What could I read in order to understand different tradeoffs between types of missiles and the interceptors? It's just curiosity, i dont need hard math, but let's say i d like to implement a somewhat realistic system for real time strategy game
This is an exhausting and dispiriting article to try to read because of its short, choppy, clearly AI-generated sentences. The topic is interesting, but whoever caused it to be penned didn’t seem to care enough to make it appealing to read.
Agreed, that's a huge turn off for me, and I thought this would genuinely be fascinating. I'm not a physics expert but I love reading about interesting things like this, but I can't stand this surface-level "well I in theory could be an expert on this topic but nobody knows because the machine removed all of the nuance and now it's shallow AI writing" style of writing.
Curious which parts specifically felt that way for you? I spent over a week on this, and yes ofc, I used LLMs to help reformulate some sections, but "didn't seem to care enough to make it appealing to read" isn't it. Happy to look at the spots that felt choppy if you can point them out.
> and yes ofc, I used LLMs to help reformulate some sections
???
Why in the world would that be an "ofc"?
If you're trying to establish yourself as a writer and communicator, LLM's are the last thing you want to color your personal voice with. They may have a role in cleaning up interpersonal communication or in helping non-professional communicators shape up their prose for formal occasions, but they are not some kind of magic neutral way to improve a writer's writing.
As you're seeing here, all that work would have been better received without the compromises and tells of LLM-ese because it would have been your writing, in your voice, as an intelligent analyst and communicator. The idiosyncrasies of that prose voice (your prose voice), are a durable signature that people come to associate with you individually and help them interpret tone, inflection, emphasis, insight in ways that the genericism and accent of an LLM scrubs out.
Give yourself more credit and don't do this; or at least don't treat it as an "of course"!
It starts in the very first paragraph. “The headlines say yes. […] The headline is wrong.”
And there are numerous such examples. “That was half true. The kill chain ran. The interceptor did not.”
LLMs produce staccato, ugly chains of sentence stumps like this all the time. They’re easy to spot, and your essay is littered with them.
If anything, spending a week on a project like this seems liable to blind you to the shortcomings of the prose, because after putting in a lot of effort you can’t read it with fresh eyes. That’s what editors are for, but an LLM is by nature very weak at editing LLM-generated text.
I want to be able to offer constructive feedback on the structure of the overall essay, for example that the interspersed animated/interactive models often don’t seem strongly connected to the text, but simply reading the words makes this a grind.
> That was half true. The kill chain ran. The interceptor did not.
That was one of the ones that particularly stood out to me. As I read the article, I often found myself wishing for semicolons and colons instead of full stops; or in some cases a comma and some conjunction:
> That was half true: the kill chain ran, but the interceptor did not.
The staccato style is often effective for emphasis, but the paragraphing is wrong on this article. It should've been:
> The headlines say yes.
> Patriot crews shot down a Kinzhal over Kyiv on the night of May 4, 2023. Arrow-3 batteries killed Iranian ballistic missiles over Tel Aviv in April and October 2024. A pair of THAAD batteries in Israel emptied something close to a quarter of the US national inventory across twelve days of war in June 2025. The headline word in every one of those engagements was hypersonic.
> The headline is wrong.
> No maneuvering boost-glide hypersonic vehicle has ever been fired in combat against a defended target. Every “hypersonic intercept” the press has reported in the last three years was a different class of weapon: an air-launched aeroballistic missile, a quasi-ballistic short-range ballistic missile with a maneuvering reentry vehicle, or in one case a MIRV bus on an intermediate-range ballistic missile that the press could not stop calling hypersonic. The Avangard, the only Russian vehicle that meets the strict definition, has sat in silos in Orenburg since 2019 without being touched. The Chinese DF-17 has never been used. The American Dark Eagle has not yet been ordered to fire.
> So when we ask “can you stop a hypersonic,” we are partly asking “what would happen if anyone fired one.”
There are assorted other issues with the article as well, like excessive use of passive voice, lack of parallelism, and too much meta-talk.
> ofc, I used LLMs to help reformulate some sections
This is not really meant to single you out, since there's a lot of this going around, but I really don't think this should be a matter of "of course". Why should it be the default to let a tool that doesn't have your context, or your voice, override your own usage of language?
He met the goal of conveying a lot of information. If he's only judged on what he said, and not how he said it, he did great. If I want to hear someone's voice, I'll watch YouTube.
