The missile fired by Russia at Ukraine last week, hailed by Putin as a new kind of experimental hypersonic weapon, was actually an application of old technology used for many years in intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM), six military experts told Reuters.
An examination by two of these experts of the debris recovered from the new intermediate-range ballistic missile (IRBM), known in Russian as the Oreshnik, or hazel tree, showed how it dropped multiple payloads across the target area, a characteristic of ICBMs.
After the missile strike, Putin said the Oreshnik was hypersonic and could not be intercepted. But Jeffrey Lewis, director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in California, noted that all ballistic missiles of that range are hypersonic, and that missile interceptors such as Israel’s Arrow 3 and the U.S. SM-3 Block 2A were designed to destroy them.
Weapons of this kind are best intercepted in space. Which is, hugely expensive - and the weapons themselves are very expensive too.
They are not very useful, except as a nuclear threat - because they cannot be precisely targeted. A warhead of this sort flies blind during re-entry into atmosphere - relying on inertial navigation, because air is turning into glowing plasma around it - onboard cameras or radar are useless at this point.
The result is low precision, and with a conventional warhead, if an attack misses the target by hundreds of meters, the attack has most likely failed. This attack missed the Pivdenmash (former Yuzhmash) factory by hundreds of meters.