Russia’s Space-Weapons Capabilities Are Worth Worrying About

L ast week, congressional leaders revealed that Russia has developed a nuclear anti-satellite weapon, which highlights just how disturbingly vulnerable the U.S. is in space.

“The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence has made available to all Members of Congress information concerning a serious national security threat,” Representative Mike Turner (R., Ohio), chairman of the committee, said in a press statement. “I am requesting that President Biden declassify all information relating to this threat so that Congress, the Administration, and our allies can openly discuss the actions necessary to respond to this threat.”

Turner’s Democratic counterparts on the committee called the warning “significant” but “not a cause for panic.” Since the statement, media sources have claimed that while Turner is referring to Russian attempts to field a nuclear weapon in orbit, this threat isn’t imminent because the alleged weapon is not yet operational. They are mistaken. Russian space capabilities are a threat we should take seriously.

It is highly likely that a Russian nuclear weapon in orbit would not be dropped on Earth but instead used against American civilian and military assets in space. Although Russia, too, has space infrastructure vulnerable to such a weapon, it is far less dependent on that infrastructure than America is. The denial of space would be far more harmful to the U.S. than to Russia. Most American satellites that are in orbit today were launched well before there were many orbital threats to worry about. As former Air Force secretary Heather Wilson said in 2018, “We built a glass house before the invention of stones.”

Should Russia deploy a nuclear weapon in orbit, it would be analogous to firing a shotgun in a crowded room where anyone hit by the initial blast would also be forced to let off a smaller shotgun blast of their own. The result could be what scientists call the Kessler syndrome, a theoretical scenario in which each collision in an overcrowded orbit generates space debris that increases the likelihood of further collisions. This would jeopardize mankind’s ability to access space and greatly damage America’s military and civilian advantages in fields such as broadband internet, cellphone service, GPS, weather-forecasting, satellite radio, and television. Ukrainian resistance to Russia, for example, is deeply dependent on secure satellite communications provided through Starlink, which is so vital to the Pentagon that it struck a deal with SpaceX last year to pay for it.

A nuclear anti-satellite weapon would be incredibly difficult to defend against, despite White House assurances to the contrary. Even a small object moving at high orbital speeds can damage much larger spacecraft, which can then turn into more dangerous objects and create an exponential chain reaction ending with blank screens, a shattered global economy, and dead U.S.-military communications. The American military is deeply reliant on communications satellites for “network-centric warfare,” the conversion of disparate bits of information into strategic advantage. The satellites that would be vulnerable to Russia’s new potential weapon are the same ones that ensure that America’s weapons strike targets with pinpoint precision measured in inches. The critical military importance of space was obscured in recent conflicts, where the U.S. fought against foes with no counter-space capacity, such as Saddam Hussein’s Iraq or the Taliban. Much of the value of an anti-satellite weapon, like that of other nuclear weapons, wouldn’t necessarily be in the destruction it causes but in the mere threat of its destructive potential, which would be valuable leverage for Russia.

When the U.S. conducted a series of five high-altitude nuclear tests in outer space during 1960s, a fairly modest nuclear weapon shocked scientists by generating a much larger than expected electromagnetic pulse, driving researchers’ instruments off the scale. The pulse created by the denotation immediately disabled three satellites and created radiation belts that eventually caused six more to fail . . . during a time when there were only 24 satellites in orbit. Today, there are almost 8,400. “It came as a surprise how bad it was, and how long it lasted, and how damaging it was to satellites that flew through that area and died,” NASA senior scientist David Sibeck said of the test after much of the data related to it were declassified. Simulations of similar electromagnetic pulses, conducted by researchers at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory who examined NASA’s declassified test data in 2022, led to dire predictions.

Russia regularly threatens to weaponize its space program against the U.S. In 2021, it used a ground-launched direct-ascent anti-satellite missile to strike an old satellite during a demonstration — and failed to notify America. The launch forced American astronauts and two Russian cosmonauts into the space equivalent of hiding in a bunker on the International Space Station. It’s enormously significant that Putin was willing to put Russian cosmonauts directly at risk for a mere demonstration. The impact was a smaller version of what a nuclear weapon in space could do, but it still created a massive debris field of more than 1,500 pieces. Any of them could inflict devastating damage to the orbital infrastructure on which the American military depends.

“Russia has demonstrated a deliberate disregard for the security, safety, stability, and long-term sustainability of the space domain for all nations,” the U.S. Space Command’s General James Dickinson told CNN after the 2021 incident. The debris produced by Russia’s direct-ascent anti-satellite missile “will continue to pose a threat to activities in outer space for years to come, putting satellites and space missions at risk, as well as forcing more collision avoidance maneuvers.” He added, “Space activities underpin our way of life and this kind of behavior is simply irresponsible.” China has also displayed similar anti-satellite capabilities, as have India and the United States, but these weapons tests have been much less destructive.

As America actively supports Ukrainian resistance against Russia on Earth, we should hope that nothing in space tips the balance of power toward Putin.