Nuclear panic and the satellite wars
In 1962, the US detonated a high-altitude warhead, with a yield of 1.4 megatons of TNT equivalent, some 250 miles above the Earth. The blast expelled the planet’s magnetic field for nearly half a minute, created a brief cavity in the ionosphere, and damaged a third of the satellites then in orbit. Decades later, some of the remaining test data was finally analyzed, to reveal a much more disruptive electromagnetic pulse (EMP) than first anticipated. With this information, teams are now working to simulate EMP incidents on a supercomputer, to better understand the scope of damage from natural or human-made events.
One thing is clear from that data, though: detonating nuclear devices in orbit is a lose-lose proposition for all parties involved. While a more indirect use of nuclear devices could sabotage individual satellites, whenever you see news items addressing the possibility of “space nukes”, keep in mind that countries like the US, China, and Russia risk their own communications systems as well as everyone else’s in such an orbital attack.
So what’s actually going on, with the current run of nuclear chatter in global politics?
The satellite space race
On Wednesday, February 14, Republican House Intelligence Chairman Mike Turner called on the Biden administration to declassify information pertaining to a perceived Russian threat to national security. This call came a day after the US Senate advanced a funding bill for Ukraine, Israel, and Pacific missions that House Republicans under Speaker Mike Johnson will struggle to see tabled, let alone pass. Johnson has already called a two-week recess that places the lower chamber under added pressure to avert a partial government shutdown on March 1.
Republican schism manifested in dissent around Turner’s decision to raise the security issue at all. While the Dayton, Ohio representative has a strong congressional history with military and foreign policy committees, and supports Ukraine, the Republican cohort that entered session on January 2023 contains many actors who have blocked military spending for its defense. In other words, Turner’s invocation of a serious Russian threat might have been intended to help fellow Republicans push back on Republican resistance to fuller funding of Ukraine.
Beyond the possibility of such intra-party politicking, though, lies the security threat itself: nuclear proliferation, if not exactly in the form most lay readers tend to associate with the term. This is because there has been an important race to weaponize space in the last few decades, but it involves spycraft and anti-spycraft, more than nightmarish visions of dropping a bomb from orbit, or destroying a nuclear power plant to ruin the land for generations.
Last year, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) released Space Threat Assessment 2023, which detailed the current state of satellite technologies, and the battleground our orbit already is and will continue to become. As the authors noted, “While over 5,400 satellites are in-orbit today, more than 24,500 satellites are anticipated to be launched in the next 10 years (2022–2031), over 70 percent of which will be commercial.” This makes space a key operational zone for national security concerns. So long as our economic systems rely heavily on orbital technologies, satellite sabotage will always be an effective tool when waging war.
The lead-up to today
Anti-satellite (ASAT) weapons have been part of our arms race for decades. In 1962, the US launched a breakthrough spy satellite. Six years later, the USSR demonstrated its ability to send up a spacecraft capable of destroying an object in orbit. In the interim, the US and the Soviet Union agreed to ban above-ground nuclear arms testing, and the Outer Space Treaty further entrenched our planetary orbit and other celestial bodies as no-go zones for nuclear weapons.
Still, there was a significant disparity in national capabilities, which kept the arms race going. When the USSR first achieved its successful ASAT weapons test, the US could not match this force with anything more than a nuclear warhead. By the mid-1970s, though, the US had established its own arsenal: not just for deterrence, but to bring down Soviet spy satellites if required.
In the 1980s, this concept bloomed with Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars” program, the Strategic Defense Initiative intent on developing missile defense systems to deter nuclear war by force, rather than by relying on the principle of mutually assured destruction to shape foreign policy.
Instead, in the aftermath of SDI, the world shifted its arms race to missile defense systems, in lockstep with the growth of satellite communications networks critical to military operations around the world. Russia and China have made prominent shows of their ASAT capabilities in recent years, while the US has been cautious about similar displays. In April 2022, US Vice President Kamala Harris called for a moratorium on conducting tests on direct-ascent ASAT missiles, while pledging the US to do the same. Nevertheless, last September, Russian representatives in the UN working group openly foiled efforts to establish international norms.
As CSIS noted in its 2023 report, Russia has expressly made use of ASAT weapons to interfere with satellite systems of relevance to its war in Ukraine. GPS-jamming devices, blocks on command and control systems operated through commercial satellites, and wiper malware deployments are a few of the ways that Russia has disrupted Western countermeasures.
