There’s plenty to worry about here on Earth.
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A brief hubbub erupted in Washington this week over an unspecified “national security threat” that some sources now believe is related to a Russian plan to use nuclear weapons in space. The prospect is cause for concern but not panic.
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For All Mankind
Yesterday, Representative Mike Turner, the chair of the House Intelligence Committee, issued a cryptic request to President Joe Biden, asking him to declassify information regarding a “serious national security threat.”
Turner’s statement angered some of the more extreme members of his own GOP caucus. Representative Andy Ogles claimed that Turner was just trying to whip up some fear about Russia, in part to help passage of a bill authorizing more aid to Ukraine, and he has asked Speaker Mike Johnson to begin an investigation into Turner’s public reference to classified information. Other members, however, were more sanguine. Representative Jim Himes, the ranking Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, told CNN’s Manu Raju: “The intelligence that he was referring to is, like, intelligence that we see a couple of times a month.” Himes, according to The Washington Post, said that a danger was brewing in the “medium to long term”; he puckishly added that there is “no need to buy gold.”
Yesterday, ABC News reported that Turner was likely talking about a Russian scheme to use nuclear arms in space as anti-satellite (or “ASAT”) weapons, citing unnamed officials.
So what’s going on? For today, I’ll put my professor hat back on—I taught national-security affairs for three decades and I helped design a certificate program in nuclear-deterrence studies at the Harvard Extension School—to try to clarify some of these issues about nuclear weapons in space. But we should bear in mind that we don’t know yet exactly what Turner is referring to; at best, we can merely speculate about a few possibilities for now.
Having said that, I will now speculate.
Only a few nations (including the United States, Russia, China, and India) have the demonstrated ability to destroy or incapacitate satellites in space, because aiming a small missile and physically hitting another relatively small thing whizzing around the Earth is not easy. Firing a nuclear weapon at the satellite’s general vicinity would be more reliable—but at great risk of an escalation to general war: For any U.S. president, if such an explosion were to occur and blind American defense and communications networks, the only sensible assumption would be that such a move is the prelude to a nuclear first strike on the United States. (Indeed, during the Cold War, both Western and Soviet strategists assumed that high-altitude nuclear detonations would be the first moves in a major nuclear conflict, because it would sow confusion and slow down all possible enemy reactions.)
The whole idea of putting nuclear weapons in space is not only incredibly stupid and provocative—it is also banned by one of my favorite arms-control agreements, the 1967 Outer Space Treaty.
The science-fiction nerd in me loves this treaty, written two years before Americans set foot on the moon (and now signed by most nations in the world). It affirms that “the exploration and use of outer space … shall be carried out for the benefit and in the interests of all countries … and shall be the province of all mankind.” It also forbids sovereign claims on the moon or other planets, and demands that these and all other objects in space be used solely for peaceful purposes. (So take that, Duck Dodgers and Marvin the Martian, as well as anyone else who was thinking about staking a claim to Jupiter or sending the Marines to set up camp at the Jamestown Moon Base.)
Some of this, of course, was just so much high-mindedness about things no one could do in 1967. But the Outer Space Treaty has one other significant prohibition in it:
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.
Russia and the U.S. signed on to this because both superpowers had been playing with fire in the early ’60s, trying to game out how they would lob nuclear weapons into Earth’s orbit, mostly as a way of gaining a decisive edge in a surprise attack. Long-range missiles, with their half-hour flight times and point-to-point trajectories, give the enemy at least some warning of an incoming strike. Sending bombs into space could offer several advantages: The weapons could take a longer and less visible route to the enemy (say, over the South Pole instead of over the North Pole and Canada), they would have unlimited range as they traversed the planet in orbit, and once the enemy was aware of the attack, their impact points would be harder to identify.
