Speaker
Description
Recent hypersonic weapon technology advances have changed military power, challenging conventional and nuclear warfare distinctions. Hypersonic glide vehicles and cruise missiles, promoted as precision, speed, and deterrence, are compressing decision-making timelines, circumventing missile-defence architectures, and blurring strategic stability-underpinning escalation thresholds. This paper examines how hypersonic weapons break the conventional–nuclear divide and introduce existential risk even without nuclear payloads.
The paper has three main points. First, hypersonic weapons undermine warning and response systems, increasing pre-emptive action and launch-on-warning incentives. Second, their integration with advanced intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, and emerging AI-enabled command-and-control systems increases misperception, automation bias, and accidental escalation, especially in fragile deterrence regions. Third, prestige politics, defense-industrial competition, and perceived vulnerability drive hypersonic development, similar to nuclear arms racing.
The paper uses the Ukraine war, the May 2025 India–Pakistan confrontation, and the Iran–Israel escalation to demonstrate how missile defence saturation, drone integration, and precision-strike doctrines are accelerating offensive dominance. Hypothesising hypersonic weapons as a “conventionally armed strategic force” with WMD-like effects contributes to military innovation and strategic studies.
The paper sheds light on how emerging technologies are changing global security environments and complicating arms-control and risk-reduction efforts by placing hypersonic weapons at the intersection of conventional military innovation and existential security risk.
| If you are submitting an Open Panel proposal, have you included all four abstracts in attachment? | Yes, I have included all required information (see below). |
|---|---|
| Would you like to be considered for travel funding through the NetSec COST Action? | Yes |
| Are you a member of the NetSec Management Committee? | No |
| What discipline or branch of humanities or social sciences do you identify yourself with? | International Security |
| Which of the following best describes your stage of the career? | PhD Candidate |
| In which country is your home institution? | UK |
| What is your gender? | Male |