"Below it you are doing high-school physics. Above it you are running a small particle accelerator with a missile attached." is where I clocked out.
(Also "honest" assessments; the word "honest" has gone the way of "delve".)
Use LLMs to proofread and critique structure. Don't take a single word they generate and put it in your copy, not even simple vocabulary suggestions. The more work you put into a piece, the more important this rule is.
"A 100 to 300 kW beam has perhaps one to three seconds of dwell on a hardened, ablating, plasma-shrouded glide body. That is orders of magnitude short of the joules per square centimetre needed for a thermal kill."
- wondering if you can elaborate more on whether a laser energy-based device would ever be able to have enough power to stop one of these?
> The honest answer to that question, in June 2026, is that we do not know
> The honest reading of those numbers is not that defense is winning on economics
> The honest 2026 answer is in three parts.
> The honest answer is that we do not know, because no one has tried
Firstly, I appreciated the article and especially the visuals. But I had the same reaction as the GP commenter. It was hard to read. I'm sick of this punchy, repetitive, LLM-generated prose.
Lasers can stop a hypersonic missile, but the challenge is getting a beam on the target through the atmosphere. Some of the old SDI tests solved the problem by flying the laser above most of the atmosphere.
As noted in the Wiki, even with a megawatt class laser, you would need the aircraft to be operating inside the borders of Iran for it to be effective, and we do not have air superiority in Iran to be able to do that with a big slow 747. And to be operationally effective, we would need a fleet of twenty of them.
What is the math on how much additional heat a laser would deliver to a warhead which is presumably designed with some kind of ablative shielding that is pushing through air compressed into a plasma? It seems like the damage from a laser pointed from miles away through atmosphere wouldn't be enough to change anything.
There was also the Adaptive Optics where the beam was shaped by lot of individual articulated mirrors that could be used to correct the beam from not only the atmospheric distortion but how the heat of the beam itself would then change the atmospheric distortion. Supposedly, that tech became DLP.
I imagine the realistic answer is "we don't know", because it's never been truly tested. They are constantly improving and iterating designs, speeds, anti-intercept tech, anti-tracking. As you said as well, this is only what from is available in OSINT reporting. There are surely classified weapons from all major countries lying in wait for the most serious scenarios.
A big part of hypersonic/ICBM warfare is anti-detection tech. When you have the two most military capable countries with 'hypersonic' ICBMs that can in theory reach across the planet is < 30 minutes, a massive part of that is stopping the other country from realizing you even fired a missile in the first place. That detection is usually done through satellites afaik. One of the next steps in global warfare is going to be satellite degradation and interference.
It's a whole different world when you detect a launch in the silo and know you have half an hour to react versus not realizing a missile is in the air until it's 5 minutes off the west coast.
Detecting hypersonics is relatively easy because they are the opposite of stealthy. Even most glide vehicles have an initial ballistic trajectory that exposes it to many sensors at distance. The US field-tested a number of short range hypersonics since the 1990s that don't have a ballistic trajectory but those were all canceled.
Hypersonics have two related technical challenges.
They are not maneuverable, at least not in the way people imagine, due to fundamental limits of material physics. They are more "straight line" fast. This requires very fast reaction times on the part of defensive systems but the intercept is otherwise pretty trivial using the same off-the-shelf intercept terminal guidance from 20-30 years ago.
The big advantage hypersonics have is they significantly reduce the amount of space an air defense system can cover due to their speed. Hypersonic air defense missiles can counter this to some extent, which the US has, but these have drawbacks related to the second point.
Terminal guidance for hypersonics is an extremely difficult engineering problem because none of the physical materials you can use in terminal guidance systems can survive endoatmospheric hypersonic travel. A hypersonic missile without effective terminal guidance is an ICBM with a shorter intercept window. This isn't that useful for many targets.
The US has been continuously developing and testing different hypersonic terminal guidance designs since (at least) the 1980s. The first viable design only went into production 15-20 years ago. Presumably they've improved on and generalized it since then. There isn't much evidence that any other country has effective terminal guidance for hypersonics.
It is worth noting that effective precision terminal guidance was a prerequisite for US deployment of hypersonic weapons. Everyone else touting "hypersonic missiles" skipped that part.
>It's a whole different world when you detect a launch in the silo and know you have half an hour to react versus not realizing a missile is in the air until it's 5 minutes off the west coast.
