Yes. Israel and USA stopped a lot of hypersonic missiles recently.
Can You Stop a Hypersonic Missile?
31–40 of 94 posts
Re: Can You Stop a Hypersonic Missile?
#32What 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…
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.…
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.
Re: Can You Stop a Hypersonic Missile?
#33Lasers 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.
Re: Can You Stop a Hypersonic Missile?
#34Or we can just all get along
Re: Can You Stop a Hypersonic Missile?
#35What 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…
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.…
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
Re: Can You Stop a Hypersonic Missile?
#36Or we can just all get along
Doesnt seem like our species is very good at that.
Re: Can You Stop a Hypersonic Missile?
#37Yes. Israel and USA stopped a lot of hypersonic missiles recently.
Think you need to read the article:)
Re: Can You Stop a Hypersonic Missile?
#38Yes. Israel and USA stopped a lot of hypersonic missiles recently.
They have stopped a lot of supersonic missiles, some probably being sub-sonic. Hypersonic is 5-10x supersonic speeds and can maneuver at that speed and not many countries have these types of missiles.
Re: Can You Stop a Hypersonic Missile?
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 s…
> 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.
The staccato style is often effective for emphasis, but the paragraphing is wrong on this article. It should've been:
> The headlines say yes.
> Patriot crews shot down a Kinzhal over Kyiv on the night of May 4, 2023. Arrow-3 batteries killed Iranian ballistic missiles over Tel Aviv in April and October 2024. A pair of THAAD batteries in Israel emptied something close to a quarter of the US national inventory across twelve days of war in June 2025. The headline word in every one of those engagements was hypersonic.
> The headline is wrong.
> No maneuvering boost-glide hypersonic vehicle has ever been fired in combat against a defended target. 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. The Avangard, the only Russian vehicle that meets the strict definition, has sat in silos in Orenburg since 2019 without being touched. The Chinese DF-17 has never been used. The American Dark Eagle has not yet been ordered to fire.
> So when we ask “can you stop a hypersonic,” we are partly asking “what would happen if anyone fired one.”
There are assorted other issues with the article as well, like excessive use of passive voice, lack of parallelism, and too much meta-talk.
Re: Can You Stop a Hypersonic Missile?
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 s…
Fair, that's very helpful feedback.
> the interspersed animated/interactive models often don't seem strongly connected to the text
It's indeed the part I struggled with most. The intent was to make the constraint more "visceral", so that the "the interceptor can't catch up" point becomes something you feel by dragging a slider and wtaching the gap grow. But you're right that I didn't do enough to stitch each properly into the prose around it. It reads a bit too adjacent to the text.
For what it's worth, an earlier draft was nearly twice the length and even included a small missile-interception game as the introduction. I think cutting it was the right call though.
Thanks for the notes! I'll keep this in mind for the next post.