By Chethana Janith, Jadetimes News
Troubling new intelligence suggests Putin could be pushing the boundaries of cosmic militarization.
On Valentine’s Day, an urgent national security meeting was called by Ohio Representative Mike Turner, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, to share classified intelligence about a “serious national security threat” characterized in an internal email as “destabilizing foreign military capability.”
Other sources rapidly clarified the foreign power in question was Russia. Multiple leaks and anonymous sources shared by major media outlets have converged on the following agreed-upon characteristics of the threat: it’s space-based (meaning it orbits around Earth), it’s an anti-satellite (or ASAT) weapon, and it’s a nuclear system of some kind. This new system is in development, but not yet in orbit.
Anti-satellite weapons are nothing new. Russia, China, and the U.S. have tested several surface-launched anti-satellite missiles over the years. A Russian test in November of 2021 created a debris field that threatened the International Space Station.
Putting ASATs into space is more controversial, contributing to the ‘weaponization of space’, but not strictly unprecedented, due to the advent of moving inspection satellites with the potential to be used in a malignant manner.
The real kicker, then, is the ‘nuclear’ part, in conjunction with the space-based part. Ground-based nukes have been deployed before in an anti-satellite role. But if it’s an actual nuclear weapon that’s being placed in orbit, whether to kill satellites or something else, that would be an unprecedented violation of the 1967 Treaty on Outer Space, which explicitly bans the deployment of nuclear weapons in orbit.
During the 2010s, Russia secretly violated the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces treaty by deploying land-based long-range cruise missiles, leading to the treaty’s eventual demise. Furthermore, in 2023, Putin announced he was unilaterally suspending participation in the New START treaty (pertaining to strategic nuclear weapons) and exited the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe, which it ceased participating in back in 2015.
Thus, Russia secretly violating, or preparing to overtly exit - longstanding arms control treaties is hardly unthinkable.
However, there’s a distinct possibility that the alleged weapon is simply nuclear-powered, not a violation of the treaty, but still potentially a destabilizing threat to satellites.
Using nukes to kill satellites? We’ve tried it before.
67 years after the launch of Sputnik, satellite usage is ubiquitous in daily life. It’s also immensely useful to modern militaries, as it provides intelligence, communication, early warning, and navigation capabilities that would seem near-magical to any armed force at any earlier point in human history.
So far, the threshold of kinetically attacking satellites in war hasn’t really been crossed, but all major military powers are preparing for the possibility that they or their adversaries may choose to end the taboo. For now, China and Russia have employed ‘reversible’ means to temporarily disrupt U.S. satellites without causing permanent damage.
Even before the first satellites were launched into orbit, military planners were thinking of ways to shoot them down. In theory, the same rockets delivering them into space could be turned to their destruction, but bearing in mind the nascent state of guided weaponry, how could we ensure a missile moving at many times the speed of sound could accurately blast a satellite?
The answer, you guessed it, was to use a nuke, not only because of the huge blast radius, but the radiation released from a nuke was likely to knock out orbital systems across an even wider radius. The latter outcome was verified in a high-altitude nuclear test undertaken by the U.S. in 1958.
Four years later, and after two failed test shots, a Thor missile was successfully launched into space on July 9, 1962 from remote Johnston Island for an operation named Starfish Prime. The Thor detonated its 1.4-megaton warhead 250 miles high, creating a green fireball and persistent glow observable in Hawai’i, along with an electromagnetic pulse that caused extensive electrical blackouts on the archipelago. The resulting radiation belt then drifted into orbit and damaged or destroyed 8 out of the 24 satellites in orbit at the time, many of which were important U.S. intelligence and communication systems.
Putting nukes in orbit? Nope, says treaty.
While the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty soon banned high-altitude nuclear tests like Starfish Prime, anti-satellite nukes themselves were not banned. At least, ground-based weapons were not.
The Outer Space Treaty, first signed in 1967 by the U.S. and Soviet Union (and which Russia remains party to), is often perceived as broadly forbidding the militarization of space. While that may have been its intention in spirit, it only had a few hard-and-fast restrictions: one of which was banning the deployment of any nuclear weapons into Earth orbit.
Article IV of that treaty reads:
States Parties to the Treaty undertake not to place in orbit around the earth any objects carrying nuclear weapons or any other kinds of weapons of mass destruction, install such weapons on celestial bodies, or station such weapons in outer space in any other manner.
So, no nukes on space stations. No Moon nukes. And while we’re at it, no chemical or biological weapons in orbit either.
But it didn’t ban nukes from being lobbed through space non-orbitally via intercontinental ballistic missiles. Nor did it prevent non-nuclear weapons from being based in orbit, like the Soviet Almaz 2 military space station, which is armed with a 23-millimeter cannon intended as a defensive weapon.
The grim reality is that, by then, the United States and Soviet Union had more than adequate means of mutually assured destruction—and very limited ballistic missile defense capacity. There was little point to trying to ‘outflank’ the other with space nukes.
