Apogee Staff
For nearly six decades, the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 has helped prevent a nuclear arms race beyond Earth’s atmosphere. The Soviet Union — like 114 other countries including the United States — signed the agreement, which was negotiated under the auspices of the United Nations and prohibits nuclear weapons in space. But fearing that Russia is now in the development stages of placing an anti-satellite nuclear weapon in orbit, Japan and the U.S. put forth a U.N. resolution that reaffirmed the ban on nuclear weapons on orbit, prompting the Russians to veto it at a U.N. Security Council meeting in April 2024, while denying that they were producing such a weapon. The international community was incredulous.
“Today’s veto begs the question: Why? Why if you are following the rules would you not support a resolution that reaffirms them?” U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Linda Thomas-Greenfield asked after the vote, according to Reuters. “What could you possibly be hiding? It’s baffling and it’s a shame.”
A July 2024 report by The Washington Post established why Russia might be avoiding the topic. The world’s outermost satellites are in geosynchronous orbit roughly 36,000 kilometers above Earth. They deliver broadcast TV, radio, communication systems and weather forecasting. A more crowded realm is low Earth orbit, 800 kilometers above Earth, which holds thousands of satellites, including Elon Musk’s Starlink internet service and the International Space Station.
LOS ALAMOS NATIONAL LABORATORY
U.S. officials, the Post reported, are concerned about a Russian satellite that circles the planet at an altitude of over 1,931 kilometers. The orbit is only shared with 10 other satellites, which are no longer functional. While Russia claims the satellite is for scientific purposes, U.S. officials believe it could be related to the development of an anti-satellite capability, potentially by nuclear detonation.
“News that Russia could be developing a nuclear, space-based anti-satellite weapon that could make parts of space not usable for any period of time is very concerning,” Clayton Swope, deputy director of the Aerospace Security Project for the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), told Apogee. “Both U.S. economic and national security presumes the availability of space. This development should also concern China and India. China is the second-most important space power after the United States and shows no sign of slowing down in space. India has a lot of space plans on the horizon, including crewed missions.”
Based on information publicly provided by the U.S. government, there is no way to assess how close Russia is to deploying such a weapon, Swope added. But a U.S. State Department official said if the Russians detonate a nuclear device in space, it could have long-term damaging effects, both in space and on Earth. Mallory Stewart, assistant secretary of state for the Bureau of Arms Control, Deterrence, and Stability, told a CSIS online forum in May 2024 that the U.S. has been tracking Russia’s pursuit of a nuclear space weapon for years. “The United States is extremely concerned that Russia may be considering the incorporation of nuclear weapons into its counterspace programs based on information we deem credible,” she said, according to a transcript from the forum. “The United States has been aware of Russia’s pursuit of this sort of capability dating back years, but only recently have we been able to make a more precise assessment of their progress. Russia has publicly claimed that their satellite is for scientific purposes. However, the orbit is in a region not used by any other spacecraft — that in itself was somewhat unusual — and the orbit is a region of higher radiation than normal lower-Earth orbits, but not high enough of a radiation environment to allow accelerated testing of electronics, as Russia has described the purpose to be.”
Sixty-five countries hoping to affirm the obligations in the Outer Space Treaty lined up to cosponsor the Japan-U.S. resolution, Stewart said. Depending on the placement of such a device, a detonation could potentially entail the limitation of lower Earth orbit “for a large amount” of time for all satellites, she said, affecting everything from communications on Earth to military operations. The effects would cause harm to civilians, including civil space and commercial space operations. For those who aren’t students of history, it might seem as if Russia has forgotten how the global community originally arrived at the ban.
Lessons from Starfish Prime
Hotels in Hawaii held rooftop parties, and there was little sense of foreboding as onlookers prepared for a celestial light show just five days after the July 4 holiday. A 1962 headline in the Honolulu Advertiser newspaper that day was downright gleeful: “N-Blast Tonight May Be Dazzling; Good View Likely.”
Indeed, there had been nothing quite as spectacular during Independence Day celebrations as the military project code-named Starfish Prime. The U.S. Atomic Energy Commission on July 9, 1962, launched a thermonuclear warhead aboard a Thor rocket, which created a suborbital nuclear detonation 402 kilometers above the Pacific Ocean, according to a 50th-anniversary account in 2012 by Smithsonian magazine. The following 50 minutes produced a “carnival of color” for crowds from Hawaii to New Zealand, illuminated in rainbow stripes and an artificial aurora borealis.