These systems were dubbed FOBS, “fractional orbital bombardment systems,” and the whole idea was insanely dangerous and destabilizing. With only seconds to respond, mistakes could be catastrophic, especially given that national leaders would have little choice but to order instant retaliation on the thinnest of warnings. Shooting nuclear bombs into space and then letting them fly around in orbit buys almost nothing in terms of capability and a lot of heartburn in terms of risk, including possible malfunctions and disastrous misunderstandings. (Some arms-control analysts believe that China is nonetheless now trying to create a FOBS capability using hypersonic glide vehicles.)
By the late ’60s, the Soviets and the Americans had developed the triad of nuclear forces—bombers, submarines, and ICBMs buried in silos—that made it impossible for either of them to disarm the other in a first strike, rendering moot such risky, Strangelovian ideas.
So what would the Russians gain now by putting a nuclear bomb on an ASAT? “Officials familiar with the matter” told the Post that Moscow was developing a capability that might be better able to damage “critical intelligence or communications satellites.” Perhaps the Russians believe that exploding a weapon in orbit and taking out Western satellites is a firebreak, a way to use nuclear weapons to shock everyone to their senses and bring a conflict to an end without provoking a massive retaliatory attack.
If this is Russia’s reasoning, then Russian leaders are making a mistake. Russian wargamers might think this way—but real political leaders do not. No matter what clever assurances are being given to the Kremlin by Russian scientists or even from the General Staff, a nuclear explosion in space would likely lead to a chain of events that no one in Moscow would want.
I suspect that if the Russians really are monkeying around with some sort of nuclear ASAT system, it’s not to gain a new strategic advantage, but to freak out the West. Such a system would be a way of signaling that the Russian Federation is done with pesky treaties and dainty nuclear niceties. Even years before the invasion of Ukraine, the Russians were pushing the limits of existing nuclear agreements. (The Americans have to own some of the blame: Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump both pulled the United States out of good treaties regarding, respectively, missile-defense systems and medium-range nuclear forces.)
Americans should be concerned, but—at least to judge from the statements of those who’ve seen the intelligence—this particular Russian system, as the White House noted today, has not been deployed and is unlikely to appear anytime soon. In the meantime, the immediate threat to Western security is Russia’s ongoing war in Europe. The daily exsanguination of Ukraine is an abomination taking place right on NATO’s borders, and America and its allies are far more likely to face an existential crisis arising from Russian military operations here on Earth than from a notional weapon system in space.
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Evening Read
The Carry-On-Baggage Bubble Is About to Pop
By Ian Bogost
Among the many things to hate about air travel, the processing of cabin luggage is ascendant. Planes are packed, and everyone seems to have more and bigger stuff than the aircraft can accommodate. The rabble holding cheap tickets who board last are most affected, but even jet-setters with elite status seem to worry about bag space; they hover in front of gates hoping to board as soon as possible—“gate lice,” they’re sometimes called. Travelers are rightly infuriated by the situation: a crisis of carry-ons that someone must be responsible for, and for which someone must pay.
Read the full article.
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P.S.
If you think all this talk of orbital bombardment and nuclear ASATs sounds like lunacy, you’re not alone. In 1980, Senator John Glenn said to Defense Secretary Harold Brown during a hearing that he had trouble wrapping his head around the idea of destroying entire nations. “That is why,” Brown admitted, “we sound a little crazy when we talk about it.”
But if you want to hear about even nuttier schemes from the 20th century, you should read Nuking the Moon, by Vince Houghton, the former historian and curator for the International Spy Museum. It’s a fascinating book about the military and intelligence plans that didn’t make it off the drawing board. Some of these are just funny, including the British plan to build a torpedo-proof ship made of ice and wood pulp, or the CIA idea to … well, as the title notes, lob a nuke at the moon. Others are horrifying, such as the American plan during World War II to attach incendiary devices to bats—yes, bats—and then release them over Japan. This awful idea was abandoned for many reasons, not least that the bats burned down part of an airfield in the United States during a test run.
If you ever shake your head at some of the boondoggles your tax dollars are funding, read Nuking the Moon and know that it could always be worse.
— Tom
Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.
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