Missile submarines have basically made this reality for decades.
I think this discussion is adressing wrong points. The question is not "can you maybe stop single missile" but: can you reliably and cheaply stop 20 missiles every day for weeks? Oreshnik in well run serial production and non atomic configuration costs around $10m per missile, and Russia can manufacture 25 every month (according to Russian sources).
What I'm perpetually confused by is I am relatively certain we developed interceptors for these type of missions in the 1970s. The LIM-49 Spartan and the later "Sprint" missile were designed for exactly this kind of intercept. The Sprint missile was capable of moving so fast it was glowing white hot during its mission.
We elected not to deploy these weapons for whatever reason. So saying they don't exist at least in the case of the US is more like saying we threw them out because they were deemed useless. But the problem doesn't really seem unsolvable.
The earlier interceptors were for ballistic missiles. They are traveling at hypersonic speeds but have high trajectories (so radar can see them earlier) and can't maneuver for significant parts of their flight (so they are easier to track and target).
FWIW they were cancelled because they didn't have a particularly good kill ratio and proliferation and MIRV meant you'd need a ton of them to prevent an attack landing (and doing so would involve a significant number of nuclear blasts pretty close to the targets anyway). Deterrence was more credible.
The weapon you linked to is an anti ballistic missile. The difficulty is not purely in how fast the target is going, but how much it maneuvers, the duration at which it can sustain those speeds, and the altitudes at which it operates. The article addresses this early on.
Weren’t those anti ballistic missile missiles all nuclear armed themselves?
And doesn’t the parent article to the Sprint article make it clear that they we didn’t deploy them because fall out shelters combined with building more nukes was deemed more cost effective at saving lives.
I think you meant to say "Sprint". In any case, if you're being attacked I think the consequence of high altitude fallout is pretty small compared to dying.
Depends on what you're being attacked by. If it's just regular warheads, a nuclear interceptor is wildly inappropriate especially if the intercept happens over someone else's airspace.
The ABM systems we built in the early cold war worked by having nuclear payloads. We could absolutely not hit an incoming ICBM with the tech at the time, so we just slapped a nuke on it and hoped we could get within 1km at detonation.
Importantly, it was a completely dead end. They had no response to MIRVs and could not be built in sufficient numbers to deal with any actual launch. We threw them out because they were in fact useless.
Generally, we have moved away from Nuclear ABM systems because detonating a hundred warheads above a city is very unlikely to work out well.
Intercepting a cold war era ICBM turned out to be feasible with newer technology, and we currently have $2 billion missiles that can feasibly intercept ICBMs (at low quantity).
>No maneuvering boost-glide hypersonic vehicle has ever been fired in combat against a defended target
Nobody has fired one of those against a target because almost nobody has a functioning maneuvering hypersonic vehicle. Basically just China I think.
I would expect "real" hypersonic weapons like that are basically uncounterable. The physics just gets too obnoxious. Interceptors will struggle to get better than a coin flip, and they will be too expensive to use on anything else so they won't be general purpose, so equipping them will be full of tradeoffs.
That's the entire point of hypersonic weapons. $3 billion dollars to make that high value target go away, with extremely high probability. They replace 50 bombers launching still quite expensive anti-ship weapons at scale, which is the strategy it replaces.
This of course has rather negative implications for the concept of force projection in future wars. Which is why China made a hypersonic weapon.
I don't think you're wrong broadly, though I want to add that the particular interceptor warheads were relatively small and nukes detonated in the upper atmosphere generally don't do much to stuff on the ground. There's not enough material to create significant fallout so it's just a mild EMP and even milder pressure wave
Interesting post. It made me think that a manned Navy of individual high value ships becomes essentially useless if you can take out a 13 billion dollar carrier with a 3 billion dollar missile.
It becomes a war of financial attrition at that point.
Wikipedia notes both the Spartan and Sprint missiles as having nuclear warheads. That was reasonable-ish, since Wikipedia also notes them being cold war-era anti-ICBM weapons. Less bad to have your own interceptor nukes going off "near" your city than to have enemy nukes scoring direct hit on it.
In contrast, modern hypersonic weapons have plenty of use cases where they'd be fitted with conventional warheads, and used against targets like US Navy ships.
There is plenty that could go wrong if USN ships mounted nuclear interceptor missiles, ready to launch on a moment's notice...
