The most dangerous time for the world

A few days ago the EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs declared that it is not the time for peace talks, that it is time to send more arms to Ukraine, and this in the midst of the constant claims by China to control the Southern China Sea, which continues to threaten Taiwan. The US has declared that if there is an attack on Taiwan it will defend it as its own and has already moved a military contingent to the area, at least at sea, to help in this potential war.

Meanwhile, we in the West are unaware of our fragility in the face of a weapon against which there is currently no viable defense, hypersonic missiles, which are a non-defeatable variant with current defenses of the also recent hypersonic speed missiles. But it seems that the solution is near, although at this time of tension it is not known whether it is sufficient or insufficient in terms of time.

By Miguel ÁngelTemprano

May 11, 2023Reading time: 5,1min

In the last few days two events have occurred that have passed as if they were nothing in our news.

The first one, a statement by the High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, Josep Borrell, saying that now was not the time for peace talks with Russia, that it was time to send more military aid to Ukraine and the second one, the shouts of joy of the Americans because a Russian hypersonic speed missile bound for Kiev had been shot down for the first time by a battery of Patriot anti-aircraft missiles.

Undoubtedly, we Westerners sitting comfortably on our sofas are unaware of the war danger to which we are subjected. I believe that never since the Bay of Cochinos crisis, with President Kennedy sitting in the Oval, has the world been so close to a war, induced by a madman’s folly or a sane man’s mistake.

“If peace talks do not seem to present themselves as an alternative, we may see a dangerous reaction from the Zar”.

Since then, the world has changed a lot, but substantially not so much. The U.S. is still the world’s leading economic and military power by far, and there is also an enemy trying to counteract this hegemony, now China, instead of Russia as it was before.

The main difference is that now there are no longer two but three because there is a nuclear power, Russia, which although it has been shown that it has no real military capability or capacity to develop it, but it is sitting on top of the biggest gas pocket on the planet and is a real oil power, therefore it is a source of resources that the world cannot ignore.

A few decades ago, at the end of the 1970s, Deng Xiaoping, the Chinese President at the time, began an economic, not political, opening of the country. We Westerners, at the heat of cheap production, fed the beast until the country became the monster that now threatens to eat us.

“As Lady Di once said, three’s a crowd for a marriage, and here it is the USA, China, Russia and one more guest, the EU”.

And it is not a phrase, it is that the current Chinese president, Xi, has already said that he intends to impose a new world order and has already begun.

To begin with, he intends to get out of the international system of banking transactions, SWIFT, and for this he has accelerated the implementation of his new currency, the digital Yuan, based on blockchain technology. This will force everyone who wants to buy in China to be forced to buy its currency in the financial market that it imposes, which will logically be its own and not where we all or almost all of us do it today.

And the second, as important as the first, is in a frenzied arms race to develop a cheap anti-missile weapon, but above all effective against hypersonic missiles, not hypersonic speed missiles.

This subject deserves a detailed explanation because it is critical and perhaps little known.

Until now, the arms race has been to have the fastest missiles possible in order to cover long distances without the enemy’s ability to react.

This has led military powers to develop hypersonic speed missiles, which are missiles whose speed is at least five times the speed of sound. Many of these missiles are prepared to carry nuclear warheads.

Until recently, such a missile had a highly predictable trajectory no matter how fast it went, making the possibility of being shot down by another missile a very real possibility. In fact, there is talk that the average is that Patriot air defense missile systems are capable of shooting down more than 2/3 of their targets.

“the acceleration of the implementation of the digital Yuan rather than a technological breakthrough is a decoupling of the Chinese economy from the SWIFT system.”

But in this that other hypersonic missiles were born which differs from hypersonic speed missiles in that their trajectory varies constantly. In other words, it is impossible for a surface-to-air missile to shoot them down. We have just entered another phase and it is very critical.

If there is no possibility of shooting down these missiles, then are we totally unprotected? The answer is very simple, yes.

Developing a defensive weapon against this weapon has become paramount. But in the meantime, many Western governments with the presence of anti-war parties, excuse me, ignorant, leftist political parties are opposed to even meeting the NATO requirement of spending at least 2% of GDP on military spending.

