the mercy of a flimsy self-enforced moratorium in place on North Korea’s testing of ICBMs and have nothing else to show. To get to even a modest, partial freeze on the production of fissile material - far from the ideal starting point - we’d have to moot partial sanctions relief. For this administration, however, I have little hope that will happen: there’s this deeply ideologically ingrained view here that sanctions are something we do to “bad” countries because they’re “bad” - not because we hope to put them on the negotiating table to get things we want in return.
TH: Finally, what potential disaster scenario around the world most keeps you up at night?
AP: I haven’t mentioned it yet, but the closest we came to nuclear war in 2019 wasn’t on the Korean Peninsula, or with Russia and China: It was India and Pakistan. The February crisis was a wake-up call for folks in Washington that two decades after their successful nuclear breakout, India, and Pakistan remain very much capable of taking their rivalry to new heights. We saw India become the first nuclear-armed state to use conventional airpower against the territory of another nuclear-armed state. I worry about South Asia spiraling out of control. Luck played a major role in ending the February crisis - especially with the serendipitous capture by Pakistan of an Indian pilot in good health, whose prisoner exchange facilitated a drawdown. We might not get so lucky in future skirmishes.
(Bloomberg)
