Imagine living in a world where, at any moment, and without much warning, you and everyone around you could die in a nuclear armageddon — an instant flash of blinding white silence, then darkness forever.
For Americans over 60 years old, that world was once a reality during the Cold War. And that nuclear armageddon never came closer than it did in the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962.
That Time the World Almost Ended
On October 22, 1962, President John F. Kennedy appeared on national television to tell America about the presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba and to justify his decision to blockade Cuba with naval ships.
Following the announcement, the nation generally supported JFK’s position. The president saw his approval ratings rise by as much as 15%. But people were afraid. For the past several years, Americans had been on edge about the threat of nuclear war, practicing duck-and-cover drills in school with Bert the Turtle.
And there’s no wonder why Americans were frightened.
Cuba is only about 90 miles from the U.S. coastline. A Soviet nuke could strike any major American city within minutes.
Hypersonic Death
Over the past several decades, militaries around the world have been developing a new breed of faster and more accurate weapons generally known as hypersonic missiles.
As their name implies, hypersonic missiles fly at more than 5X the speed of sound… "more than." Some weapons being developed now, like the so-called “spaceplane,” will have the capability of reaching speeds of up to 25X the speed of sound — that’s a little more than 19,000 miles per hour, or 8,575 meters per second.
What that means is one of these hypersonic missiles could pretty much hit any target in the world in under one hour!
Source: Raytheon
Yeah… scary, right?
But it gets even more frightening.
See, hypersonic missiles have technically been in use for decades. There are ballistic missiles that already travel at hypersonic speeds, over Mach 5. But this new generation of hypersonic missiles will be much harder to defend against.
An ordinary ballistic missile basically travels in an arc. But these hypersonic weapons move with an unpredictable trajectory before firing down on their target. That makes them way harder to intercept.
But that's not all…
They can also change trajectory mid-course.
Again, an ordinary ballistic missile basically travels in an arc. And once it’s fired, it generally can’t change trajectory. The new generation of hypersonic missiles, however, will have maneuvering capabilities that will make them even harder to stop.
James Acton, co-director of the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said in a 2020 interview, “What’s different with the new crop of hypersonic weapons isn’t speed by itself. It’s the combination of speed and maneuverability over long ranges.”
Right now, China, Russia, and the United States have the most advanced hypersonic weapons programs. Other nations including France, Germany, Japan, Australia, and North Korea also claim to have tested hypersonic missiles.
And they’ve already been used in combat.
Back in March, Russia used a newly developed hypersonic missile to strike an arms depot in western Ukraine — making it the first to use the advanced weaponry in combat.
As a result, governments around the world are scrambling to develop their own hypersonic programs.
In the U.S. the Pentagon requested $4.7 billion for hypersonic research in its FY2023 budget — up from $3.8 billion in the FY2022 request. In a reported dated May 5, 2022, the Congressional Research Service says:
Funding for hypersonic weapons has been relatively restrained in the past; however, both the Pentagon and Congress have shown a growing interest in pursuing the development and near-term deployment of hypersonic systems. This is due, in part, to the advances in these technologies in Russia and China, both of which have a number of hypersonic weapons programs and have likely fielded operational hypersonic glide vehicles—potentially armed with nuclear warheads.
This hypersonic weapons funding boom could be the opportunity of a lifetime for quick investors — a chance to get in on the ground floor and to make a life-changing fortune off of it. But there probably isn’t much time left.
The Pentagon is rapidly pouring money into the hypersonic weapons race. And everyone has their hands out. Wall Street's Proving Grounds director Jason Simpkins has identified the one company best-positioned for the biggest gains. He told me the other day, “Once word gets out that a significant portion of the Pentagon's money is going directly to this tiny, unknown company, its shares are going to take off.”
He has put all of his findings in a report, which you can access here.
To conclude, the proliferation of these new hypersonic weapons is as certain as the rising sun. For investors today, it should be an easy win.
