BEIJING, Aug. 12 Taiwan's Defense Ministry plans to develop a hypersonic ramjet engine, a technology related to hypersonic weapons, the Taipei Times reported, citing the ministry.
The program to create such an engine, the newspaper wrote, indicates that the armed forces are likely planning to acquire long-range hypersonic weapons «capable of deterring China.»
The Zhongshan Institute of Science and Technology (NCSIST) will reportedly oversee the development. The program is planned to be implemented within three years.
The Zhongshan Institute of Science and Technology (NCSIST) was formerly part of the Armaments Bureau of the Taiwan Ministry of Defense, which is actively involved in the development, production, support, and maintenance of various weapons systems and dual-use technologies. In 2014, the institute became an administrative corporation that reports directly to the island's government, and is currently one of Taiwan's two main defense contractors. NCSIST is engaged in the development, production, and sale of defense technologies and weapons, and is also responsible for international cooperation in technology and information exchange.
The situation around Taiwan significantly escalated after Nancy Pelosi, then Speaker of the US House of Representatives, visited the island in early August 2022. China, which considers the island one of its provinces, condemned Pelosi's visit, seeing it as US support for Taiwanese separatism, and held large-scale military exercises.
Formal relations between China's central government and its island province were severed in 1949 after Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang forces, defeated in a civil war with the Communist Party of China, moved to Taiwan. Business and informal contacts between the island and mainland China resumed in the late 1980s. Since the early 1990s, the two sides have been in contact through non-governmental organizations — the Beijing-based Association for the Development of Relations Across the Taiwan Straits and the Taipei-based Cross-Strait Exchange Foundation.