9000 mph is not that difficult to achieve if the weight is mainly the fuel and not wasted on a heavy nuclear warhead. How high did Kim-Jong-Un’s last rocket go? About 3000 miles I believe. Now imagine it doing a 180 and using say the remaining third of its fuel, accelerating it toward the earth in a vacuum at hypersonic speed aimed at say New York or London or even that bit of sea your P-8 is protecting!
They could launch these in waves like they do Katusia Rocket’s. Now the thought of that would certainly ring my alarm bells and it’s not impossible to achieve and at a low cost
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Then do the maths …. double the weight and you double the kinetic energy BUT ….. double the speed and you quadruple the kinetic energy!
The Pentagon’s New Super Weapon Is Basically A Weaponized Meteor Strike By Jared Keller on June 7, 2017
In 2013, the U.S. Air Force 846th Test Squadron and civilian researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory successfully test-fired a kinetic energy projectile, a tungsten-rich shell moving at 3,500 feet-per-second — more than three times faster than the speed of sound — on a specialized track at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico. More recently, the Pentagon has tested the Navy electromagnetic rail gun’s hypervelocity projectiles with the help of conventional U.S. Army howitzers; the Navy hopes the completed cannon will be able to launch shells at up to 4,500 mph, six times the speed of sound.
Explosives may be dazzling in their destructiveness, but there’s an elegant, almost Newtonian lethality to the kinetic energy projectile, explains Matt Weingart, a weapons program development manager at Lawrence Livermore.
“The classic way of delivering hurt against a target has been to pack a lot of chemical explosive into a container of some kind, a barrel or a cannonball or steel bomb,” Weingart told Task & Purpose in a phone interview. “The violence comes from the chemical explosive inside that bomb sending off a blast wave, followed by the fragments of the bomb case. But the difference with kinetic energy projectiles is that the warhead arrives at the target moving very, very fast — the energy is there to propel those fragments without the use of a chemical explosive to accelerate them. The more mass, the more violence.”
The concept of the hypersonic impact that defined Project Thor and its devastating potential hasn’t been lost on defense officials. Military researchers are continuing to explore battlefield applications that “take advantage of high terminal speeds to deliver much more energy onto a target than the chemical explosives they carry would deliver alone,” as Army Maj. Gen. William Hix put it at the Booz Allen Hamilton Direct Energy Summit in March.
“Think of it as a big shotgun shell,” Hix told the assembled crowd. “Not much can survive it. If you’re in a main battle tank, if you’re a crew member, you might survive but the vehicle will be non-mission capable, and everything below that level of protection will be dead. That’s what I am talking about.”
http://taskandpurpose.com/kinetic-bombardment-kep-weaponry/
BTW: I don't watch science fiction films ..... but obviously these guys do and can translate fantasy into reality. So, it is still KYAGB time if it comes to this!
