Lasers can stop a hypersonic missile, but the challenge is getting a beam on the target through the atmosphere. Some of the old SDI tests solved the problem by flying the laser above most of the atmosphere.
This is an exhausting and dispiriting article to try to read because of its short, choppy, clearly AI-generated sentences. The topic is interesting, but whoever caused it to be penned didn’t seem to care enough to make it appealing to read.
Curious which parts specifically felt that way for you? I spent over a week on this, and yes ofc, I used LLMs to help reformulate some sections, but "didn't seem to care enough to make it appealing to read" isn't it. Happy to look at the spots that felt choppy if you can point them out.
It starts in the very first paragraph. “The headlines say yes. […] The headline is wrong.”
And there are numerous such examples. “That was half true. The kill chain ran. The interceptor did not.”
LLMs produce staccato, ugly chains of sentence stumps like this all the time. They’re easy to spot, and your essay is littered with them.
If anything, spending a week on a project like this seems liable to blind you to the shortcomings of the prose, because after putting in a lot of effort you can’t read it with fresh eyes. That’s what editors are for, but an LLM is by nature very weak at editing LLM-generated text.
I want to be able to offer constructive feedback on the structure of the overall essay, for example that the interspersed animated/interactive models often don’t seem strongly connected to the text, but simply reading the words makes this a grind.
> That was half true. The kill chain ran. The interceptor did not.
That was one of the ones that particularly stood out to me. As I read the article, I often found myself wishing for semicolons and colons instead of full stops; or in some cases a comma and some conjunction:
> That was half true: the kill chain ran, but the interceptor did not.
"A 100 to 300 kW beam has perhaps one to three seconds of dwell on a hardened, ablating, plasma-shrouded glide body. That is orders of magnitude short of the joules per square centimetre needed for a thermal kill."
- wondering if you can elaborate more on whether a laser energy-based device would ever be able to have enough power to stop one of these?
> The honest answer to that question, in June 2026, is that we do not know
> The honest reading of those numbers is not that defense is winning on economics
> The honest 2026 answer is in three parts.
> The honest answer is that we do not know, because no one has tried
Firstly, I appreciated the article and especially the visuals. But I had the same reaction as the GP commenter. It was hard to read. I'm sick of this punchy, repetitive, LLM-generated prose.
Agreed, that's a huge turn off for me, and I thought this would genuinely be fascinating. I'm not a physics expert but I love reading about interesting things like this, but I can't stand this surface-level "well I in theory could be an expert on this topic but nobody knows because the machine removed all of the nuance and now it's shallow AI writing" style of writing.
I imagine the realistic answer is "we don't know", because it's never been truly tested. They are constantly improving and iterating designs, speeds, anti-intercept tech, anti-tracking. As you said as well, this is only what from is available in OSINT reporting. There are surely classified weapons from all major countries lying in wait for the most serious scenarios.
A big part of hypersonic/ICBM warfare is anti-detection tech. When you have the two most military capable countries with 'hypersonic' ICBMs that can in theory reach across the planet is < 30 minutes, a massive part of that is stopping the other country from realizing you even fired a missile in the first place. That detection is usually done through satellites afaik. One of the next steps in global warfare is going to be satellite degradation and interference.
It's a whole different world when you detect a launch in the silo and know you have half an hour to react versus not realizing a missile is in the air until it's 5 minutes off the west coast.
>It's a whole different world when you detect a launch in the silo and know you have half an hour to react versus not realizing a missile is in the air until it's 5 minutes off the west coast.
Missile submarines have basically made this reality for decades.
I think this discussion is adressing wrong points. The question is not "can you maybe stop single missile" but: can you reliably and cheaply stop 20 missiles every day for weeks? Oreshnik in well run serial production and non atomic configuration costs around $10m per missile, and Russia can manufacture 25 every month (according to Russian sources).
What I'm perpetually confused by is I am relatively certain we developed interceptors for these type of missions in the 1970s. The LIM-49 Spartan and the later "Sprint" missile were designed for exactly this kind of intercept. The Sprint missile was capable of moving so fast it was glowing white hot during its mission.
We elected not to deploy these weapons for whatever reason. So saying they don't exist at least in the case of the US is more like saying we threw them out because they were deemed useless. But the problem doesn't really seem unsolvable.
The earlier interceptors were for ballistic missiles. They are traveling at hypersonic speeds but have high trajectories (so radar can see them earlier) and can't maneuver for significant parts of their flight (so they are easier to track and target).
FWIW they were cancelled because they didn't have a particularly good kill ratio and proliferation and MIRV meant you'd need a ton of them to prevent an attack landing (and doing so would involve a significant number of nuclear blasts pretty close to the targets anyway). Deterrence was more credible.
