| 双语新闻 Bilingual News | 双语对照阅读 分级系列阅读 智能辅助阅读 在线英语学习 |
|
| 双语新闻 Bilingual News | 双语对照阅读 分级系列阅读 智能辅助阅读 在线英语学习 |
| [英文] [中文] [双语对照] [双语交替] [] |
| WASHINGTON — China’s testing of a hypersonic missile designed to evade American nuclear defenses was “very close” to a “Sputnik moment” for the United States, Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Wednesday in the first official confirmation of how Beijing’s demonstration of its weapon capabilities had taken American officials by surprise. | 华盛顿——美国参谋长联席会议主席马克·米利(Mark A. Milley)将军周三表示，中国试验了躲避美国核防御系统的高超音速导弹，对美国而言“非常接近‘斯普特尼克时刻’(Sputnik moment)”。米利将军的话首次证实北京展示的武器能力使美国官员感到意外。 |
| The tests, which could revive fears of a Cold War-like arms race, come as Beijing is spending heavily to modernize its military and may be seeking to expand its nuclear arsenal. | 试验可能会重新引发人们对类似冷战的军备竞赛的担忧，北京正在斥巨资实现军事现代化，并且可能正在寻求扩大核武库。 |
| Two separate tests, reported earlier by The Financial Times, took place this summer, conducted in a fashion that Chinese officials knew would be highly visible to American satellites. But United States officials remained mostly silent until General Milley spoke on Wednesday, talking about the tests on a Bloomberg Television interview show hosted by David Rubenstein, the billionaire investor and philanthropist. | 英国《金融时报》(Financial Times)早些时候曾报道，两次单独试验分别在今年夏天进行，中国官员知道这会引起美国卫星的高度关注。但在米利将军于周三在彭博电视台接受亿万富翁投资者、慈善家戴维·鲁宾斯坦(David Rubenstein)主持的采访节目中谈到这些试验之前，美国官员大多保持了沉默。 |
| “I don’t know if it’s quite a Sputnik moment, but I think it’s very close to that,” General Milley said, making it clear he and other officials were surprised. The tests, he said, were a “very significant technological event,” and he said “it has all of our attention.” | “我不知道这是否是一个斯普特尼克时刻，但我认为非常接近，”米利将军说，并明确表示他和其他官员感到惊讶。他说，这些试验是“非常重要的技术事件”，还说“引起了我们所有人的关注”。 |
| Hypersonic weapons have a long history, going back to the 1960s. But while General Milley did not elaborate, the surprise appears to have arisen from how China joined two different technologies — the launch of a missile that completed a partial orbit of the earth, and a hypersonic vehicle that could plow a suddenly shifting path, maneuvering in ways that would render all current U.S. missile defenses obsolete. | 高超音速武器有着悠久的历史，可以追溯到上世纪60年代。虽然米利将军没有详细说明，但令人惊讶的似乎是，中国是如何将两种不同的技术结合在一起——发射一枚完成部分地轨飞行的导弹，以及可以突然改变路径的高超音速飞行器，这使得美国目前所有的导弹防御系统都落伍了。 |
| At least one of the tests was not completely successful; it reportedly missed an intended target by a wide margin. But the advances suggest that China might one day be able to arm a hypersonic vehicle with a nuclear warhead, launch it into a low orbit, and release it from anyplace — including, perhaps, an evasive flight path over Antarctica. | 至少其中一次试验没有完全成功；据报道，它以较大误差未能击中预定目标。但这些进展表明，中国有朝一日可能用高超音速飞行器携带核弹头，将其发射到低轨道，然后从任何地方将其射出——也许包括南极洲上空一条可规避监测的飞行路线。 |
| Existing defenses of the continental United States all point west and north over the Pacific, meaning they might fail in defeating an attack from the south. Even if there were antimissile bases pointed south, current antimissile technology is designed to intercept intercontinental ballistic warheads on predictable, parabolic paths in outer space — not hypersonic weapons that can zig and zag through the atmosphere. | 美国大陆现有的防御系统都指向太平洋的西部和北部，这意味着它们可能无法击败来自南部的进攻。即使有反导基地指向南部，当前的反导技术旨在拦截在外太空沿可预测的抛物线飞行的洲际弹道弹头，而不是可以在大气层中曲折穿行的高超音速武器。 |
