Moscow’s race to perfect spacecraft tipped with nuclear warheads could presage a rapidly expanding new phase of Space War 1, say leading American defense scholars who have been war-gaming potential space clashes between Russia and the United States.
Russia’s detonation of a nuclear bomb in orbit – if it destroyed one or more American missile warning satellites – could in turn trigger a U.S. response that extends to its most powerful weapons, these scholars say.
While simulating potential battles – including in space – between the one-time archenemies of the Cold War, Washington-based nuclear arms experts predict an array of possible skirmishes, but not a full-scale exchange of intercontinental ballistic missiles.
The Kremlin’s drive to develop nuclear-capped anti-satellite weaponry might be principally aimed at destroying the SpaceX Starlink satellites that have enabled Ukraine’s president to communicate with his Western allies, his top generals and his soldiers, says Peter Hays, a scholar at George Washington University’s Space Policy Institute who has helped shape national security space strategies at the Pentagon for the past two decades.
“I believe the Russian nuclear ASAT is primarily intended to hold proliferated LEO [low Earth orbit] satellites like Starlink at risk,” Hays told me in an interview. “Starlink is arguably the single most important system for the Ukrainians” directing the defense of the embattled democracy in the face of Moscow’s missile blitzkrieg on their cities and telecommunications towers.
The Kremlin has already deployed its fighter-bombers and missile brigades to attack Starlink ground terminals across Ukraine, and Elon Musk has recounted that Russia’s ambassador to the U.S. personally warned him the use of SpaceX satellite and navigation technology by Ukrainian drone pilots could force Russia to begin using tactical nuclear weapons to wipe them out.
With its new nuclear spacecraft, Hays says in a just-released report, “Modernizing Space-Based Nuclear Command, Control, and Communications,” Russia could decide “the greatest military effectiveness from the limited use of nuclear weapons would be to detonate just one in LEO.”
Just one bomb could destroy many of the commercial satellites – especially the SpaceX spacecraft – that have aided in Ukraine’s defense, he explains in the report, released by the Atlantic Council, a prominent American think tank.
“A high-altitude nuclear detonation,” Hays says, would “cause the failure in weeks to months of most if not all LEO satellites not specifically hardened against this threat.”
Yet much more ominously, he predicts, Russia might aim its conventional or nuclear-tipped ASATs at American nuclear command, control, and communications (NC3) satellites positioned in higher orbits.
An attack on these nuclear command outposts in space would cross a longstanding “red line” – recognized by both Moscow and Washington – “that could trigger a nuclear war,” he adds.
The U.S. began building its nuclear command system during the start of the space race in the 1960s with “a very small number of highly expensive, sophisticated, and exquisitely capable satellites,” Hays says.
Because these easily trackable satellites make prime targets for an adversary’s ASATs, he adds, the U.S. Space Force is now moving to augment the first-generation system with new NC3 spacecraft distributed across “highly proliferated constellations in multiple orbits.”
Nuclear command spacecraft give the White House the capability to track missile launches and detect detonations of nuclear weapons across the face of the Earth, and in orbit, and to communicate with Pentagon leaders even during nuclear clashes.
The longstanding armistice protecting American and Russian nuclear command satellites might now be crumbling: Moscow could gamble that it can prevent Washington from entering the Ukraine conflict “by threatening or attacking U.S. space capabilities,” Hays says. Putin might “employ a space attack as a ‘first salvo.’”
Russia is also weaving a defense web with like-minded regimes armed with nuclear weapons to challenge the U.S. and the UN-based international order, Professor Hays tells me in the interview.
NATO’s Secretary General agrees.
On the eve of President Putin’s recent trip to North Korea, NATO’s Jens Stoltenberg told the BBC: “Russia right now is aligning more and more with authoritarian leaders.” After Pyongyang funnelled weapons to Russia, Stoltenberg said, Moscow handed over “advanced technology for North Korea’s missile and nuclear programs.”
The two rogue regimes also signed a new joint defense pact that states: “In case any one of the two sides is put in a state of war by an armed invasion from an individual state or several states, the other side shall provide military and other assistance with all means in its possession without delay.”
That means the U.S. might have to face off against Russia and its confederate, North Korea, as they threaten or actually stage coordinated nuclear attacks, Professor Hays predicts.
“This and many other increasingly worrisome scenarios are growing more likely,” he says in the interview. “The Russians could also encourage the DPRK [North Korea] to detonate a nuclear in LEO.”
To prevent any attack on American satellites – even one aimed at independent outfits including SpaceX – Professor Hays says, the White House should clearly state that it would regard an ASAT or nuclear assault on any U.S. satellite as an attack on the United States itself under the UN Charter, and that it would reserve the corresponding right to respond with force in self-defense.
The U.S. Department of Defense has already adopted a stance promising to defend commercial spacecraft operators that are aiding American security missions, says Mark Massa, deputy director of strategic forces policy at the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security.
DOD’s leaders stated just months ago, with the new Commercial Space Integration Strategy, that their shield against military aggression will extend to cover these commercial space players and that: “In appropriate circumstances, the use of military force to protect and defend commercial assets could be directed,” Massa told me in an interview.
Since Russia began blitzing Ukraine two years ago, and Elon Musk rushed to provide a life-saving dome of satellite internet coverage over the country, President Putin has repeatedly despatched his emissaries to the UN to threaten Moscow could begin shooting down SpaceX satellites.
If the Kremlin were to deploy its new nuclear warhead-tipped spacecraft to carry out that threat, it’s difficult to predict the dénouement of this new global superpower phase of Space War 1.
“A Russian nuclear detonation in space would be hugely destructive, possibly degrading or destroying thousands of U.S. and other states’ satellites, government and commercial,” says Massa, a widely published expert on nuclear arms and space security.
“Such an action would demand a forceful response from the United States and the international community leveraging all tools of national power.”
A simulated nuclear war between Russia and the U.S., conducted by atomic arms scholars and war-gamers at Princeton University, triggered estimates of more than 90 million people dead or injured across Russia, Europe and North America within the first few hours of the conflict.
“This project is motivated,” the Princeton scholars explain, “by the need to highlight the potentially catastrophic consequences of current US and Russian nuclear war plans.”
Russia’s nuclear brinkmanship, and the doomsday scenarios that would be unleashed by any nuclear war, highlight the immensity of the dangers posed to humanity’s future by atomic arms, says Tim Wright, Treaty Coordinator at the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, which was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2017 for its central role in promulgating the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.
Escalating nuclear threats underscore the urgency for all the nuclear weapons states to join the UN Treaty and begin dismantling their arsenals, he says, which would mark one of the greatest advances ever in the progress of human civilization.