Weren’t those anti ballistic missile missiles all nuclear armed themselves?
And doesn’t the parent article to the Sprint article make it clear that they we didn’t deploy them because fall out shelters combined with building more nukes was deemed more cost effective at saving lives.
The weapon you linked to is an anti ballistic missile. The difficulty is not purely in how fast the target is going, but how much it maneuvers, the duration at which it can sustain those speeds, and the altitudes at which it operates. The article addresses this early on.
I think you meant to say "Sprint". In any case, if you're being attacked I think the consequence of high altitude fallout is pretty small compared to dying.
Depends on what you're being attacked by. If it's just regular warheads, a nuclear interceptor is wildly inappropriate especially if the intercept happens over someone else's airspace.
The ABM systems we built in the early cold war worked by having nuclear payloads. We could absolutely not hit an incoming ICBM with the tech at the time, so we just slapped a nuke on it and hoped we could get within 1km at detonation.
Importantly, it was a completely dead end. They had no response to MIRVs and could not be built in sufficient numbers to deal with any actual launch. We threw them out because they were in fact useless.
Generally, we have moved away from Nuclear ABM systems because detonating a hundred warheads above a city is very unlikely to work out well.
Intercepting a cold war era ICBM turned out to be feasible with newer technology, and we currently have $2 billion missiles that can feasibly intercept ICBMs (at low quantity).
>No maneuvering boost-glide hypersonic vehicle has ever been fired in combat against a defended target
Nobody has fired one of those against a target because almost nobody has a functioning maneuvering hypersonic vehicle. Basically just China I think.
I would expect "real" hypersonic weapons like that are basically uncounterable. The physics just gets too obnoxious. Interceptors will struggle to get better than a coin flip, and they will be too expensive to use on anything else so they won't be general purpose, so equipping them will be full of tradeoffs.
That's the entire point of hypersonic weapons. $3 billion dollars to make that high value target go away, with extremely high probability. They replace 50 bombers launching still quite expensive anti-ship weapons at scale, which is the strategy it replaces.
This of course has rather negative implications for the concept of force projection in future wars. Which is why China made a hypersonic weapon.
I don't think you're wrong broadly, though I want to add that the particular interceptor warheads were relatively small and nukes detonated in the upper atmosphere generally don't do much to stuff on the ground. There's not enough material to create significant fallout so it's just a mild EMP and even milder pressure wave
Interesting post. It made me think that a manned Navy of individual high value ships becomes essentially useless if you can take out a 13 billion dollar carrier with a 3 billion dollar missile.
It becomes a war of financial attrition at that point.
Wikipedia notes both the Spartan and Sprint missiles as having nuclear warheads. That was reasonable-ish, since Wikipedia also notes them being cold war-era anti-ICBM weapons. Less bad to have your own interceptor nukes going off "near" your city than to have enemy nukes scoring direct hit on it.
In contrast, modern hypersonic weapons have plenty of use cases where they'd be fitted with conventional warheads, and used against targets like US Navy ships.
There is plenty that could go wrong if USN ships mounted nuclear interceptor missiles, ready to launch on a moment's notice...
They have stopped a lot of sonic missiles, some probably being sub-sonic. Hypersonic is 5-10x sonic speeds and not many countries have these types of missiles.
>Every “hypersonic intercept” the press has reported in the last three years was a different class of weapon: an air-launched aeroballistic missile, a quasi-ballistic short-range ballistic missile with a maneuvering reentry vehicle, or in one case a MIRV bus on an intermediate-range ballistic missile that the press could not stop calling hypersonic.
Most people understand that no demonstrable air breathing lift-generating hypersonic missile actually exist. This article goes on to claim that various never launched paper-tigers created for sabre rattling propaganda do actually exist. But it also says they've never been successfully tested. And they haven't. This is a really hard problem.
"Can You Stop a Hypersonic (air breathing/lift generating) Missle?" is actually, "Can you Build a Hypersonic (air breathing/lift generating) Missle?" and the answer is "No, so there's no need to stop them." Conical rockets that travel at hypersonic speeds have existed since the 1950s and will continue to exist and be used as weapons though.
So, tldr; going hypersonic isn't special or new, but air-breathing or lift generating while doing it would be, if it existed, so nation states sabre rattle about fake weapons.
Lasers can stop a hypersonic missile, but the challenge is getting a beam on the target through the atmosphere. Some of the old SDI tests solved the problem by flying the laser above most of the atmosphere.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_YAL-1
This is an exhausting and dispiriting article to try to read because of its short, choppy, clearly AI-generated sentences. The topic is interesting, but whoever caused it to be penned didn’t seem to care enough to make it appealing to read.
