The lethal hypersonic nuclear glider that looks to revolutionize defense aviation could travel the distance from Moscow to London within 13 minutes and could penetrate NATOs missile defense system.
After launching initial tests on Russia's first futuristic glider last year as part of Russia's Project 4202, the aircraft believed to be the Yu-74 is "ready for action" reports Britain's Daily Star.
The glider can travel at a speed of Mach 10 (7,680MPH or 12,3560kmh) and will reportedly be fit with RS-28 Sarmat intercontinental ballistic missiles although details about the glider's specifications remain top secret. In April, US military officials confirmed the existence of Russia's deadly hypersonic glider.
Considered a first in a growing aviation arms race, both the US and China are now hurrying to develop comparable hypersonic gliders equipped with nuclear intercontinental ballistic missiles increasing the defense gap between the military superpowers and the rest of the world.
The report on the development of Russia's hypersonic glider comes at a time when Moscow's relations with the West approach a historic tipping point driven most recently by accusations that President Vladimir Putin is attempting to intervene in the US political election after Hillary Clinton's campaign hurled a desperate allegation that the WikiLeaks file dump exposing her own bid, joined by the media and Democratic Party officials, to subvert the 2016 presidential election was all a plot of the Russians.
The splurge of Russophobia appears to have spilled over into defense relations with feverish assaults on Moscow's strategy in Syria of stabilizing the Assad regime at least as long as necessary to root out Daesh and other jihadist elements in addition to renewed struggle in Crimea after Ukrainian forces were thwarted in a terror plot, an incident that has brought Moscow and Kiev to the brink.
There does appear to be a bit of opportunism in the reporting of Russia's defense capabilities by Western media outlets with recent leaks claiming that NATO would be outgunned by the Moscow military machine if a conflict were to ensue in a transparent effort to lobby for increased defense appropriations to further subsidize the Western military-industrial complex.
Although the latest report by Britain's Daily Star may be in line with this vein of exaggerating the threat of Russia, Moscow's program of hypersonic military capabilities has been an open secret and similar reports about the incredible capabilities of the experimental Yu-74 have been detailed by defense analytics webspite Ostkraft.ru which determined that the aircraft's outstanding maneuverability and high speeds would render NATO's missile defense systems and the US THAAD shield useless.
Source: Sputnik News
from Military Space News, Nuclear Weapons, Missile Defense http://ift.tt/2aNyHai
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