Russia’s Pursuit of Nuclear Space Weapon Raises Global Concerns

TFD – Explore the escalating tensions as Russia reportedly develops a nuclear space weapon targeted at American satellites, raising alarm among experts and policymakers globally.

Russia’s apparent pursuit of a nuclear space-based weapon has stirred a frenzy in Washington — and raised a flurry of questions among a world of scientists and experts.

It’s unclear exactly what kind of weapon the Kremlin may be seeking and how disastrous it would be for the West if President Vladimir Putin did use one, given the limited information that has been made public from the congressional briefings.

This could be an alarming escalation of hostilities reminiscent of the tensest days of the Cold War, or a less significant development whose revelation may stem from more mundane domestic concerns than the possibility of nuclear war in space.

Bleddyn Bowen, author of “Original Sin: Power, Technology, and War in Outer Space” and associate professor at the University of Leicester in England, stated, “We know very little, and the comments so far have been very, very cryptic.”

According to three people with knowledge of the situation, Russia is working on a nuclear space weapon that is intended to destroy American satellites, NBC News has learned. According to the sources, this weapon is not yet operational, but the intelligence was sufficient for House Intelligence Committee Chair Rep. Mike Turner, R-Ohio, to request that the White House declassify material regarding an unidentified “serious national security threat.”

Whether this is a space-based nuclear weapon in the traditional meaning of the word—nuclear warheads, atomic reactions, mushroom clouds—is the primary unknown, at least as far as the general public is concerned. Alternatively, if this is, as many experts believe, a nuclear-powered satellite carrying electronic weapons, which could devastate Earth by taking out satellites that power everything from phone calls and weather forecasts to conflicts and the world economy.

If the former is true, then using real space nuclear weapons would be against the 1967 United Nations Outer Space Treaty. It prohibits nations from “placing nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction in orbit, or on celestial bodies, or stationing them in outer space in any other manner,” according to one of its sections.

The exact threat that makes keeping nuclear weapons in orbit so perilous is one of the reasons this deal was signed: any nation may suddenly unleash a nuclear bomb out of the sky. According to the sources, the Russian technology in question is intended to target American satellites, something that experts believe Russia and other nuclear-armed nations are more than capable of accomplishing with ground-based intercontinental ballistic missiles, or ICBMs.

The Russian Federation has previously broken many arms control agreements, so putting nuclear weapons in orbit “would be a new escalatory step by the Russian Federation,” according to Mariana Budjeryn, a senior research associate at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Project on Managing the Atom. “This would involve deploying a nuclear weapon in space, an area that has never before seen one.”

Several specialists think that this armaments system will be nuclear-powered instead of nuclear-armed after interpreting the reports’ hidden meanings. There have also been rumors that this has something to do with Cosmos 2575, a Russian satellite that was launched last week and is classified.

Having said that, very few, if any, of these ideas or technologies are novel.

During the Cold War, anti-satellite weapons, or ASATs, were designed and tested by both the US and the USSR. Additionally, both have routinely employed nuclear power in orbit.

The United States started working on anti-satellite missiles in 1959 because of concern that the Soviet Union may follow suit. The U.S. Air Force museum states that this culminated in its 1985 test launch by an F-15 fighter jet, which released a payload at around 38,000 feet that whooshed into orbit and destroyed a U.S. satellite that was deteriorating.

According to a 2000 article published by the Air Force’s Air University Press, Washington was able to “cobble together” an anti-satellite system that used already-existing nuclear missiles in “direct ascent” mode to destroy targets in orbit between 1969 and 1975.

Washington also launched the first nuclear-powered satellite into orbit in 1961, but this time the focus was on nuclear power as opposed to nuclear weapons. During that time, the Soviet Union created and implemented comparable technology, which propelled numerous of its satellites.

History has demonstrated that there are risks associated with this.

A Soviet nuclear-powered satellite malfunctioned in 1978, fell from the sky, and released radioactive debris that covered northern Canada as it burnt.

What doesn’t seem to have been developed yet, or at least made public, is a Russian nuclear-powered satellite that can accomplish all of these tasks simultaneously and is carrying a warhead.

According to Budjeryn, “yes, it is a new development” if the United States possesses “intelligence that is not about development, but the actual plans to deploy.”

According to a 2019 technical essay published in The Space Review, an online publication widely shared among experts following this week’s news, a nuclear-fueled satellite might be able to carry a powerful jammer that could block out a wide array of communications and other signals for extended periods of time.

An architecture like that would be “extremely expensive,” according to Bowen of the University of Leicester, and “just waiting for a problem to go wrong to then have a nuclear environmental disaster in orbit.”

In the end, he and Budjeryn concluded that while the actual application of this technology would undoubtedly be perceived as an escalation, none of it is new.

He remarked, “I find it pretty strange that this is creating such a stir right now,” adding that Russia has been using this technology “for a very, very long time.” “You would prefer not to see more nuclear materials in orbit, but it’s not that big of a deal from a security standpoint if they do,” he continued.

He and others have questioned if politics rather than a military threat may have played a larger role in the information’s distribution.

He remarked, “Congresspeople do these things for different reasons.” Is the goal to acquire more details from the Pentagon or to make Russia a news story? I’m not sure.

That’s definitely how it looks from Moscow.

“It is obvious that the White House is trying, by hook or by crook, to push Congress to vote on the bill to allocate money,” said Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, in an apparent reference to the push for new aid for Ukraine, of which Turner is a prominent advocate. “We’ll see what maneuvers the White House pulls out.”

There have been suggestions from others that this might be a side trip.

According to Francesca Giovannini, executive director of the Harvard Kennedy School’s Project on Managing the Atom, “Russia has tried to develop weapons in space for a long time,” in an email. “It’s unclear to us whether this is simply a disinformation operation aimed at pressuring the United States to reallocate valuable resources from other capacities (which are far more significant and consequential).”

CORRECTION (11:41 a.m. ET, February 15, 2024): The altitude at which an anti-satellite missile was deployed during a test launch in 1985 was incorrectly mentioned in an earlier version of this article. Not at 36,000 feet, but somewhere about 38,000 feet.