Nuclear weapons in space will not benefit Beijing
News that China has tested an orbital nuclear bombardment system has created fears that China could nuke America from space. But does this threaten America with a nuclear destruction – or is it just a Chinese bluff? In August, China tested a Fractional Orbit Bombardment System (FOBS), according to Britain’s Financial Times. Sources told the newspaper that “the Chinese military launched a rocket that carried a hypersonic glide vehicle which flew through low-orbit space before cruising down towards its target.” China says the August launch was just a civilian test of a reusable spacecraft. But if U.S. intelligence reports are true, then China appears to have paired two technologies, one old and one new. FOBS is an old Soviet concept from the 1960s. It essentially involves launching a nuclear warhead into a low-Earth orbit like a satellite, except that the warhead only makes a partial orbit before reentering the atmosphere. The goal was to bypass U.S. missile defenses: while American ground-based radars were and still are aimed northwards to detect ICBMs coming in over the North Pole – the shortest route between Russia/China and North America – a FOBS warhead could approach from the south. But the Soviet weapon was considered less accurate than a conventional ICBM, and a FOBS coming in over the South Pole to hit America would take closer to an hour than the 30 minutes for a standard North Pole trajectory. The Soviets scrapped FOBS in the 1980s. However, China may have revived FOBS, or what some are calling G-FOBS (Glider- Fractional Orbit Bombing System). Instead of a nuclear warhead, the Chinese rocket carries a nuclear-armed hypersonic glider. America, Russia and China are developing such boost-glide vehicles, in which a heavy rocket or ICBM boosts a glider into the upper atmosphere, which then descends on to the target at Mach 20-plus (Russia claims its Avangard system can reach Mach 27).
