Look up! The ghosts of space weapons past have once again darkened our cosmic doorway. Recently Britain’s Financial Times reported that China flight-tested a new breed of space weapon when it launched a massive “Long March” rocket tipped with a nuclear-capable, hypersonic glider. The missile briefly entered orbit before descending on its target, which it missed by roughly two dozen miles. The report suggested that the test was evidence that China has “made astounding progress on hypersonic weapons and [is] far more advanced than US officials realised.”
As one might expect, some commentators have seized upon the test to call U.S. security into doubt. And why not? The glider’s physical capabilities are truly impressive. Its high lift-to-drag ratio, for instance, means that it can descend on its target unpowered and can fly much farther than the reentry vehicles of normal ICBM warheads. Hypersonic gliders zip along at lower altitudes and can maneuver, enabling them to hide from radar and missile defense systems. Not least, there is the weapon’s ludicrous speed: Hypersonic weapons travel at speeds that literally change the surrounding molecules, either by breaking them apart (dissociation) or picking up electrical charge (ionization). That’s fast.
The Chinese test has disentombed long-buried fears of orbital bombardment that hark back to the Cold War. In the 1960s and 1970s, the Soviet Union developed and tested a terrifying weapon that preoccupied U.S. leaders for more than two decades: the “fractional orbital bombardment system” (FOBS). Like the purported Chinese glider, FOBS permitted the Soviets, in theory, to orbit a nuclear warhead and deaccelerate it out of orbit onto earthly targets. Though the Kremlin abandoned the program in 1983, having never orbited a single warhead, FOBS’s political and military significance continued to resonate long after the Cold War ended. Indeed, the history of the FOBS scare tells us much about how space weapons have figured in the American imagination and offers us a window into why the Chinese test isn’t a cause for panic.
By the time the American public first learned of FOBS in 1967 — the CIA had speculated about development of the system five years earlier, shortly after design work began — Cold War paranoia and an exploding science fiction literature had been priming readers for the news for more than 20 years. As early as July 1945, U.S. Army intelligence was regaling journalists with details of a massive Sonnengewehr, or “Sun Gun,” that Nazi scientists had modeled for use in combat. Their blueprints called for a gigantic mirror that would harness solar rays and redirect them onto enemy cities and armies. Months later, after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, physicist Louis Ridenour immediately connected the devastating power of the atomic bomb to satellite technology in a short story for Fortune magazine. “Pilot Lights of the Apocalypse” ends when an underground command center outside San Francisco confuses an earthquake with an all-out nuclear strike from space, precipitating a cataclysmic world war. After the Soviet Union launched Sputnik in October 1957, dozens of novels and short stories — Jeff Sutton’s “Bombs in Orbit” (1959) and Robert Heinlein’s “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress” (1966), for example — employed space-based bombardment as a dramatic device.