Their design, with a high lift-to-drag ratio, means that they can then glide, unpowered, much farther than the re-entry vehicle of a normal intercontinental ballistic missile warhead
IN AUGUST a Chinese “Long March” rocket streaked into space. That is hardly unusual; there were nearly three dozen such launches last year. But having begun to orbit the Earth, the rocket’s payload then swung back down, glided through the upper atmosphere and crashed into the ground, missing a target by about 40km. According to the, which first reported the news, this was a test of a new, nuclear-capable hypersonic glide vehicle.
The advantage of this is that a warhead can travel to America over the South Pole, thus bypassing existing radar shields. In recent years Russia has said it is building a FOBS-capable ICBM, and some think that the huge size of new North Korean missiles suggest a similar interest. China has long worried that American missile defence might undermine its relatively small, though, nuclear arsenal.
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