| “We just don’t know how we can defend against that technology, neither does China, neither does Russia,’’ said Ambassador Robert A. Wood, who is retiring in a few weeks as the U.S. representative at arms control sessions in Geneva. | “我们不知道如何防御这种技术，中国也不知道，俄罗斯也不知道，”将在几周后从日内瓦举行的军备控制会议上退休的美国代表罗伯特·A·伍德(Robert A. Wood)说。 |
| Mr. Wood, a longtime American diplomat, spoke before General Milley’s characterization of the test, but noted that hypersonic technology was “something that we have been concerned about” for a long time. “We have held back” from pursuing its military uses, he added, to avoid stoking a new kind of arms race. | 美国资深外交官伍德的这番言论发表在米利将军对试验定性之前，不过他也指出，高超音速技术长期以来是“我们一直关注的事情”。他还说，为了避免引发新的军备竞赛，“我们一直克制”不去追求它的军事用途。 |
| General Milley’s reference to a near-Sputnik moment was meant to resonate with a generation that remembers a long-ago Cold War. Sputnik was the launch, in 1957, of a Soviet satellite. It created fear in Washington that the Soviets were getting ahead in the space race, and led to President John F. Kennedy’s declaration that the United States would be the first to land humans on the moon, an accomplishment that was reached in less than a decade. But it also helped spur the nuclear arms race, which was only tamped down in the past 30 years, after the Soviet Union’s collapse. | 米利将军提到“斯普特尼克时刻”，意在引起对很久以前的冷战仍存在记忆的一代人的共鸣。斯普特尼克1号是苏联在1957年发射的一颗卫星。它在华盛顿引起了恐慌，认为苏联在太空竞赛中处于领先，并导致约翰·F·肯尼迪(John F. Kennedy)总统宣布美国将成为第一个将人类送上月球的国家，在不到十年的时间内就实现了这一成就。但它也助长了核军备竞赛，这在苏联解体后的过去30年里才得到遏制。 |
| Now, the arms race could be revived, though in a new form. | 现在，军备竞赛可能会以一种新的形式重新开始。 |
| The United States has an active hypersonic program of its own, as does Russia and, among others, North Korea. But the U.S. program has run into its own technical difficulties, including a booster failure last week. | 美国也有一个积极的高超音速计划，俄罗斯以及朝鲜等国也有。但美国的计划遇到了自己的技术困难，包括上周的一次助推器故障。 |
| Both China and the United States have the resources to work out the bugs, and the concern of many arms control experts is that it could become a new form of competition — at the very moment that President Biden has been looking for ways to avoid a proposed trillion-dollar modernization of the American nuclear forces and delivery systems. | 中国和美国都有足够的资源来解决这些问题，许多军备控制专家担心这可以成为一种新形式的竞争——与此同时，拜登总统一直在想方设法避开美国核力量与运载系统耗资万亿美元的现代化方案。 |
| The fact that the Pentagon was so surprised may explain why it stayed silent after the revelation of the tests. John F. Kirby, the Pentagon spokesman, declined to confirm the tests after the first report in The Financial Times. Even after General Milley spoke, the Pentagon would say nothing about it. | 五角大楼非常惊讶，这或许可以解释该试验被披露后它为何保持沉默。在《金融时报》首次报道后，五角大楼发言人约翰·F·柯比(John F. Kirby)拒绝证实这些试验。即使在米利发言后，五角大楼也没有对此发表评论。 |
| What apparently made the Chinese tests unsettling, military experts said in recent interviews, was that — in a first — it combined two well-known military technologies that previously had been developed separately, starting a half-century ago. | 军事专家在最近的采访中说，中国的试验显然令人不安，它第一次结合了两项著名的军事技术，这两项技术是半个世纪前开始分别研发的。 |
| The first of the two technologies was a weapon that circled the globe before speeding toward its target, an approach the Soviet Union had pioneered in 1960s. Known as the Fractional Orbital Bombardment System, or FOBS, the Soviet concept was to send a nuclear warhead into a partial orbit of the Earth before it plunged back through the atmosphere toward a target. | 两项技术中的第一项是一种武器，它可以先环绕地球飞行，然后再加速飞向目标，这是苏联在1960年代率先采用的方法，被称为“部分轨道轰炸系统”(FOBS)，苏联的概念是将核弹头送入地球的部分轨道，然后再穿过大气层冲向目标。 |
