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On Wednesday, Republican Congressman Mike Turner mysteriously announced to the public the existence of secret intelligence on a “destabilizing foreign military capability”. Turner said that the intelligence was so serious that all members of Congress needed to know about it, and the information should be declassified for the public to see. What the hell was it?
We now know that the intelligence is about Russian efforts to put a nuke into space. While this would be extremely concerning - more on that in a minute - there doesn’t seem to be any information regarding an immediate threat. This is about a program in long-term development. That makes this as much a story about national security politics as anything else: it seems that Turner decided to create a public firestorm around the issue in order to pressure his Republican colleagues to pass more aid for Ukraine, or possibly to reauthorize controversial post-9/11 surveillance powers which were supposed to up for for a vote later that day. Republican congressmen who oppose these things are not amused. “It’s f***ing bullsh*t,” said one.
That pettiness aside, what doesn’t seem to be bull poop is the Kremlin’s desire to put a nuke into space, eventually at least. And if they were to do that, it would be really bad.
Why put a nuke in space?
There are two conceivable reasons to put a nuke into space: either to use it against satellites in orbit, or to use it to strike targets on Earth.
A space-based strike capability was much discussed in the early Cold War. If your goal is to nuke somewhere fast, firing from space has a lot of benefits. A satellite-based missile could hit its target in about ten minutes as opposed to the 30 minutes it takes for an ICBM to travel from Russia to the continental United States. Because of this, space-based nukes would make it much harder to ensure mutually assured destruction (MAD), which is how the nuclear balance of terror is kept, well, balanced. MAD means that no-one will use nukes because they know they’d be destroyed as well. Remove MAD, and you create incentives for actually using these insane weapons.
Fortunately, a space-based strike capability does not seem to be what Russia is pursuing. According to the leaked intelligence, they’re trying to create a nuclear anti-satellite system. In terms of its potential consequences, that could actually be even worse.
The last decade or so have seen something of an anti-satellite (ASAT) arms race. Russia, China and the United States have all tested systems which can take down a targeted satellite from orbit. For America’s adversaries, the appeal of such technology is obvious. The American military, as well as American civilians, are disproportionately dependent on satellite communications for everyday life. Taking them down could remove some of the American military’s technological advantage and make it easier for an adversary to achieve their aims.
The systems that Russia and China (as well as India and others) have tested so far have been targeted. Their goal is to take down a specific satellite. But a nuclear ASAT system would be something different, a kind of weapon of mass orbital destruction which would wreak havoc with everyday life on Earth and potentially fundamentally change the nature of orbital space.
We know this because the U.S. has tested one before.
When the U.S. tested a nuke in space
In July 1962, U.S. researchers blew up a thermonuclear weapon in Earth orbit, above the atoll of Johnston Island in the Pacific Ocean. Tourists who had gathered on hotel rooftops in Hawaii to watch the spectacle saw the sky flash white, then ooze green, and finally settle into a red aurora.
But that wasn’t all that happened. The blast also sent a strong electromagnetic pulse throughout the region below, knocking out street lights and disabling radio stations. Even worse, the radiation it released blanketed the Earth, and over the next few months it disabled over a third of the satellites in low-Earth orbit. Among those damaged were the first ever commercial communications satellite, and the first satellite that Britain had ever launched.
This test, known as Starfish Prime, was one of the last ever conducted in orbit. One year later, the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty came into effect, banning orbital tests from taking place in the future. Later in the decade, the Outer Space Treaty banned not just the testing but also the placement of nuclear weapons in Earth orbit. So far as we know, the treaties have been observed ever since.1
The results of Starfish Prime were really bad, but the impact was mitigated by the fact that in 1962, the world was not particularly reliant on satellites for carrying out commercial or military activities. Today, a comparable explosion in Earth orbit could have catastrophic consequences.
