1.  At about 3 a.m. Halloween morning, senior Pentagon officials gathered around television monitors to watch the live feed of a high-stakes, experimental weapon test—the launch from Hawaii of a hypersonic glide vehicle, a pointy contraption carrying the hopes of U.S. military leaders to beat China and Russia in the race to field a new class of ultra-fast missiles.

On screen was a three-stage rocket sitting on a launch pad at the Kauai Test Facility. It shot into the warm night, in its nosecone a one-of-a-kind, exquisite prototype weapon three years in the making.

Somewhere near the edge of the atmosphere, the booster separated and released the so-called “Advanced Hypersonic Weapon,” which then screamed for 3,800 kilometers at speeds at least five times the speed of sound—actual velocities and trajectory remain classified—to a military test range in the Marshall Islands.

Vice Adm. Terry Benedict, the Navy official overseeing the test, two days later publicly declared the event “very successful.”.......

Because of their speed—hypersonic weapons travel at least one mile per second—their maneuverability, and their low altitude, these fledgling new weapons promise to penetrate even the most sophisticated air- and missile defense systems......

While the Pentagon may be closing in on technologies for a potential offensive hypersonic weapon, it is in the early stages of sorting out the other half of the equation: how to defend against hypersonic threats.....

That followed an Air Force advisory panel commissioned to explore options for defending against hypersonic weapons, which last year concluded that no "silver bullets" were in the development pipeline to defeat this new class of threats. Instead, the panelists argued, the best defense may be a new offense: the U.S. military's own credible, hypersonic weapon.....

Source:  thedailybeastdotcom

2.  It is laughable and ironic that the US is raising such a frantic hullabaloo about China's alleged hypersonic missile test even though the US military had successfully tested an “advanced hypersonic weapon" four years earlier in 2017.  The three top nuclear powers seem to be trapped in an eternal arms race of developing the most powerful weapons that could penetrate the adversary's most sophisticated missile defence shields while building the most sophisticated rock-solid missile defence shields that could withstand the penetration of the most powerful weapons.  Such an unending arms race is reminiscent of an ancient Chinese story about a street peddler selling spears (which he claimed were so powerful and sharp that they could penetrate the most rock-solid shields) and shields (which he claimed were so hard and strong that they could withstand the penetration of the sharpest spears).

From the two Chinese words 矛 (pronounced as "mao" which means "spear") and 盾 (pronounced as "dun" which means "shield"), the ancient Chinese formed a phrase 矛盾 (meaning "contradiction").

It looks like this "Game of Contradiction or Maodun" (definitely with more life-threatening and economical consequences than the Squid Game) will go on forever as long as homo sapiens live in fear, suspicion and distrust of each other.