(Newsweek) – Russian officials said they have developed a new weapons system that travels at 27 times the speed of sound, thus making it “impossible” to intercept with current missile defense technology. The system, known as the Avangard hypersonic glide vehicle, “essentially makes missile defenses useless,” Deputy Prime Minister Yuri Borisov told Russian state television on Thursday, Associated Press reported. On Wednesday, the Russian military completed a successful test of the Avangard—
according to the Kremlin—in which the weapon was launched from the Dombarovskiy missile base in the Southern Ural Mountains, striking a practice target 3,700 miles away in Kamchatka, a peninsula in the far east of the country. President Vladimir Putin oversaw the test, commenting afterward that the weapons system would guarantee Russia’s security for the foreseeable future and that it could be deployed as early as next year. READ MORE