The proposed Golden Dome missile defense system of the US has plans to stop hypersonic missiles and more. I have a recent well-researched NotebookLM composite video on the topic:
They have stopped a lot of supersonic missiles, some probably being sub-sonic. Hypersonic is 5-10x supersonic speeds and can maneuver at that speed and not many countries have these types of missiles.
You know there is a pretty direct calculation to determine the theoretical best outcome. How close you can come to a maneuver-capable rocket, is the answer to a conic section that takes distance, and maximum speed of both rockets into account.
The purpose of a rocket is really only for distance to drop to something like 10 meters for conventional munitions and something like 300 meters or so for nuclear, in practice this is a constant.
So what matters is the maximum speed of both rockets. Make that large enough and you can get the attacking rocket to make maneuvers that (assuming they cannot be predicted), make it mathematically impossible to intercept the attacking rocket. In practice this difference is only something like 130 km/h (for nuclear).
Lasers won't work until we're talking gigawatt lasers, and even then only at "medium range" (in other words, for stopping nuclear weapons, an optimal outcome can only be achieved at single-digit kilometers, in other words, it may be able to protect individual points like the president, but it will never protect a city against a fusion device). Oh and whether a laser weapon works or not will not be known until seconds before impact. I hope you have strong nerves.
Note that the attacking rocket does not need tracking, it needs a good random number generator.
TLDR: no, we cannot currently intercept a hypersonic controlled rocket ... and that won't change without an overwhelming technological advantage, which basically means better rocket motors. At a sufficiently high equivalent level of technology, attacking rockets cannot be stopped. That level is only slightly higher than the level the US is currently at (and we don't know. Both US and Russia may already be past that point)
>Every “hypersonic intercept” the press has reported in the last three years was a different class of weapon: an air-launched aeroballistic missile, a quasi-ballistic short-range ballistic missile with a maneuvering reentry vehicle, or in one case a MIRV bus on an intermediate-range ballistic missile that the press could not stop calling hypersonic.
Most people understand that no demonstrable air breathing lift-generating hypersonic missile actually exist. This article goes on to claim that various never launched paper-tigers created for sabre rattling propaganda do actually exist. But it also says they've never been successfully tested. And they haven't. This is a really hard problem.
"Can You Stop a Hypersonic (air breathing/lift generating) Missle?" is actually, "Can you Build a Hypersonic (air breathing/lift generating) Missle?" and the answer is "No, so there's no need to stop them." Conical rockets that travel at hypersonic speeds have existed since the 1950s and will continue to exist and be used as weapons though.
So, tldr; going hypersonic isn't special or new, but air-breathing or lift generating while doing it would be, if it existed, so nation states sabre rattle about fake weapons.
???
Why in the world would that be an "ofc"?
If you're trying to establish yourself as a writer and communicator, LLM's are the last thing you want to color your personal voice with. They may have a role in cleaning up interpersonal communication or in helping non-professional communicators shape up their prose for formal occasions, but they are not some kind of magic neutral way to improve a writer's writing.
As you're seeing here, all that work would have been better received without the compromises and tells of LLM-ese because it would have been your writing, in your voice, as an intelligent analyst and communicator. The idiosyncrasies of that prose voice (your prose voice), are a durable signature that people come to associate with you individually and help them interpret tone, inflection, emphasis, insight in ways that the genericism and accent of an LLM scrubs out.
Give yourself more credit and don't do this; or at least don't treat it as an "of course"!
And there are numerous such examples. “That was half true. The kill chain ran. The interceptor did not.”
LLMs produce staccato, ugly chains of sentence stumps like this all the time. They’re easy to spot, and your essay is littered with them.
If anything, spending a week on a project like this seems liable to blind you to the shortcomings of the prose, because after putting in a lot of effort you can’t read it with fresh eyes. That’s what editors are for, but an LLM is by nature very weak at editing LLM-generated text.
I want to be able to offer constructive feedback on the structure of the overall essay, for example that the interspersed animated/interactive models often don’t seem strongly connected to the text, but simply reading the words makes this a grind.
That was one of the ones that particularly stood out to me. As I read the article, I often found myself wishing for semicolons and colons instead of full stops; or in some cases a comma and some conjunction:
> That was half true: the kill chain ran, but the interceptor did not.
> The headlines say yes.