Notably, though, some of Russia’s tech boasts seem to be for projects still in research phases, if they haven’t been scrapped altogether. Laser system designs like Peresvet, Sokol-Eshelon, and Zadira have complex, propagandist backstories, and have not made a meaningful difference for Ukraine’s remote sensing satellite systems, among other orbital targets.
Granted, there are other serious concerns with both satellite and nuclear weapons in the current climate. Last November, the space tracking firm LeoLabs reported low Earth orbit activities from Russian satellites that seem to fall in the realm of spycraft. Meanwhile, recently tested nuclear-powered and nuclear-capable low-flying cruise missiles pose a more terrestrial threat.
In practical terms, these issues suggest that, while the scenario of “space nukes” has been oversold, there are still plenty of war games afoot. It is certainly possible that Russia, having failed to achieve its desired ends with lasers and while actively pulling out of existing international efforts to keep space demilitarized, is now entertaining the use of nuclear weapons. A more likely scenario, though, is that the Kremlin is simply content with the world believing it’s capable of orbital deployments, for the leverage this would create in earthbound campaigns.
Meanwhile, the most pragmatic nuclear use case remains as a delivery system for electronic payloads: sending up missiles to continue the decades-long work of spying on, scrambling, or destroying satellites that currently support opposing states.
So long as our economic systems rely heavily on orbital technologies, satellite sabotage will always be an effective tool when waging war.
Where the US stands in this ‘race’
The panic over US space readiness has been in strong form in media this week.
On February 15, the US Space Force canceled a multibillion-dollar classified military satellite program, citing cost, payload performance, and timeline issues. The contract was with Northrop Grumman, which boasts anti-jamming systems, and which was intended to launch in 2025. However, the program was not developed on its own; years back, the Space Force procured a Boeing design to compete with Northrop Grumman’s prototype. Last April, the Boeing project reported satisfactory progress, and as of September seemed to be on track for a late 2024 or early 2025 deployment.
Perhaps more importantly, though, the US is rethinking its strategy to keep up in a space race that has significantly diversified in state and private players.
In January, Biden described Houthi rebels as having used “anti-ship ballistic missiles for the first time in history”: a sharp reminder that the fight for aerial and orbital security is going to involve more than formal state actors going forward. Likewise, thanks in large part to the transport and aerospace manufacturer SpaceX, 212 of 223 orbital launches reached orbit in 2023: a new status quo that invites far more commercial involvement in space flight, with all the added challenges that come with leaving state security in private citizens’ hands.
Then, of course, there’s China, which in the Pentagon’s 2023 Annual Report to Congress continued to demonstrate significant maturity and strong growth in its orbital operations. With a fleet of over 290 intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) satellites, and an operational system of ASAT missiles, China stands ready to act in an era of “informatized warfare” that will involve cyberattacks, jamming, and direct destruction of competing satellite systems.
Startups with enough venture capital and solid government relationships, like True Anomaly, are leveraging this broader playing field of competitors and security threats to develop designs ahead of Pentagon acquisition. True Anomaly’s Jackal Autonomous Orbital Vehicle is one such spycraft looking for a place in the skies this March, when two prototypes will launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket rideshare.
All the flexibility that newer actors can bring to space is not built into US systems, though, which is why the Space Development Agency is still only at a proof-of-concept stage for the creation of the infrastructure necessary for its next era of satellite security. In a 2022 article for Air & Space Operations Review, “Space Force Culture”, William D. Sanders suggested that engineers will become dominant players in space conflict, but also noted that, to stake its claim in such a future, the US Space Force will have to overcome “ambivalent policies toward fielding counterspace technologies in light of worrisome advancements by China and Russia.”
It’s in this delicate political realm, between an official desire to keep space peaceful and the need to respond to orbital threats in process, that recent nuclear panic like US Congressman Mike Turner’s call for declassified data now finds us.
Average citizens are not informed enough to understand the difference between literal nuclear payloads dropped from high orbit and nuclear-powered devices used to escalate electronic sabotage in the skies.
But we’re going to need this level of media, tech, and military literacy going forward, if we’re to set effective policy for the difficult space race already upon us now.
