US intelligence reports: Russia's new hypersonic weapon will likely be ready for war by 2020

[Ulquiorra]

A Russian weapon the U.S. is currently unable to defend against will be ready for war by 2020, according to sources with direct knowledge of American intelligence reports.

The sources, who spoke to CNBC on the condition of anonymity, said Russia successfully tested the weapon, which could carry a nuclear warhead, twice in 2016. The third known test of the device, called a hypersonic glide vehicle, was carried out in October 2017 and resulted in a failure when the platform crashed seconds before striking its target.

The latest revelations come more than two months after Russian President Vladimir Putin touted his nation's growing hypersonic arsenal as "invincible."

The hypersonic glide vehicle, dubbed Avangard, is designed to sit atop of an intercontinental ballistic missile. Once launched, it uses aerodynamic forces to sail on top of the atmosphere.

One U.S. intelligence report, according to a source, noted that the hypersonic glide vehicles were mounted to Russian-made SS-19 intercontinental ballistic missiles – and one test featured a mock warhead.

Devastation even without explosives

While it is unclear whether Avangard will be outfitted with explosives, the precision and speed of the weapon is believed to pack enough force to obliterate targets.

The weapon, which Moscow has been developing for three decades, can travel at least five times the speed of sound, or about one mile per second.

"These kinds of boost glide vehicles attack the gaps in our missile defense system," Thomas Karako, director of the Missile Defense Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told CNBC.

"There's no time like the present to modify our current missile defense posture," Karako added, saying it was "unfortunate that we have let Russia come this far."

The Russians are expected to conduct a fourth test sometime this summer.

Sources familiar with the U.S. intelligence reports assess that the Russian hypersonic glide vehicles are equipped with onboard countermeasures that are able to defeat even the most advanced missile-defense systems. The weapons are also highly maneuverable and, therefore, unpredictable, which makes them difficult to track.

The intelligence reports, which were curated this spring, calculate that Russia's hypersonic glide vehicles are likely to achieve initial operational capability by 2020, a significant step that would enable the Kremlin to surpass the U.S. and China in this regard.