News that China has tested an orbital nuclear bombardment system has created fears that China could nuke America from space.
But does this threaten America with a nuclear destruction – or is it just a Chinese bluff?
In August, China tested a Fractional Orbit Bombardment System (FOBS), according to Britain’s Financial Times. Sources told the newspaper that “the Chinese military launched a rocket that carried a hypersonic glide vehicle which flew through low-orbit space before cruising down towards its target.”
China says the August launch was just a civilian test of a reusable spacecraft. But if U.S. intelligence reports are true, then China appears to have paired two technologies, one old and one new.
FOBS is an old Soviet concept from the 1960s. It essentially involves launching a nuclear warhead into a low-Earth orbit like a satellite, except that the warhead only makes a partial orbit before reentering the atmosphere. The goal was to bypass U.S. missile defenses: while American ground-based radars were and still are aimed northwards to detect ICBMs coming in over the North Pole – the shortest route between Russia/China and North America – a FOBS warhead could approach from the south. But the Soviet weapon was considered less accurate than a conventional ICBM, and a FOBS coming in over the South Pole to hit America would take closer to an hour than the 30 minutes for a standard North Pole trajectory. The Soviets scrapped FOBS in the 1980s.
However, China may have revived FOBS, or what some are calling G-FOBS (Glider- Fractional Orbit Bombing System). Instead of a nuclear warhead, the Chinese rocket carries a nuclear-armed hypersonic glider. America, Russia and China are developing such boost-glide vehicles, in which a heavy rocket or ICBM boosts a glider into the upper atmosphere, which then descends on to the target at Mach 20-plus (Russia claims its Avangard system can reach Mach 27). Unlike ICBM warheads, which follow a fast but fixed trajectory, the wings on a hypersonic glider allow it to maneuver within the atmosphere to avoid detection and interception.
But assuming China does have a G-FOBS, what exactly would be the benefit to Beijing? China is estimated to have 100-plus ICBMs and is building more missile silos, so it already has the capacity to devastate the United States. Yet despite Pentagon fears of a Chinese orbital nuclear strike, the Chinese would be foolish to try. For a first strike to succeed without China being bombed into the Stone Age, Chinese leaders would have to be certain of destroying American ballistic missile submarines, as well as any land-based ICBMs and bombers that survived a surprise attack.
As for sending rockets over the South Pole to avoid missile detection radars, any FOBS launch would still be detected by U.S. missile warning satellites that constantly scan the Earth below for the infrared signature of rocket engines. Perhaps a single FOBS launch might not arouse alarm, but a mass launch of rockets is precisely what the U.S. missile warning system is designed to detect.
It’s true that the potential threat of missiles – or gliders – coming in from multiple directions would defeat missile defenses. But that’s not the biggest danger of boost-glide weapons. The real problem is that no one currently has a good solution for stopping Mach 20 gliders. Indeed, it seems premature to worry about FOBS when the U.S. – despite many billions of dollars on missile defense since the 1960s –cannot even reliably intercept a handful of regular ICBM warheads launched a nation like North Korea.
On the other hand, China can’t even be sure that its hypersonic weapons will work as planned. The U.S. tested two hypersonic gliders in 2010 and 2011: they did reach Mach 20 for a few minutes – and then crashed due to overheating and instability. Russia touts its Avangard boost-glide vehicle as an unstoppable wonder weapon, but it’s not clear whether Russia has solved the technical issues.
Ultimately, this boils down to two questions: why did China develop a hypersonic FOBS, and how will the U.S. respond? From Beijing’s perspective, it’s reasonable to assume that this a clever way of leveraging China’s work on hypersonic weapons, which may equal – or even exceed – American efforts. It may also be seen as a way to discomfit the U.S. and serve as a bargaining chip to dissuade the U.S. from building missile defenses. At the least, it could divert U.S. resources from issues that are dearer to China, such as the U.S. building air and naval forces to defend Taiwan.
As for the U.S. response to G-FOBS, there will be a temptation to expand missile defense radar and satellite coverage. This was likely to happen anyway because existing radars and satellites aren’t designed to detect hypersonic gliders flying high in the atmosphere rather than in outer space. Some may also demand that America develop its own hypersonic FOBS – which would soak up resources for minimal gain.
What’s really disturbing here is the prospect of nuclear weapons in space (as depicted in the 1968 Star Trek episode “Assignment Earth,” where a sabotaged orbital nuclear bomb nearly triggers World War III). The 1967 Outer Space Treaty bans weapons of mass destruction from being placed “in orbit around the Earth, installed on the moon or any other celestial body.” But if China does deploy a working FOBS system, the U.S. and Russia will be tempted to develop their own space-based H-bombs.
That grim future nearly happened during the Cold War. The world doesn’t need to resurrect it.