The Next Arms Race: Straight Out of Sci-Fi

http://www.financialexpress.com/news/india-working-on-supersonic-missile-aircraft/1298527

India is developing a hypersonic aircraft. The goal of the future craft is to reach twenty-five times the speed of sound. Although mach 25 is a mere three and a half thousandths of one percent of light speed, it is almost ten times faster than the fastest manned, unassisted flight; and almost ten thousand KPH faster than the fastest powered aerial vehicle ever tested. The speed, of the projected craft is not, in itself, particularly groundbreaking. What sets the Indian project apart is its proposed propulsion system. The Indian equivalent of DARPA (DRDO) is planning to build the world's first nuclear fusion powered aircraft.

Building a fusion driven aircraft is ambitious because the scientific community has yet to harness fusion energy in a way sufficient to turn a simple steam turbine, let alone power an aircraft. As if the construction of the world's first fusion drive wasn't enough, the planned acquisition process of the fusion fuel takes another page out of science fiction. The proposed fuel source is helium three. He₃ is only available in practical quantities on the moon. This means that Humanity will have to initiate its first sustained, extraterrestrial mining operation.

This is the part of the process where scientific speculation meets geopolitical intrigue. It is highly doubtful that any one actor, private or governmental, will have the resources to initiate a He₃ supply line. The amount of standard chemical rocket fuel needed to get some sort of space tanker out of earth's atmosphere would be unprecedented; this fact alone rules out unilateral action. I am envisioning the formation of a multinational He₃ mining and refining consortium, similar to OPEC. The immense resources required to manufacture He₃ fusion fuel would give this organization, and its member nations, a massive amount of global political influence. Imagine all of the Faustian bargains various nations have made for oil increased in scale and deviousness by a couple orders of magnitude. The country at the forefront of fusion technology, say India, may be willing to trade some of this technology with whoever controls the supply line, say Russia, and the U.S., in exchange for a better deal on He₃.

Once applied fusion technology becomes available, an arms race may begin that will make the arms/space race of the Cold War era look like an elementary school science fair. Our only current application of nuclear fusion is the thermo-nuclear bomb. As destructive as an H bomb is, it is the strong force equivalent of banging rocks together to make fire. Once a weapons designer can use a fusion engine to accelerate a projectile to mach 25, the entire concept of a warhead, thermo-nuclear or otherwise, will become superfluous. The kinetic damage alone will cause the desired result. The complete shift in warfare technology may alter the balance of power similar to tanks in WWI and planes in WWII.