Imagine living in a world where, at any moment, and without much warning, you and everyone around you could die in a nuclear armageddon - an instant flash of blinding white silence, then darkness forever.
For Americans over 60 years old, that world was once a reality during the Cold War. And that nuclear armageddon never came closer than it did in the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962.
On October 22, 1962, President John F. Kennedy appeared on national television to tell America about the presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba and to justify his decision to blockade Cuba with naval ships.
Following the announcement, the nation generally supported JFK's position. The president saw his approval ratings rise by as much as 15%. But people were afraid. For the past several years, Americans had been on edge about the threat of nuclear war, practicing duck-and-cover drills in school with Bert the Turtle.
And there's no wonder why Americans were frightened.
Cuba is only about 90 miles from the U.S. coastline. A Soviet nuke could strike any major American city within minutes.
Today a new arms race threatens to bring about another such panic.Over the past several decades, militaries around the world have been developing a new breed of faster and more accurate weapons generally known as hypersonic missiles.
As their name implies, hypersonic missiles fly at more than 5X the speed of sound... "more than." Some weapons being developed now, like the so-called "spaceplane," will have the capability of reaching speeds of up to 25X the speed of sound - that's a little more than 19,000 miles per hour, or 8,575 meters per second.
What that means is one of these hypersonic missiles could pretty much hit any target in the world in under one hour!
Source: Raytheon
Yeah... scary, right?
But it gets even more frightening.
See, hypersonic missiles have technically been in use for decades. There are ballistic missiles that already travel at hypersonic speeds, over Mach 5. But this new generation of hypersonic missiles will be much harder to defend against.