The warhead itself was terrifying. The hydrogen bomb had a yield of 1.45 megatons, making it 100 times more powerful than the atomic weapon dropped on Hiroshima. Starfish Prime was part of a series of high-altitude nuclear bomb tests at the height of the Cold War. Just four years earlier, in 1958, the Soviet Union had called for a ban on atmospheric nuclear weapons tests and stopped its testing. The U.S. soon followed. But in 1961, internal political pressures prompted Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev to break the moratorium, and the U.S. responded with its own tests, according to a historical account from Discover magazine.
Starfish Prime produced unexpected results. When the bomb detonated, the electromagnetic pulse (EMP) was so huge that it affected the flow of electricity on Earth hundreds of kilometers away. In Hawaii, the EMP blew out hundreds of streetlights and caused widespread telephone outages. Other effects included electrical surges on airplanes and radio blackouts.
Scientists had predicted the EMP, Discover reported, but the Starfish Prime pulse was far larger than they imagined. Many of the electrons didn’t fall into Earth’s atmosphere but instead lingered in space for months and created an artificial radiation belt high above Earth’s surface.
It had devastating effects on satellites. When a high-speed electron hits a satellite, it can generate a miniature EMP. The pulse of electrons from Starfish Prime crippled one-third of the 24 satellites in orbit at the time, the Post reported, and other satellite failures may have been caused by the explosion.
Low Earth orbit today is immensely more crowded, making the prospect of a nuclear detonation even more devastating. Thousands of satellites linked to communications, commercial and scientific endeavors orbit the globe. “A nuclear explosion in space would cause indiscriminate damage, with the blast potentially knocking out many capabilities — from internet services to early warning military systems that track missile launches — of both the United States and its adversaries,” the Post reported.
If hundreds of satellites were unable to correct their positioning, they could slam into each other and create debris fields moving at more than 16,093 kph, the Post reported. That could create a cascading effect known as the Kessler Syndrome. Although some debris would burn up in the atmosphere, Earth would be cloaked in a cloud of space junk, making spaceflight impossible and rendering everyday technology useless.
Some experts are dubious that Russia would detonate a nuclear space device because such weapons produce indiscriminate effects, meaning they would harm Russia’s friends as well as its adversaries. “I’m less concerned about a Russian nuke in space because it is only a weapon of last resort,” Todd Harrison, a senior fellow with the American Enterprise Institute told Apogee. “Use of a weapon like this would be an attack against China, Europe and the whole world, not just the U.S.”
A nuclear explosion in space would cause indiscriminate damage, with the blast potentially knocking out many capabilities — from internet services to early warning military systems that track missile launches — of both the United States and its adversaries.”
~ The Washington Post
Still, the potential for harm is so severe that top U.S. generals are publicly sounding the alarm. Such a weapon threatens “the entire modern way of life,” Gen. Stephen Whiting, commander of the U.S. Space Command, told the Aspen Security Forum in July 2024. “It would affect the United States satellites, Chinese satellites, Russian satellites, European satellites, Indian satellites, Japanese satellites. And so, it’s really holding at risk the entire modern way of life, and it’s just an incredibly reckless decision.”
Both the Soviets and the U.S. stopped conducting high-altitude nuclear explosions after November 1, 1962, the same day the Soviets began dismantling their missiles in Cuba. Stepping back from the brink of nuclear war, U.S. President John F. Kennedy and Khrushchev signed the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty on July 25, 1963, banning atmospheric and exo-atmospheric nuclear detonations. That eventually led to the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, which limits space to peaceful purposes and prohibits nuclear weapons in orbit.
Finding a safe path forward
Despite U.N. sanctions against Russia over its invasion of Ukraine, the Russian economy managed to grow over the past year. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) expects the Russian economy to grow faster over the next year than any other advanced economy. This is in large part because India and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) continue to do business with Russia. Trade between the PRC and Russia hit a record high in 2023, increasing by more than 26% over the prior year, according to the IMF.
“Though there has been little sign that Beijing would exert economic pressure to change Russian behavior in Ukraine, China may feel differently about space,” Swope wrote in the June 2024 CSIS article, “Is there a path to counter Russia’s space weapons?” The PRC, he wrote, has sent mixed signals. It abstained from the Japan-U.S. resolution reaffirming the nuclear space weapons ban but supported an even stricter proposal from Russia. “However, these actions could be interpreted within the larger geopolitical dynamics of U.S.-China relations, with China uninterested in giving the United States a symbolic diplomatic win at the United Nations when it sees no benefit in return.”
Although it is unclear if India and the PRC would be willing to challenge Russia’s nuclear space pursuits, NATO can continue to play a key role in deterrence, according to Swope and Harrison. “Arguably, one main goal of NATO’s focus and collaboration on space is to demonstrate the collective strength and resilience of alliance space capabilities,” Swope told Apogee. “The robustness of those equities may deter any adversary from striking in space.”