The US President Donald Trump accused Russia of stealing hypersonic missile technology during the Barack Obama regime. Moscow has already deployed the Avangard hypersonic cruise missile systems and is testing Tsirkon hypersonic anti-ship cruise missile and the Sarmat strategic missile system.
“They [Russia] have the missile, the super-duper-hypersonic missile… It goes five times faster than a normal missile,” he told the crowd in Bemidji, Minnesota. “We have one that goes much faster, much faster than that.”
“Russia got that information from the Obama administration, Russia stole that information. You knew that you knew that. Russia got the information, and then they built it,” he said.
Speaking at a ceremony in the White House in mid-May, Trump said the United States was working on a “super-duper missile” capable of flying 17 times faster than any other missile existing at the moment. He gave no further details.
This is not the first time the US is accusing Russia of stealing the hypersonic missile technology. In August 2019, White House National Security Adviser John Bolton in an interview with Voice of America accused Russia of stealing the American technologies related to the development of hypersonic weapons.
Moscow Rejects the charges
Moscow had rejected the charges in 2019 citing the display of a mock-up of an intercontinental ballistic missile warhead dubbed Yu-71 back in the 1990s which was a boost-glide vehicle. They argue that the technology developed in the former Soviet Union was on par with the US and the current generation of missiles are a continuation of the built-up capabilities.
Editor-in-Chief of Arsenal of the Fatherland journal Viktor Murakhovsky told the Russian news agency TASS “Domestic hypersonic technologies rely on the gigantic scientific and technical potential created in the USSR. Publicly, these developments were mentioned by the Russian president only recently but they were started back in the 1970s. This work was carried out both for military purposes and for outer space exploration.
Long before it or before US space shuttle flights, the Soviet Research and Production Association Molniya led by Gleb Lozino-Lozinsky was developing a dual-purpose orbital aircraft called Spiral. Many technologies developed under this project were used in the Energia-Buran program.”
Buran orbital spacecraft, which flew at hypersonic speed re-entered into the atmosphere. “A host of hypersonic technologies had to be developed,” Murakhovsky added.
Avangard ICBM
The Avangard strategic intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) system is equipped with a hypersonic glide vehicle. As per the open-source, the testing of the ICBM began in 2004. The Russian President Vladimir Putin revealed the existence of the ICBM in his State of the Nation Address to the Federal Assembly on March 1, 2018.
The Russians have agreed to include Sarmat and Avangard missile systems in the New START treaty. The New START treaty which took effect in 2011 is for a period of ten years unless it is replaced by a new agreement before 2021. The New START treaty can be prolonged for five years, 2026, by mutual consent.