While we were arguing about whether military spending is necessary or not, two things happened: the Chinese began to show that they were serious about the new world order with them at its epicenter.

They threatened to invade Taiwan and take over the microchip factories that are now essential to the daily lives of the world’s inhabitants. And secondly, Russia proceeded to attack Ukraine in a step similar to Hitler’s invasion of the Sudetenland in 1938.

Here many metes woke up and German Chancellor G. Scholz, at the head of a multi-colored government, but where the whole amalgam of colors of the left is present, declared that Germany from that moment on would spend 2% of its GDP on military expenditure. Even a government such as the Spanish government has folded and has retracted the anti-militarist stupidities of the past.

“The Germans have already realized that investing in defense is cheaper than investing in rebuilding the country. For the time being, 350 billion euros will have to be spent in Ukraine”.

To all these anti-militarists we should tell them that, unfortunately for humanity, there are madmen who think they are hegemonists, and that when you arm yourself it is not to attack, not even to defend yourself, but to show these madmen that you are capable of defending yourself and that it is therefore a bad idea to attack you. That’s how peace is built, not with doves and words.

Well, going back to our aforementioned military problems, right now we live at the risk of someone putting a nuclear warhead on a mobile trajectory hypersonic missile and killing it.

Fortunately, only two countries currently have it in their arsenals, China and the US.

The U.S., faced with the seriousness of the situation, accelerated development and procurement programs with military contractors to find a solution. For the time being, the leader of the program, Northrop Grumman, is required to deliver a producible prototype this summer, once the Navy has successfully tested the R&D prototypes.

What they have developed is a cannon that fires laser beams. The reader may be thinking that I’ve seen too many movies or that this is looking more and more like Star Wars. Well, it’s the latter.

“If we citizens do not stop listening to the ignorant who proclaim that the only possible defense is the word, someday a madman will take advantage of it and we will pay dearly for it.”

I don’t know if you know that after the attack on the Twin Towers the Pentagon military held a meeting with Hollywood producers and screenwriters to tell them the types of terrorist attacks they could think of for a movie, because probably some of them would be right.

Well here it’s like Star Wars. The weapon makes perfect sense, you need something that travels faster than the fastest missile and that alone is light. You need to shoot down weapons with light beams, because if you throw many together aiming at nearby places, the one that moves slower than the light will be shot down.

Now you only need a beam of light powerful enough, calorically speaking, to “burn” the missile. And these are very high frequency laser beams.

The truth is that saying it like that seems very simple, but its development has been a technological challenge.

The next advantage of the weapon is that its use is very cheap, each laser beam has a cost of 10 cents, so a beam of 10,000 ray has a cost of 1,000 dollars and is capable of shooting down a missile of tens of millions of dollars.

I have to admit that when I started researching this subject I had a moment of uncertainty that later turned into fear, because the world is now at the mercy of a madman who really has it made.

“When I saw the Star Wars movie, I did not imagine that 40 years later our salvation would be a laser cannon”

This is why many geopolitical analysts consistently say that the Ukrainian war cannot be settled with an invasion, but neither can it be settled with a defeat of Putin.

To understand this man we have to go back to August 1991, to the failed coup against Gorbachev by three members of the USSR Politburo, the Vice-President, the Minister of Defense and the Director of the KGB. While the first two acted alone, the director of the KGB acted in coordination with his men, shouting revolt because his immense power was vanishing with the disintegration of the USSR.

Putin, at that time and fortunately for him, was not a first rank, but he was a colonel with a long history in East Germany. The spirit of a great nation has been in his mind since the very beginning, as well as all the KGB officers of that time.

He certainly believes himself to be the Tsar whose mission in this life is to rebuild the former USSR, starting with Belarus and continuing with Ukraine.

When he could, the first thing he did was to take back his summer house. No kidding, all the “da-chas” of the Soviet leaders were on the Crimean beaches.

So, we are facing a world with powerful weapons, without efficient defensive replica and in the middle of the game two leaders, a madman with a revanchist spirit and another who claims his position as a descendant of the Chinese emperors.

If we are not in the most dangerous moment in recent history, someone tell me what it was.

Not wanting to see something does not mean it does not exist.