Air Power

“Facilities producing solid fuel motors or hosting planetary mixers would come under sustained attack from Russia,” says Sidharth Kaushal, a senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute in London. “It will be difficult to produce a MRBM [medium-range ballistic missile] or IRBM [intermediate-range ballistic missile] at the scale needed to be a useful conventional weapon.”

In the summer Professor Justin Bronk, an airpower expert at the Royal United Services Institute, and something of a Tempest sceptic, argued that big decade-long projects risked detracting from the urgent spending necessary to deter Russia and China in the next three years. “You have to be ready by that point — if I sound a bit alarmed it is because I am,” he said. “Stop looking at large-scale procurement programmes for the next little while.”

Speaking on the growing cooperation between Russia and North Korea, Associate Fellow of London-based think tank The Royal United Services Institute's (RUSI), Samuel Cranny-Evans told Newsweek: "The relationship between Russia and North Korea is clearly developing into a much closer one with various aspects and shared goals."