> Patriot crews shot down a Kinzhal over Kyiv on the night of May 4, 2023. Arrow-3 batteries killed Iranian ballistic missiles over Tel Aviv in April and October 2024. A pair of THAAD batteries in Israel emptied something close to a quarter of the US national inventory across twelve days of war in June 2025. The headline word in every one of those engagements was hypersonic.
> The headline is wrong.
> No maneuvering boost-glide hypersonic vehicle has ever been fired in combat against a defended target. Every “hypersonic intercept” the press has reported in the last three years was a different class of weapon: an air-launched aeroballistic missile, a quasi-ballistic short-range ballistic missile with a maneuvering reentry vehicle, or in one case a MIRV bus on an intermediate-range ballistic missile that the press could not stop calling hypersonic. The Avangard, the only Russian vehicle that meets the strict definition, has sat in silos in Orenburg since 2019 without being touched. The Chinese DF-17 has never been used. The American Dark Eagle has not yet been ordered to fire.
> So when we ask “can you stop a hypersonic,” we are partly asking “what would happen if anyone fired one.”
There are assorted other issues with the article as well, like excessive use of passive voice, lack of parallelism, and too much meta-talk.
This is not really meant to single you out, since there's a lot of this going around, but I really don't think this should be a matter of "of course". Why should it be the default to let a tool that doesn't have your context, or your voice, override your own usage of language?
(Also "honest" assessments; the word "honest" has gone the way of "delve".)
Use LLMs to proofread and critique structure. Don't take a single word they generate and put it in your copy, not even simple vocabulary suggestions. The more work you put into a piece, the more important this rule is.
"A 100 to 300 kW beam has perhaps one to three seconds of dwell on a hardened, ablating, plasma-shrouded glide body. That is orders of magnitude short of the joules per square centimetre needed for a thermal kill."
- wondering if you can elaborate more on whether a laser energy-based device would ever be able to have enough power to stop one of these?
> The honest reading of those numbers is not that defense is winning on economics
> The honest 2026 answer is in three parts.
> The honest answer is that we do not know, because no one has tried
Firstly, I appreciated the article and especially the visuals. But I had the same reaction as the GP commenter. It was hard to read. I'm sick of this punchy, repetitive, LLM-generated prose.
Spend enough time arguing with Claude and hearing that combination of words starts making you wince / twitch uncontrollably.
That said I enjoyed the article!
I will only look at AI slop if paid to do so.
(Scouting ahead for alternatives, I wouldn't mind a Lobste.rs invite, to see whether that's pleasantly anti-slop.)
> Don't post generated comments or AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans.
were extended to submissions as well. People submitting junk should get banned just as people commenting with LLMs do (or risk).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_YAL-1
A big part of hypersonic/ICBM warfare is anti-detection tech. When you have the two most military capable countries with 'hypersonic' ICBMs that can in theory reach across the planet is < 30 minutes, a massive part of that is stopping the other country from realizing you even fired a missile in the first place. That detection is usually done through satellites afaik. One of the next steps in global warfare is going to be satellite degradation and interference.
It's a whole different world when you detect a launch in the silo and know you have half an hour to react versus not realizing a missile is in the air until it's 5 minutes off the west coast.
Hypersonics have two related technical challenges.
They are not maneuverable, at least not in the way people imagine, due to fundamental limits of material physics. They are more "straight line" fast. This requires very fast reaction times on the part of defensive systems but the intercept is otherwise pretty trivial using the same off-the-shelf intercept terminal guidance from 20-30 years ago.
The big advantage hypersonics have is they significantly reduce the amount of space an air defense system can cover due to their speed. Hypersonic air defense missiles can counter this to some extent, which the US has, but these have drawbacks related to the second point.
Terminal guidance for hypersonics is an extremely difficult engineering problem because none of the physical materials you can use in terminal guidance systems can survive endoatmospheric hypersonic travel. A hypersonic missile without effective terminal guidance is an ICBM with a shorter intercept window. This isn't that useful for many targets.
The US has been continuously developing and testing different hypersonic terminal guidance designs since (at least) the 1980s. The first viable design only went into production 15-20 years ago. Presumably they've improved on and generalized it since then. There isn't much evidence that any other country has effective terminal guidance for hypersonics.
It is worth noting that effective precision terminal guidance was a prerequisite for US deployment of hypersonic weapons. Everyone else touting "hypersonic missiles" skipped that part.
