Hypersonic and unrestrained arms race
And Putin picked up not his rifle but his Kinzhal (Russian for "stab") ultrasonic missiles. It is the decisive, "invincible" weapon, as his own Defence Ministry describes it. The attack on a major Ukrainian army underground missile and ammunition depot in the village of Deliatine, Ivano-Frankivsk region, was carried out with mathematical precision. It was the christening of this hypersonic missile in a wartime context, having tested it in various manoeuvres and exercises since 2018.
The Kinzhal was first shown flying over Moscow's Red Square on 9 May 2018, at the air parade commemorating the victory in World War II, carried by MIG-31 fighters, from which they are fired at targets up to 2,000 kilometres away. The speed they can reach, above Mach 5 (6,000 km/h), makes them virtually invulnerable to today's anti-aircraft defences, as well as highly destructive, as the same hyper-speed allows them to penetrate deeper in search of the target.
Moscow's Defence Spokesman Igor Konachenkov claims that these hypersonic missiles can even reach speeds of over 12,000 km/h, and so far there is no reason not to believe him. If so, today's supersonic rockets would be reduced to the status of antiquities.
US President Joe Biden warned that an attack on any inch of land in a NATO country would trigger World War III. The totalitarian Russian Tsar has not yet done so, but with the use of his new weapon he has undoubtedly raised many doubts, certainly in the already devastated Ukraine, but also throughout Europe and certainly in the United States, the superpower which despite its undisputed military superiority has not yet developed a shield capable of neutralising the Kinzhal.
Russia's invasion of Ukraine has therefore already led to an acceleration of the arms race. In almost all parts of the world, priorities have changed and defence has come to the fore. In the case of NATO, EU countries in general, and Spain in particular, have had to hastily design a truly stratospheric mutation between what they budgeted just a few months ago and the enormous amount of money they will now have to devote to rearming. Germany's move to allocate 100 billion euros to equip its armed forces with the best equipment available on the market, and to promise to allocate 2% of its GDP to military spending from now on, is dragging the others into an enormous effort, which has been demanded for several presidencies now by the leader of the Western world, who still has his home in Washington.
This frantic race is affecting the whole world. One need only look at the growing expenditure that all countries are devoting to it: almost two trillion dollars by 2020, according to the Stockholm-based International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI).
Even today the United States, with $778 billion and 39 % of the total, far outstrips China ($252 billion and 13 %) and Russia ($61.7 billion and 3.1 %). The Americans have absolute dominance in the field of conventional armaments. This is why the Chinese and Russians have opted for research and development of hypersonic missiles as a way of compensating for their backwardness. Such is also North Korea's unabashed pursuit of missiles, including supposedly supersonic ones, with which the "Beloved Leader" Kim Jong-un is trying to intimidate Japan and even the western states of the United States.
Russia and China's immediate neighbourhood are highly suspicious of Moscow and Beijing's ultimate intentions, which is why they have also embarked on strengthening their strategic alliances and corresponding rearmament to deal with hypothetical threats. Taiwan is the hottest example, but all countries bordering the China Sea, claimed by President Xi Jinping almost as an inland sea of his own, and where he has undertaken a de facto occupation and sovereignty, are in a similar situation.
No less volatile is the situation in the Middle East, where Israel is waging an increasingly silent war against Iran and its pre-nuclear facilities, and where Saudi Arabia and the Emirates have multiplied their investments to equip themselves with powerful combat aircraft, missiles capable of reaching Iranian territory, and air defence systems that may have become obsolete in the face of the Kinzhal and the like.
Nor, of course, are many African countries lagging behind, whose Sahel strip is increasingly likely to become the scene of an all-out war, driven in principle by the pretext of confronting the jihadist threat, but which would also be fought in terms of regional power, following in the wake, not very well publicised, of the ancestral confrontations between separate tribes and countries drawn with square and square in 19th century offices.
Far from the good intentions of those who advocated the end of history or the uselessness of Defence Ministries, the world seems to be filling its warehouses with the most modern machines and instruments of killing that can be afforded. And, as always in the face of such a development, the inevitable question arises: how will such vast quantities of war materiel be disposed of? In the past Cold War, the nuclear arsenals balanced between the Western and Communist worlds served to dissuade both from using each other, given the "mutually assured destruction".
For the time being, in the current arms race, both sides are striving for a favourable asymmetry vis-à-vis their potential adversary. As long as either considers itself in a position to attack and defeat the other, and does not realise that the dividends of peace are far greater than those of war, the world will not be safe from a conflagration of which what we are seeing in Ukraine will then have been a mere prelude.