China’s first test of an intercontinental ballistic missile-launched hypersonic glide vehicle last July is a “technological achievement with serious implications for strategic stability,” Admiral Charles Richard wrote in prepared testimony posted on the website of the House Defense Appropriations subcommittee.The hypersonic vehicle flew 40,000 km for more than 100 minutes, Richard wrote in the testimony — the most detailed U.S. account of the test to date.
Both China and Russia have the capability to “unilaterally escalate a conflict to any level of violence, in any domain, worldwide, with any instrument of national power, and at any time,” Richard said. The U.S. armed forces no longer have “the luxury of assuming the risk is always low, particularly during a crisis,” he added.“If strategic or nuclear deterrence fails, integrated deterrence and no other plan or capability in the DoD will work as designed,” he said.
Russia is in its second decade of investing substantial resources to expand their strategic and non-strategic nuclear capabilities.According to its publicly available nuclear strategy, “Russia acknowledges it could use nuclear weapons first, including in response to conventional attacks that threaten the ‘existence of the state,’” Richard said.
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