X-47B and other contenders
emerged from the US Navy’s
Unmanned Carrier-Launched
Airborne Surveillance and Strike
(UCLASS) program which changed
scope several times along the way
but finally settled on the unmanned
tanker role.
That’s certainly useful but the
final potential would appear far
greater, with unmanned aircraft
accompanying Super Hornet or
F-35 on strike missions, refuelling,
providing extended sensor coverage
and releasing weapons at the behest of
the manned aircraft.
How long before it would be
decided the unmanned aircraft could
do all that was needed and possibly
better than ultra-expensive manned
aircraft and their highly trained pilots
- maybe not long at all.
US private sector intelligence group
Stratfor says as the power competition
between Russia, China and the
US intensifies, the emergence of
disruptive weapons technologies will
drive them deeper into a destabilising
arms race.
Increasingly capable missile
defence systems will contribute,
specifically anti-ballistic missiles.
That goes both ways. Russia views
the SM-3 – likely to be eventually
acquired by Australia – with grave
suspicion, along with the US THAAD
and Ground Based Interceptor, as
potentially neutralising their nuclear
arsenals.
Add to that the new US super-fuze
installed on nuclear warheads of
submarine-launched Trident ballistic
missiles under the decade-long nuclear
weapon modernisation program.
This doesn’t make the missile itself
any more accurate. The fuze detonates
the missile warhead at the optimum
location to cause most damage to
a target such as a missile silo. The
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists says
that it boosts the killing power of
US nuclear warheads by a factor of
around three.
“Because the innovations in
the super-fuze appear, to the
non-technical eye, to be minor,
policymakers outside of the US
government (and probably inside thegovernment as well) have completely
missed its revolutionary impact on
military capabilities and its important
implications for global security,” it
said in an article in March 2017.
But there’s more. The US is looking
to field more of what are termed low-
yield nuclear weapons, with explosive
power of less than 20 kilotons. These
are also termed tactical or battlefield
nuclear weapons.
By nuclear standards their yield
is modest but at the upper end it’s
still equivalent to the bomb that
devastated Hiroshima.
The logic is that large bombs,
in the megaton range, would be so
catastrophic that their use would
be unthinkable and so they pose no
effective deterrent, unlike smaller
bombs. It’s not just the US - both
India and Pakistan possess low-yield
bombs as do other nuclear powers.
Any use of any nuclear weapon
by anyone would be profoundly
disruptive to the human race. If it
didn’t lead to immediate escalation, it
would have the effect of lowering the
nuclear threshold for next time.The USSZumwalt stars in the
techno-thriller Ghost Fleet.
US NAVY‘By nuclear
standards
their yield is
modest.’
DISRUPTION