Weapons are power

Do not confuse the militaristic frenzy of propaganda and advanced scientific developments, the main customer of which remains the military-industrial complex

Soviet announcers never told three times a week, choking with delight, what the next weapon system could do and how quickly.

And the slogan "we can repeat" in the USSR was unthinkable.

Although it was a dictatorship, it did not tolerate fuss, unlike our current state machine.

In recent years, militaristic officialdom has so filled the lives of fellow citizens that the most sober minds have accumulated a persistent aversion not just to propaganda, but in general to all advanced developments closely related to the military-industrial complex. Because the redundancy of verbal militarism, in which both propaganda and the country's leadership almost literally bathe, is associated in the mass consciousness with the redundancy of the defense complex as such.

But we must rise above this false association.

The politicians who will inevitably replace the current team, even the most liberal ones, will certainly finance the main developments in the field of defense initiated by their predecessors.

And the liberal public must be ready for this.

On March 21, Novaya published an article by engineer Gorbachevsky, who criticized the Zircon hypersonic missile, the pride of the president and our military-industrial complex. It was a pure mental experiment, absolutely scholastic. The researcher, relying on his entire experience in the military-industrial complex, and indeed his whole life, tried in good faith to reconstruct the main characteristics of the most advanced, completely classified technical product, knowing nothing at all about it, except for the name and the estimated speed.

Mental exercises led to the expected conclusion - the Zircon rocket is too expensive, it flies too high, and such a speed is not needed and no one will indicate its purpose. It is necessary to produce subsonic missiles a la "Harpoon" (USA), put into service 41 years ago.

It is not clear why, in the heat of the controversy, Gorbachevsky limited the means of target designation to the capabilities of naval air reconnaissance locators. Such tasks are solved in an integrated manner, using electronic intelligence, satellites of all kinds, radars on land and sea, data from stationary hydrophones and acoustic stations of submarines, laying routes by staff workers.

Already in 1966, the first ship-based over-the-horizon radar was installed on the cruiser of the USSR Navy "Moskva" as an experiment, its equipment still worked on radio tubes. The range is more than 600 km. The officers of the Black Sea Fleet, not approaching the Turkish coast, observed the takeoffs and landings of aircraft at the Incirlik NATO air base, located near the Mediterranean Sea.

Hypersonic missiles therefore go into the mesosphere (above 35 km) because the air rudders of the most modern American anti-aircraft missiles, which the author judges, do not work there. And infrared guidance heads at such speeds overheat and fail even in a rarefied atmosphere.

But the main message of the article by a respected engineer lies rather in the plane of public discussion. It has, for my taste, a philosophical dimension and is much more interesting than technical calculations.

Should Russia generally refuse to participate in scientific and technical competition, spending the main money and human resources in the military field?

There is no end in sight to this competition.

Here is an incomplete list of the main projects of the most developed countries of the world on the topic of hypersonic aircraft, which are at different stages of readiness, some of which have passed the first tests (with the only exception, all these weapons). Advanced Hypersonic Weapon (USA), Falcon HTV-2 (USA), DF-ZF (China) are complete analogues of the Russian Avangard system. X-51A Waverider (USA), Skylon (UK, the only civilian project in this extensive set), India is leading its own RLV-TD project.

On March 6, Raytheon, the recognized leader of the American military-industrial complex, won a contract to create a hypersonic tactical guided warhead. Lockheed Martin has been working on two projects of hypersonic missiles of the same class as Zircon for about a year now. The amount of funds allocated for development is more than a billion dollars. Previously, a similar project "BrahMos-2" (India - Russia) was launched, literally after the New Year - ASN4G (France).

Even Ukraine, which almost lost its space industry, presented a model of such a rocket at the exhibition.

A scientific and technical race has started in the world, involving the development of such areas of knowledge as fuel combustion in a supersonic and hypersonic environment, the aerodynamics of sustainable hypersonic flight, the control of such vehicles, the creation of new materials with unprecedented properties, and the modeling of complex processes on a supercomputer. The greatest difficulty is the creation of a ramjet hypersonic engine, the basis of future aircraft covering the distance between continents in an hour or less.

Today, no one has such engines ready for mass production, but everyone is trying to build them. And Andrey Gorbachevsky says that he seems to be standing on the Zircon rocket. But this means that

our designers were the first in the world to create a working engine that will become the basis for the development of hypersonic aviation. This is a scientific feat!

How it happened that Russia took the lead in the hypersonic race, I do not know. Most likely it won't be for long. But the knowledge collected in the process of creating these weapons, the created competencies will become the foundation for further development.

States, driven by the ambitions or fear of politicians, create more and more new weapons and collect famous scientists for this in the best laboratories. No private company would risk money on such fundamental research, and in the interests of the military-industrial complex, it is spent all over the world. Generation after generation goes through this scenario: weapons are produced first, followed by never-before-seen civilian technology.

The bombers were followed by civilian liners, the atomic bomb was followed by power plants, and the intercontinental missiles were followed by navigation and communication satellites.

Gagarin and the first people on the moon are by-products of a gigantic industry of mass murder created in the USSR and the USA literally from scratch. This is not an apology for militarism, but a sober look at human nature.

I only hope that readers will remember that the military-industrial complex also created the Internet, with the help of which they just read and unanimously branded my misanthropic article. After all, a whole generation has already grown up that does not have the experience of living without this man-made miracle of nature. Disappear the World Wide Web - the creation of the Pentagon - and many of them will go to a psychiatrist, according to the latest research scientists.

One must be able to separate the militarism of the authorities and state propaganda from the tasks of scientific and technological development, which is inextricably linked with the military-industrial complex. The conditional president Navalny will not put the submarines to the quay wall for eternal parking, he will not cut the tanks into scrap metal. Dictatorships and the world's largest democracies behave like twins in this area.

This is how our world is built. What is new here is that today the peoples with the so-called critical technologies are benefiting. Hypersonic flight will be among them in the front row.