Why You Shouldn't Worry About China’s New 'Hypersonic' Nuclear Death Machine

Military vehicles carrying DF-17 missiles parade through Tiananmen Square in Beijing on Oct. 1, 2019, celebrating the 70th anniversary of the founding of the Peoples Republic of China.

(Image credit: GREG BAKER/AFP/Getty Images)

Nervous ripples spread across U.S. social media Monday night (Sept. 30), as reports spread of China unveiling a scary-sounding new nuclear missile at a military parade.

The missile is designed to move very fast, even for a ballistic missile. (That's why they call it "hypersonic.") It approaches its target at a lower altitude. And it can make abrupt changes in direction that make it hard to track or hit with an interceptor.

The AP isn't wrong. The Dongfeng-17, described as a "hypersonic glider," is specifically designed to be more difficult than usual to knock out of the sky, according to multiple news reports. But Americans don't need to worry that China is suddenly able to breach the safety and security of U.S. missile defenses. That's because U.S. missile defenses aren't safe or secure at all, experts have long said.

As Laura Grego, a senior scientists and expert in nuclear issues at the Union of Concerned Scientists wrote back in 2017, the only shield the U.S. has is the Ground-based Midcourse Defense (GMD). But the GMD basically doesn't work. It's not well-tested, Grego said. In tests conducted under ideal conditions — no bad weather, no countermeasures — the GMD has only been able to knock a missile out of the sky four out of 10 times. In the real world, she wrote, we should expect them to work even less often.

But there's a more basic problem. Even setting aside that most missile defense plans involve trying to hit one missile with about four interceptor missiles, the U.S. simply doesn't have enough interceptors to stop a nuclear attack from a country like China under the best of conditions, according to news reports. Right now, according to Defense News, the U.S. has a total of 44 interceptors in place. China, according to the South China Morning Post, has 280 warheads. That's a much smaller arsenal than the U.S. or Russia, but more than enough to hit most major U.S. cities in a nuclear war even if all 44 interceptors worked perfectly to knock 44 missiles out of the air.

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Rafi joined Live Science in 2017. He has a bachelor's degree in journalism from Northwestern University’s Medill School of journalism. You can find his past science reporting at Inverse, Business Insider and Popular Science, and his past photojournalism on the Flash90 wire service and in the pages of The Courier Post of southern New Jersey.