Abstract
The emergence of hypersonic weapons technology presents a consequential and complex challenge to modern global security in the post-Cold War era. Hypersonic weapons, or projectiles that can travel at speeds of Mach 5 or greater while maneuvering in the Earth’s atmosphere, have quickly moved from theoretical development to fielding by major world powers, namely the United States, Russia, and China. Today, these nations are heavily invested in specifically hypersonic glide vehicles (HGVs) and related systems due to their ability to evade air-defense systems and deliver payloads with both speed and precision. The U.S. Department of Defense has designated hypersonics technology development as a critical modernization priority and seeks to field acquisition programs across the Army, Navy, and Air Force to support capabilities with hypersonic weapons.
The technological arms race presents strategic challenges for understanding what proliferation means for established deterrence frameworks. The same features that make hypersonic weapons attractive (speed, maneuverability, and missile defense evasion) are what also might make these systems strategically destabilizing. Compressed decision-making timelines, ambiguity between conventional and unconventional payloads, and resistance to existing arms control mechanisms are what scholars and critics say threaten the foundations of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) that has preserved relative peace among nuclear states since the Cold War. The two research projects that comprise this portfolio address this overarching problem from both a technical and strategic and policy perspective.
Technical Report: UVA Hypersonic Low-Altitude Research Projectile (Hyper-LARP)
This technical project was conducted as a response to a solicitation from the University Consortium for Applied Hypersonics (UCAH) Undergraduate Hypersonic Flight Design Competition, which challenged universities to optimize the design of an unpowered, high lift-to-drag, low-altitude hypersonic projective. The UVA Hyper-LARP team undertook a Senior Capstone project from the months of August 2025 to April 2026, spanning multiple engineering disciplines including computational fluid dynamics (CFD), finite element analysis (FEA), vehicle optimization, machine learning, material selection, trajectory analysis, and aircraft dynamics.
The design process began with a conceptual trade study that evaluated three bodies of existing hypersonic aircraft or projectiles, the common hypersonic glide body, the winged glide missile, and the waverider. This trade study evaluated these designs based on parameters such as manufacturability, lift-to-drag ratio, cost, and structural complexity. Through this analysis, the winged glide vehicle was chosen to proceed to the optimization phase. Ten design parameters were identified and constrained per competition guidelines; a parameterized SolidWorks CAD model was created, and a Latin HyperCube Sampling (LHS) process generated 50 well-distributed sample cases across the 10-dimensional design space. These cases were run through ANSYS Fluent using a density based solver at Mach 5, 5 degrees angle of attack, and sea level conditions with a medium fidelity mesh to build a surrogate model. By running fifty cases, an aerodynamic database containing data for lift and drag was created. A Kriging model that was trained on this data was then optimized using global and gradient-based methods to obtain a single design that maximized lift-over-drag. Stability analysis confirmed the stability across the roll, pitch, and yaw axes, and FEA validated the structural and thermal requirements of the design. Finally, NASA’s OTIS trajectory solver predicted a range of 100.4 km. The final vehicle features a ceramic carbon composite nose tip, tungsten structural sections, swept delta wings with ceramic leading edges, a combined titanium main body and vertical fin, and an aluminum interior structure at an estimated total cost of $18,000 USD.
STS Research Paper: Hypersonic Weapons and the Challenge to Deterrence
This STS research paper addresses the following question: How does the introduction of hypersonic weapons challenge established principles of deterrence? To answer this, this paper looks at the historical evolution of nuclear deterrence from its post-WWII origins, through the space race, and the eventual emergence of mutually assured destruction as the bedrock of strategic stability. This historical foundation is used to evaluate how hypersonic technology supports or disrupts these frameworks.
This paper focuses on two competing camps of thought. Proponents of hypersonics technology, such as the Department of Defense, prime contractors, and select strategists, believe that hypersonic weapons are necessary to bolster American deterrence and are essential to restoring capability parity with Russia and China. Critics, including arms control scholars, warn that issues such as nuclear ambiguity and aggressive arms race postures may pose serious threats to the stability in the future. The paper concludes that hypersonic weapons mark a more dangerous change in deterrence than previous shifts such as Cold War missile developments. Because modern hypersonics seek to reach targets undetected and uncontested, these weapons may undermine the second-strike capability on which MAD depends. Ultimately, this paper calls for stronger international diplomatic frameworks to facilitate mutual transparency and cooperative actions capable of addressing the ambiguous nature of these systems.