| The system was seen as ideal for surprise attacks because the weapon could fly on any course, even over the South Pole, and in theory could evade radars and detection. However, the United States quickly lofted early-warning satellites that could spot the bright flames of rising Soviet missiles and diminish the element of surprise. | 该系统被视为突袭的理想选择，因为该武器可以在任何航线上飞行，甚至飞越南极，而且理论上可以躲避雷达和探测。然而，美国很快发射了预警卫星，它们可以发现苏联导弹上升时的明亮火焰，从而减少了突袭因素。 |
| Separately, the Soviets and others worked to develop hypersonic weapons, which by definition could fly at more than five times the speed of sound, sometimes to deliver conventional weapons, not nuclear warheads. | 此外，苏联和其他国家还致力于开发高超音速武器，根据定义，这种武器能以五倍音速以上的速度飞行，有时用于运载常规武器，而不是核弹头。 |
| The United States began investigating that technology more than a half century ago, and a RAND Corporation report in 2017 said more than two dozen nations, including China, were experimenting with hypersonic flight. The appeal was clear: With the United States deploying more missile defenses in the Pacific, largely aimed at containing North Korea, Chinese strategists wanted to demonstrate that they could easily evade the antimissile technologies that the United States had spent roughly $400 billion over the decades to develop. | 美国在半个多世纪前就开始对这项技术展开调查，2017年兰德公司(RAND Corporation)的一份报告称，包括中国在内的20多个国家正在试验高超音速飞行。其吸引力很明显：随着美国在太平洋部署更多导弹防御系统（主要是为了遏制朝鲜），中国的战略家想要证明，他们可以轻易避开美国在过去几十年里花费了大约4000亿美元开发的反导技术。 |
| Starting in 2014, Beijing conducted a series of hypersonic flight tests, and it has since deployed with its armed forces a medium-range missile known as the DF-17. The missile, topped with a hypersonic glide vehicle, has become a fixture in Beijing’s military parades and images of it are widely available. | 从2014年开始，北京进行了一系列高超音速飞行测试，并在其武装部队部署了一种名为东风-17的中程导弹。该导弹顶部装有高超音速滑翔飞行器，已成为北京阅兵仪式上的固定项目，其图像被广泛传播。 |
| For its part, China said the flight test this summer — it has acknowledged only one, though U.S. officials say there were two — was of a reusable space vehicle, not a nuclear-capable hypersonic missile. | 中国则表示，今年夏天试射的是可重复使用的太空飞行器，而不是具有核能力的高超音速导弹。它只承认了一次测试，尽管美国官员说有两次。 |
| American critics faulted the initial report of the claimed hypersonic feat as vague and unconvincing and, if true, unsurprising given the decades of work on the underlying technologies. It was, they say, a logical step forward for an aspiring nuclear power. | 美国的批评人士指出，最初关于高超音速技术的报道含糊不清，缺乏说服力，如果是真的，考虑到中国几十年来在基础技术方面的工作，也不足为奇。他们说，对于一个有抱负的核国家来说，这是一个合乎逻辑的进步。 |
| “Any country that can put something into space could do this,” said David Wright, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who has long studied space developments. “And we certainly should not be surprised that China could do this given the sophistication of its space program.” | “任何能把东西送进太空的国家都能做到这一点，”麻省理工学院长期研究太空发展的物理学家戴维·赖特(David Wright)说。“考虑到中国太空计划的复杂性，我们当然不应该对中国能做到这一点感到惊讶。” |
| The tests may, however, have had a deeper resonance for Pentagon officials concerned with how China is flying sorties inside Taiwan’s air identification zone, digging hundreds of new silos for long-range nuclear missiles, building an arsenal of antisatellite weapons, and routinely firing more rockets into space than any other country. | 然而，这些测试可能会对五角大楼的官员产生更深的影响，他们关心的是中国如何在台湾的防空识别区内飞行，为远程核导弹挖掘数百个新的发射井，建立一个反卫星武器库，以及例行向太空发射比其他国家都要多的火箭。 |
OK阅读网 版权所有(C)2017 | 联系我们