Curious which parts specifically felt that way for you? I spent over a week on this, and yes ofc, I used LLMs to help reformulate some sections, but "didn't seem to care enough to make it appealing to read" isn't it. Happy to look at the spots that felt choppy if you can point them out.
It starts in the very first paragraph. “The headlines say yes. […] The headline is wrong.”
And there are numerous such examples. “That was half true. The kill chain ran. The interceptor did not.”
LLMs produce staccato, ugly chains of sentence stumps like this all the time. They’re easy to spot, and your essay is littered with them.
If anything, spending a week on a project like this seems liable to blind you to the shortcomings of the prose, because after putting in a lot of effort you can’t read it with fresh eyes. That’s what editors are for, but an LLM is by nature very weak at editing LLM-generated text.
I want to be able to offer constructive feedback on the structure of the overall essay, for example that the interspersed animated/interactive models often don’t seem strongly connected to the text, but simply reading the words makes this a grind.
> That was half true. The kill chain ran. The interceptor did not.
That was one of the ones that particularly stood out to me. As I read the article, I often found myself wishing for semicolons and colons instead of full stops; or in some cases a comma and some conjunction:
> That was half true: the kill chain ran, but the interceptor did not.
Thanks for compiling this.
"A 100 to 300 kW beam has perhaps one to three seconds of dwell on a hardened, ablating, plasma-shrouded glide body. That is orders of magnitude short of the joules per square centimetre needed for a thermal kill."
- wondering if you can elaborate more on whether a laser energy-based device would ever be able to have enough power to stop one of these?
> The honest answer to that question, in June 2026, is that we do not know
> The honest reading of those numbers is not that defense is winning on economics
> The honest 2026 answer is in three parts.
> The honest answer is that we do not know, because no one has tried
Firstly, I appreciated the article and especially the visuals. But I had the same reaction as the GP commenter. It was hard to read. I'm sick of this punchy, repetitive, LLM-generated prose.
“Honestly” / “the honest answer is” are huge LLM tells.
Spend enough time arguing with Claude and hearing that combination of words starts making you wince / twitch uncontrollably.
That said I enjoyed the article!
Agreed, that's a huge turn off for me, and I thought this would genuinely be fascinating. I'm not a physics expert but I love reading about interesting things like this, but I can't stand this surface-level "well I in theory could be an expert on this topic but nobody knows because the machine removed all of the nuance and now it's shallow AI writing" style of writing.
I imagine the realistic answer is "we don't know", because it's never been truly tested. They are constantly improving and iterating designs, speeds, anti-intercept tech, anti-tracking. As you said as well, this is only what from is available in OSINT reporting. There are surely classified weapons from all major countries lying in wait for the most serious scenarios.
A big part of hypersonic/ICBM warfare is anti-detection tech. When you have the two most military capable countries with 'hypersonic' ICBMs that can in theory reach across the planet is < 30 minutes, a massive part of that is stopping the other country from realizing you even fired a missile in the first place. That detection is usually done through satellites afaik. One of the next steps in global warfare is going to be satellite degradation and interference.
It's a whole different world when you detect a launch in the silo and know you have half an hour to react versus not realizing a missile is in the air until it's 5 minutes off the west coast.
>It's a whole different world when you detect a launch in the silo and know you have half an hour to react versus not realizing a missile is in the air until it's 5 minutes off the west coast.
Missile submarines have basically made this reality for decades.
I think this discussion is adressing wrong points. The question is not "can you maybe stop single missile" but: can you reliably and cheaply stop 20 missiles every day for weeks? Oreshnik in well run serial production and non atomic configuration costs around $10m per missile, and Russia can manufacture 25 every month (according to Russian sources).
What I'm perpetually confused by is I am relatively certain we developed interceptors for these type of missions in the 1970s. The LIM-49 Spartan and the later "Sprint" missile were designed for exactly this kind of intercept. The Sprint missile was capable of moving so fast it was glowing white hot during its mission.
We elected not to deploy these weapons for whatever reason. So saying they don't exist at least in the case of the US is more like saying we threw them out because they were deemed useless. But the problem doesn't really seem unsolvable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprint_(missile)
The earlier interceptors were for ballistic missiles. They are traveling at hypersonic speeds but have high trajectories (so radar can see them earlier) and can't maneuver for significant parts of their flight (so they are easier to track and target).
FWIW they were cancelled because they didn't have a particularly good kill ratio and proliferation and MIRV meant you'd need a ton of them to prevent an attack landing (and doing so would involve a significant number of nuclear blasts pretty close to the targets anyway). Deterrence was more credible.
Weren’t those anti ballistic missile missiles all nuclear armed themselves?
