"I call it the 'super-duper missile,' and I heard the other night 17 times faster than what they have right now, when you take the fastest missile we have right now. You've heard Russia has five times and China's working on five or six times — we have one 17 times, and it's just gotten the go-ahead..."
Donald Trump 19 May 2020
Hypersonic Espionage - Trump Claims
Donald Trump has repeatedly claimed that Russia made a technological breakthrough after stealing ‘super-duper’ missile plans from the US during the presidency of Barack Obama. In this he seems intent on reviving the Red Scare panic of 1949, when the first atomic bomb test of the Soviet Union quickly provoked American production of the "Super" - the Hydrogen Bomb. The former TV personality made the suggestion during an election rally in New Hampshire on 23 October 2023, when he pledged to beef up American strategic defensive and offensive capabilities if he were returned to the White House in 2024. Moscow dismissed the allegations.
Early in the Manhattan Project, the Hungarian physicist Edward Teller began arguing for a version of atomic weapon that used nuclear fusion. Teller was so persistent, and according to some, so annoying, that he was given his own small subset of scientists to pursue what he called the “Super”, which would be much more powerful than anything produced by the Manhattan Project. Little came of this effort during WWII. Many other scientists had suspected that Germany was developing a bomb and wanted to push ahead in the race against slow action.
Few aspects of the Manhattan Project remained secret from the Soviet Union for long. Given the size of the pre-existing Soviet espionage network within the United States and the number of Americans who were sympathetic to communism or even members of the CPUSA themselves, it seems highly unlikely in retrospect that penetrations of the Manhattan Project could have been prevented. Soviet espionage directed at the Manhattan Project probably hastened by at least 12-18 months the Soviet acquisition of an atomic bomb. In 1949, when the Soviet Union tested its first atomic bomb, it came as a great shock to most Americans.
In 1950, Truman administration officials arrested Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for conspiracy to commit espionage. Specifically, the serious charges concerned passing information about the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union and thereby causing the Korean War. Klaus Emil Julius Fuchs (1911-1988) was a German-born atomic scientist who was convicted of espionage in Great Britain for supplying atomic secrets to the Soviet Union. The Fuchs file is tied closely to that of the Rosenbergs. In June 1953, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed for conspiracy to commit espionage under the U.S. Espionage Act of 1917. Members of the communist party, the Rosenbergs were convicted of passing secret information about the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union. A number of spies within the Manhattan Project have never been positively identified.
After the Soviet Union tested its first atomic bomb in 1949, scientist Edward Teller pressed for the U.S. to speed up work on the “Super,” the hydrogen or H-bomb, and dedicate another laboratory to the effort in order to take the pressure off Los Alamos. The Atomic Energy Commission was divided on the H-bomb. While they agreed on the need to respond to the Soviet threat by producing more nuclear weapons, not all of them were willing to support the transition to vastly more powerful thermonuclear weapons, which they considered morally reprehensible.
“Under my leadership, we will once again protect our own people with our own missile defense system capable of blasting China, Russia, Iranian missiles out of the sky. And we will in addition have offensive weapons that will be second to none,” he said. “You know, Russia stole the super, we call them the super-dupers, right? They go super fast. They stole that during the Obama administration,” Trump added. “They stole the plans and they built it.”
As for Trump, in 2020 he also mentioned a “super duper US rocket” that he claimed would be capable of quickly hitting targets at a distance of 1,600 kilometers. Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova reacted at the time by pointing out that the US claims to have missiles that “no one can even think about.” The Russian diplomat stressed “Speed is a wonderful thing, but precision also matters. We remember what happened to the wonderful, new and smart [US] missiles in 2018”. She apparently referred to the US airstrikes on Syria in April 2018, when 71 out of 101 American missiles were downed by Syrian air defense forces.
Trump made similar claims about Russia in 2021, when he discussed a Chinese test of a hypersonic glider – a type of weapon that can travel at a very high speed in the atmosphere before hitting its target. “You know, somebody gave them, during the Obama administration, everything we had on hypersonic,” Trump claimed in an interview with radio host Hugh Hewitt at the time. “What happened is Russia got it, and China got it, perhaps from Russia.”
Asked about the remarks, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov was quick to respond by telling reporters that Russia “has its own missile, an excellent one." Peskov pointed out "It’s hard for me to say whether it fits in well with Mr. Trump's term ‘super-duper,’ but it is a good missile that has no rivals in the world for now. And there is not just one [such missile". The Kremlin press secretary did not specify what kind of missile he was referring to, but it’s worth noting in this regard that the Russian army is already equipped with hypersonic weapons, including the Kinzhal (Dagger) missiles, the Avangard gliders and the Zircon cruise missiles.
The United States is now far behind Russia as far as developing hypersonic missiles go, and several attempts by Washington to steal data on relevant Russian technologies have already been thwarted, Moscow-based military expert Alexey Leonkov told Sputnik. "Trump says that the drawings were stolen. But wait, someone made those drawings, so where is this person or group of comrades?" the expert said, in an apparent nod to American designers.
He also stressed that as far as the drawings are concerned, they are “not made in a single copy.”
"Anyway, where are these American hypersonic projects? This is all about technologies rather than the drawings. For us, all this happened consistently, and we were already on the verge of a breakthrough [into hypersonic development] before the collapse of the Soviet Union [in 1991]," Leonkov underscored. The expert recalled that Russian President Vladimir Putin “spoke about these hypersonic projects in 2018, namely about the Avangard, the Zircon and the Kinzhal.”
"Now we are already working on the second generation, so there was no point in stealing certain US drawings. On the contrary, it were Americans who tried to steal our hypersonic research and development. Russian special services have recently tackled several [US] espionage attempts in this field," Leonkov said.
He emphasized that the Americans, who are now trying to catch up with Russia, have attracted specialists from other countries, who deal more with theory, not practice. In this vein, the expert applauded "almost non-stop" hypersonic research and development work in Russia, where heads of several major corporations cooperated with developers of intercontinental ballistic missiles. “We improved technologies as we carried out complex physical and mathematical modeling, resolving the issue of reliable communications and control at hypersonic speeds,” he added.
Leonkov was echoed by another Russian military expert, Alexander Mikhailov, who told Sputnik that "if Russia had stolen the drawings of a 'super duper' US missile during Obama’s presidency, then a question arises: what prevented Americans from making hypersonic weapons with the help of the same drawings long time ago?"
Recalling that hypersonic weapons have yet to be put on service at the US army, Mikhailov singled out billions of dollars that are annually wasted for the purpose, not least by the Pentagon. He also recalled that “only Russia and China possess hypersonic weapons”, while the US continues to pay lip-service to the issue. "When it comes to development of hypersonic weapons, Russia outdid America by at least a decade. That’s why it’s safe to assume that it was the US which could steal our drawings. Judging by the fact, however, that America is yet to make progress in creating hypersonic weaponry, our drawing are in place," Mikhailov concluded.
|
NEWSLETTER
|
| Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list |
|
|
|