Even then, the Soviet Union sort of tried to do so in a treaty-compliant manner, by devising nuclear missiles that made partial or “fractional” earth orbits, allowing them to drift into attack position without technically being orbital weapons.
These Fractional Orbital Bombardment Systems (FOBS) were not judged to be disruptive of the existing balance of power, nor in violation of treaty, so the U.S. didn’t complain. The Pentagon did, however, maintain some nuclear anti-satellite weapons through 1975 as an anti-FOBS measure. The SALT II arms control treaty then banned FOBS, which was rapidly retired.
The seemingly retired FOBS concept was apparently revived for a test by China in October of 2021, perhaps premised on developing a capability to outflank the sensors of the U.S.’s 21st-century ballistic missile defense system. It’s certainly plausible that Russia might seek to resurrect FOBs on the same premise, but that would amount to a surface-attack weapon rather than an anti-satellite one.
Nuclear-powered weapons in space?
The enhanced precision of modern guidance systems lessens the appeal of nuclear anti-satellite weapons. Meanwhile, the collateral and fratricidal effects of nukes, and even conventional kinetic weapons - are considerable, given the risk (or even likelihood) of knocking out own-side and neutral assets, or triggering a catastrophic chain-reaction known as the Kessler Syndrome (depicted in the film 2013 film Gravity).
So, if you’re looking to fight a smarter space war against enemy satellites, it’s desirable to employ means that result in little or no debris.
There are two major technologies that could enable such an outcome. One is inspection satellites, which can maneuver to approach other satellites, ostensibly to inspect their status and perhaps make repairs. The other is directed energy weapons, like lasers or microwaves, which might be used to quietly damage satellites in orbit. The resulting ‘space battle’ might better resemble standoff-range laser surgery, targeting communications antennas, optical sensors, and solar panels, and less a torpedo attack on the Death Star’s exhaust port.
Perhaps even more practicable than a laser weapon are electronic warfare systems. A sufficiently high-powered electronic warfare jammer might potentially drown out communications with hostile satellites continuously over a large area.
The problem is that directed energy weapons, jammers and propulsion consume a lot of energy. While solar-panels on satellites enable a degree of sustainability, that may be insufficient for particularly vigorous use. But a satellite with a nuclear reactor might, in theory, chug along for a while on a sustainable satellite-killing (or jamming) spree.
In theory;
Deploying a nuclear reactor into space obviously poses technical challenges, but there’s reason to believe that there is enthusiasm for such projects. Russia’s military-industrial sector has also been developing a nuclear-powered cruise missile (despite a deadly mishap in 2019) and intercontinental range nuclear-armed drone torpedoes.
It also has been done before by both the U.S. and Russia. In April 1965 U.S. launched into space via Atlas Agena rocket the SNAP-10A satellite with a fission reactor capable of producing 500 watts. It broke down after six weeks due to a voltage regulator failure.
Then between 1967 and 1988, the Soviet Union launched Radar Ocean Reconnaissance Satellites (RORSATs, or designated US-As by the Soviets) using small BES-5 or TOPAZ nuclear reactors generating 2 or 6 kilowatts to help sustain their orbits. Unencouragingly, one of these (Kosmo 954) malfunctioned and left a radioactive mess in Canada in January 1978, while four more failed at launch.
More commonly, various satellites and probes have used nuclear batteries known as radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs). These cannot throttle output and generate less overall power, but are less complicated and somewhat safer than reactors.
Given that Russia has demonstrably invested in several outlandish-seeming and expensive weapons reliant on miniaturized nuclear reactors, it seems a lot more believable that the country might seek to apply nuclear propulsion to the anti-satellite role.
The benefits of placing a nuclear anti-satellite weapon (or one for land-attack) into orbit appear minimal, and doing so would be in overt violation of treaty. Such a move would be intended to be, in large part, a provocation, perhaps one premised on punishing the U.S. for its military support of Ukraine. It would further cement Russia’s status as a serial treaty violator while likely destroying the current arms control regime that has succeed in restraining, but not outright preventing, militarization of outer space.
However, a nuclear-powered anti-satellite weapon would not be in violation of treaty while, in theory, having the potential to be more practical for sustainably sabotaging key adversary satellites in a conflict.
Indeed, there are prior reports suggesting that Russia is particularly working on an nuclear-powered jamming satellite. A St. Petersburg-based program to develop a satellite with a 30- or 50-kilowatt uranium nuclear reactor called Ekipazh may be linked to development of a large-diameter space-based jamming antenna. There's also been a Russian project for a 1-megawatt space reactor called TEM, though its near-term realization seems less likely.
Should Russia manage to deploy a nuclear-powered satellite killer, the U.S. will nonetheless likely be compelled to overtly deploy its own treaty-complaint space-weapons, helping propel into greater prominence the space arms race that heretofore has taken place in a more discrete and subtextual manner. Either way, an intensified space arms race is likely to be one that everybody loses once proverbial triggers start getting pulled.
