The Kinetic
Energy Projectile would be a tungsten warhead that moves at three times the
speed of sound, destroying anything in its path.
Were the United States to go to war with Russia, both sides could draw on deadly weapons that
the world has never seen on a battlefield. On the Russian side, there are new
and smaller tactical nuclear weapons. To counter them, the U.S. Army is taking another look at a
“devastating” weapon it first tested in 2013: the Kinetic Energy Projectile, or KEP, a
tungsten-based charge moving at three times the speed of sound that can destroy
anything in its path.
“Think of it as a
big shotgun shell,” Maj. Gen. William Hix, the Army’s director of strategy,
plans & policy, said a few weeks ago at the
Booz Allen Hamilton Direct Energy Summit. But unlike a shotgun shell, Hix said,
the KEP moves at incredible speeds of “Mach 3
to Mach 6.”
Randy Simpson, a
weapons programs manager at Lawrence Livermore National Lab, explains that
kinetic energy projectiles are warheads that “take advantage of high terminal
speeds to deliver much more energy onto a target than the chemical explosives they
carry would deliver alone.”
Said Hix: “The way
that they [Lawrence Livermore] have designed it is quite devastating. I
would not want to be around it. Not much can survive it. If you are in a main
battle tank, if you’re a crew member, you might survive but the vehicle will be
non-mission capable, and everything below that will level of protection will be
dead. That’s what I am talking about.”
The general
emphasized that the exploration was in a conceptual phase and not yet any sort
of actual program: “We’re looking at ways we might — key, might — use that capability in one of
our existing launch platforms as part of the weapons suite that we have.”
He said the main
contender for a launcher would be the Army Tactical Missile System, made by
Lockheed Martin.
In October 2013, an
Air Force test team strapped the projectile to a “sled” on the high-speed test
track at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico. The goal: to get it moving
faster than Mach 3 and see how it might actually work in the air. The test showed that the warhead design worked; it
also provided data to help simulations and modeling.
Why
would the U.S. military, which has put untold billions of dollars
into precision weapons over several decades, need such a blunt and terrifying
weapon? To counter small Russian nuclear weapons.
“The Russians … maintain their tactical
nuclear stockpile in ways that we have not,” Hix said.
Potomac Institute head Philip Karber, who
helped write the Pentagon’s Russia New
Generation Warfare Study, offered a bit more explanation when Defense
One spoke to him in January. While the United States retains just a
few of its once-large arsenal of tactical nukes, Karber estimates that Russia
currently has anywhere from 2,000 to 5,000 of the weapons.
“Look at what the Russians have been doing in
low-fission, high-fusion, sub-kiloton tactical nuclear technology,” he said.
“It appears that they are putting a big effort…in both miniaturizing the
warheads and using sub-kiloton low-yield warheads.”
Why is that significant? By shrinking the
warhead, you can shoot it out of a wider variety of guns, including,
potentially, 152-millimeter tank cannons.
“They’ve announced that the follow-on tank to
the Armata will
have a 152-millimeter gun missile launcher. They’re talking about it having a
nuclear capability. And you go, ‘You’re talking about building a
nuclear tank, a tank that fires a nuke?’ Well, that’s the implication,”
said Karber.
Hix says that the use of tactical battlefield
nuclear weapons, even very low-level ones, is not part of official Russian
military doctrine, but it is a capability that they are increasingly eager to
show off (and discuss) to intimidate neighbors and adversaries.
“They certainly exercise the use of those
weapons in many of their exercises, including the one that participated in the
parking of 30,000 to 40,000 soldiers on the Ukrainian border right before [the
2014 invasion of] Crimea. That coercive intimidation is a part of their
design,” he said.
And while even Soviet generals may have shied
away from using tactical nukes, Blix said, Putin’s military is “a lot more
inclined philosophically to see the utility of them.”
·
Patrick Tucker is
technology editor for Defense One. He’s also the author of The Naked Future:
What Happens in a World That Anticipates Your Every Move? (Current, 2014).
Previously, Tucker was deputy editor for The Futurist for nine years. Tucker
has written about emerging technology in Slate,
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