Brandon J. Weichert
Hypersonic weapons are alarming on their own—but there is little evidence that Pakistan has built the underlying technology that makes them truly lethal.
In November of this year, the Pakistani Navy staged what it called a “first at-sea launch” of its newest toy: the P-282 SMASH, a ship-launched anti-ship ballistic missile (ASBM) said to be able to strike targets at Mach 8. According to Islamabad, the system rides a “quasi-ballistic” trajectory—climbing into the sky, then plunging like a manmade meteor toward enemy ships while executing high-G terminal maneuvers.
The implication is obvious: Pakistan wants the world to believe it has entered the elite club of nations wielding hypersonic maritime killers. On paper, the SMASH missile adds a vertical “burst-strike” option to Pakistan’s naval arsenal—very different from the low-flying cruise missiles that dominate the region today. Pakistan claims the tested variant carries a range of roughly 350 kilometers and can attack both moving sea targets and fixed land sites.
If true, that would place a major new threat inside India’s maritime neighborhood.
But that’s the key word here—if. Because for all the noise around SMASH, almost none of Pakistan’s more sensational claims currently stand on independently verifiable ground.
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