And doesn’t the parent article to the Sprint article make it clear that they we didn’t deploy them because fall out shelters combined with building more nukes was deemed more cost effective at saving lives.
The weapon you linked to is an anti ballistic missile. The difficulty is not purely in how fast the target is going, but how much it maneuvers, the duration at which it can sustain those speeds, and the altitudes at which it operates. The article addresses this early on.
Spirit is a nuke. Not really something we want to be detonating in the atmosphere.
I think you meant to say "Sprint". In any case, if you're being attacked I think the consequence of high altitude fallout is pretty small compared to dying.
Depends on what you're being attacked by. If it's just regular warheads, a nuclear interceptor is wildly inappropriate especially if the intercept happens over someone else's airspace.
Modern thermonuclear weapons don’t really have fallout.
I think you are missing something;
The ABM systems we built in the early cold war worked by having nuclear payloads. We could absolutely not hit an incoming ICBM with the tech at the time, so we just slapped a nuke on it and hoped we could get within 1km at detonation.
Importantly, it was a completely dead end. They had no response to MIRVs and could not be built in sufficient numbers to deal with any actual launch. We threw them out because they were in fact useless.
Generally, we have moved away from Nuclear ABM systems because detonating a hundred warheads above a city is very unlikely to work out well.
Intercepting a cold war era ICBM turned out to be feasible with newer technology, and we currently have $2 billion missiles that can feasibly intercept ICBMs (at low quantity).
>No maneuvering boost-glide hypersonic vehicle has ever been fired in combat against a defended target
Nobody has fired one of those against a target because almost nobody has a functioning maneuvering hypersonic vehicle. Basically just China I think.
I would expect "real" hypersonic weapons like that are basically uncounterable. The physics just gets too obnoxious. Interceptors will struggle to get better than a coin flip, and they will be too expensive to use on anything else so they won't be general purpose, so equipping them will be full of tradeoffs.
That's the entire point of hypersonic weapons. $3 billion dollars to make that high value target go away, with extremely high probability. They replace 50 bombers launching still quite expensive anti-ship weapons at scale, which is the strategy it replaces.
This of course has rather negative implications for the concept of force projection in future wars. Which is why China made a hypersonic weapon.
I don't think you're wrong broadly, though I want to add that the particular interceptor warheads were relatively small and nukes detonated in the upper atmosphere generally don't do much to stuff on the ground. There's not enough material to create significant fallout so it's just a mild EMP and even milder pressure wave
Interesting post. It made me think that a manned Navy of individual high value ships becomes essentially useless if you can take out a 13 billion dollar carrier with a 3 billion dollar missile.
It becomes a war of financial attrition at that point.
Wikipedia notes both the Spartan and Sprint missiles as having nuclear warheads. That was reasonable-ish, since Wikipedia also notes them being cold war-era anti-ICBM weapons. Less bad to have your own interceptor nukes going off "near" your city than to have enemy nukes scoring direct hit on it.
In contrast, modern hypersonic weapons have plenty of use cases where they'd be fitted with conventional warheads, and used against targets like US Navy ships.
There is plenty that could go wrong if USN ships mounted nuclear interceptor missiles, ready to launch on a moment's notice...
Or we can just all get along
Doesnt seem like our species is very good at that.
Yes. Israel and USA stopped a lot of hypersonic missiles recently.
They have stopped a lot of sonic missiles, some probably being sub-sonic. Hypersonic is 5-10x sonic speeds and not many countries have these types of missiles.
Think you need to read the article:)
“A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now.”
too pedantic for me
insightful though
Sometimes pedantic is needed to deflate over-enthusiastic headlines.
>Every “hypersonic intercept” the press has reported in the last three years was a different class of weapon: an air-launched aeroballistic missile, a quasi-ballistic short-range ballistic missile with a maneuvering reentry vehicle, or in one case a MIRV bus on an intermediate-range ballistic missile that the press could not stop calling hypersonic.
Most people understand that no demonstrable air breathing lift-generating hypersonic missile actually exist. This article goes on to claim that various never launched paper-tigers created for sabre rattling propaganda do actually exist. But it also says they've never been successfully tested. And they haven't. This is a really hard problem.
"Can You Stop a Hypersonic (air breathing/lift generating) Missle?" is actually, "Can you Build a Hypersonic (air breathing/lift generating) Missle?" and the answer is "No, so there's no need to stop them." Conical rockets that travel at hypersonic speeds have existed since the 1950s and will continue to exist and be used as weapons though.
So, tldr; going hypersonic isn't special or new, but air-breathing or lift generating while doing it would be, if it existed, so nation states sabre rattle about fake weapons.
Yes, I can.
With maturity and adult spending decisions and lasting motions to transcend warfare as a method of resource distribution, of course you can.