Technically speaking, hypersonic weapons have existed since the middle of the 20th century. A hypersonic weapon is merely something that travels at Mach-5 or faster, or at least five times the speed of sound. Ballistic missiles have long possessed these speeds. What differentiates today’s emerging class of hypersonic capabilities is the use of aerodynamic lift […]
Fact Sheet: Autonomous Weapons
Often misleadingly referred to as “killer robots,” autonomous systems can interact with their environments by gathering information, determining a course of action and undertaking actions to achieve a goal, all with limited or no human interaction. In the realm of weaponry, autonomous technologies have most prominently been deployed in unmanned aerial and submersible drones. Such […]
Fact Sheet: North Korea Missile Test Activity
Updated November 5, 2024 Origins Throughout the 1960s and early 1970s as part of military cooperation pacts with the Soviet Union, North Korea was delivered surface-to-air and artillery rockets and trained on how to build and operate multiple-rocket launchers. Separately, it reached agreements with the People’s Republic of China to provide coastal defense capabilities such as anti-ship cruise missiles and the transfer of China’s missile research and […]
The China Dilemma
By John Erath Earlier this year, for the first time since the Cold War, it was announced that the total number of nuclear weapons in the world rose in 2022. Largely, the reason for the increase was China’s rapid construction of additional weapons. Although the United States and Russia are undergoing modernizations of their nuclear […]
Fact Sheet: The Sino-Soviet Border Dispute
In 1969, long-simmering Sino-Soviet tensions boiled over into direct military confrontation along the Ussuri River. The Ussuri served as an official border boundary between the People’s Republic of China and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and it had been a point of Chinese contention that the Soviet Union had forced China to consign Chinese […]