Missile submarines have basically made this reality for decades.
We elected not to deploy these weapons for whatever reason. So saying they don't exist at least in the case of the US is more like saying we threw them out because they were deemed useless. But the problem doesn't really seem unsolvable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprint_(missile)
FWIW they were cancelled because they didn't have a particularly good kill ratio and proliferation and MIRV meant you'd need a ton of them to prevent an attack landing (and doing so would involve a significant number of nuclear blasts pretty close to the targets anyway). Deterrence was more credible.
And doesn’t the parent article to the Sprint article make it clear that they we didn’t deploy them because fall out shelters combined with building more nukes was deemed more cost effective at saving lives.
The ABM systems we built in the early cold war worked by having nuclear payloads. We could absolutely not hit an incoming ICBM with the tech at the time, so we just slapped a nuke on it and hoped we could get within 1km at detonation.
Importantly, it was a completely dead end. They had no response to MIRVs and could not be built in sufficient numbers to deal with any actual launch. We threw them out because they were in fact useless.
Generally, we have moved away from Nuclear ABM systems because detonating a hundred warheads above a city is very unlikely to work out well.
Intercepting a cold war era ICBM turned out to be feasible with newer technology, and we currently have $2 billion missiles that can feasibly intercept ICBMs (at low quantity).
>No maneuvering boost-glide hypersonic vehicle has ever been fired in combat against a defended target
Nobody has fired one of those against a target because almost nobody has a functioning maneuvering hypersonic vehicle. Basically just China I think.
I would expect "real" hypersonic weapons like that are basically uncounterable. The physics just gets too obnoxious. Interceptors will struggle to get better than a coin flip, and they will be too expensive to use on anything else so they won't be general purpose, so equipping them will be full of tradeoffs.
That's the entire point of hypersonic weapons. $3 billion dollars to make that high value target go away, with extremely high probability. They replace 50 bombers launching still quite expensive anti-ship weapons at scale, which is the strategy it replaces.
This of course has rather negative implications for the concept of force projection in future wars. Which is why China made a hypersonic weapon.
It becomes a war of financial attrition at that point.
In contrast, modern hypersonic weapons have plenty of use cases where they'd be fitted with conventional warheads, and used against targets like US Navy ships.
There is plenty that could go wrong if USN ships mounted nuclear interceptor missiles, ready to launch on a moment's notice...
https://youtu.be/9kdXKJbDQCs
The purpose of a rocket is really only for distance to drop to something like 10 meters for conventional munitions and something like 300 meters or so for nuclear, in practice this is a constant.
So what matters is the maximum speed of both rockets. Make that large enough and you can get the attacking rocket to make maneuvers that (assuming they cannot be predicted), make it mathematically impossible to intercept the attacking rocket. In practice this difference is only something like 130 km/h (for nuclear).
Lasers won't work until we're talking gigawatt lasers, and even then only at "medium range" (in other words, for stopping nuclear weapons, an optimal outcome can only be achieved at single-digit kilometers, in other words, it may be able to protect individual points like the president, but it will never protect a city against a fusion device). Oh and whether a laser weapon works or not will not be known until seconds before impact. I hope you have strong nerves.
Note that the attacking rocket does not need tracking, it needs a good random number generator.
TLDR: no, we cannot currently intercept a hypersonic controlled rocket ... and that won't change without an overwhelming technological advantage, which basically means better rocket motors. At a sufficiently high equivalent level of technology, attacking rockets cannot be stopped. That level is only slightly higher than the level the US is currently at (and we don't know. Both US and Russia may already be past that point)
insightful though
Most people understand that no demonstrable air breathing lift-generating hypersonic missile actually exist. This article goes on to claim that various never launched paper-tigers created for sabre rattling propaganda do actually exist. But it also says they've never been successfully tested. And they haven't. This is a really hard problem.
"Can You Stop a Hypersonic (air breathing/lift generating) Missle?" is actually, "Can you Build a Hypersonic (air breathing/lift generating) Missle?" and the answer is "No, so there's no need to stop them." Conical rockets that travel at hypersonic speeds have existed since the 1950s and will continue to exist and be used as weapons though.
So, tldr; going hypersonic isn't special or new, but air-breathing or lift generating while doing it would be, if it existed, so nation states sabre rattle about fake weapons.