There are now about 8,400 satellites in orbit around Earth, and many societies could not function without them. They help monitor and predict the weather, provide access to GPS and global communications, and are central to the operations of the American military. They make our globalized world possible. But they also come with a paradox: as the world becomes more reliant on satellites to carry out everyday life, and as the sheer number of them in orbit increases, the world becomes more and more vulnerable to a catastrophic attack on them.
A nuclear explosion in orbit today would, if the experience of Starfish Prime is anything to go by, knock out a huge chunk of this satellite network. Any satellites exposed to the initial electro-magnetic pulse blast would likely be disabled immediately. As the radiation from the blast settled down over the Earth’s magnetic field, it would slowly degrade the satellites there and cause a large number of them to fail in the coming months. The radiation would linger for years, making it impossible to launch replacements until it dispersed.
There’s also the sheer physical effect of the blast to consider. If enough objects were destroyed by it, the resultant space debris would hurtle around Earth orbit, potentially destroying other satellites, which then form their own debris field and multiply the problem. If the amount of debris reached a critical mass, the result could be a Kessler cascade - a situation in which low-earth orbit is so congested with debris that it becomes unusable for hundreds of years.
What maniac would do such a thing?
This sounds like a situation in which nobody wins. But there would be different degrees of loss for every nation. The most technologically advanced nations would find it hardest to function in the event of a major attack on the world’s satellite grid, and less advanced nations would find it easiest. Russia has only 220 satellites in orbit; the United States has about 3,000.
Even so, it doesn’t seem likely that Putin is intending to send this thing into orbit and then just blow it up immediately. More likely, its purpose is to serve as the ultimate deterrent. According to American intelligence officials quoted in the New York Times, Putin apparently believes that threatening the destruction of satellites is more believable than threatening to nuke Los Angeles. He couldn’t really plausibly threaten to do the latter in the case that, say, Ukraine was about to overrun Crimea - but he could perhaps threaten to set off his nuclear ASAT.
It’s easy to picture how this could get really scary. Imagine that in 2030, Russian troops sweep into Estonia and declare it re-annexed to the Russian Empire. NATO’s plans for such an eventuality involve losing Estonia and then coming back to liberate it later. But what if Russia announces that it will set off its nuclear ASAT device unless NATO acquiesces in the conquest?
What makes this type of weapon tricky to deal with is that it’s not really clear what the proportionate response to it would be. The consequences of a nuclear blast in space would be so severe that many people are arguing that it should trigger a nuclear response here on Earth. “You take out our satellites, we take out Moscow” is big talk, but would Washington really follow through on it? If it did, you’re then looking at a chain of events which goes something like: NATO reinvades Estonia → Russia sets off its ASAT → The U.S. responds by nuking a Russian city → General nuclear war ensues.
Because this chain of events might lead to a broader nuclear war which ends the continued possibility of human civilization on Earth, it’s not at all clear to me that when push came to shove, it’s believable to expect Washington to respond this way. That lack of plausibility, in turn, might tempt the Russians to try their luck. Either the Russians are wrong and nuclear war ensues, or they’re right and they get to keep Estonia. Both are terrible outcomes. This is surely why U.S. officials have been describing the weapon as “destabilizing” - a word often used for technologies which throw the nuclear balance of terror into disequilibrium and raise the possibility of really bad things happening.
This is no doubt why the American intelligence and political establishments are flipping out. What they can do about it is much less clear. Right now the plan seems to be to lean on the Chinese and others to pressure Russia into not launching the weapon, and no doubt the Biden administration would seek to impose additional sanctions or other costs on Moscow if the launch happened. But as Biden said when talking about the death of Alexei Navalny the other day, Russia has already been squeezed so hard that it’s hard to see what else Washington can do. Might they try to physically prevent the launch in some way, or destroy the weapon in orbit afterwards? I wouldn’t rule it out. The stakes are really that high.
There was one Soviet system called the Fractional Orbital Bombardment System which delivered a nuclear weapon via a partial rather than complete orbit of the Earth.