Kremlin's Russian Nuclear Roulette in Orbit Could Trigger Conflict with NATO

As Russia steps up its nuclear strategy – with a top-secret attempt to launch the first plutonium warhead into orbit and with simulated tactical bomb explosions near Ukraine – it is poised to spark conflict with Russia. alliance of 32 NATO countries, top defense leaders say. academics in the United States

The White House has already denounced Moscow's clandestine mission to launch a spacecraft equipped with a nuclear warhead, even though the space defense experts in the American war game know how to prevent this new super-space bomb from threatening satellites Americans and how to react if the weapon is still on fire.

President Vladimir Putin has scaled a nuclear escalation pyramid, but it's unclear whether that process ends with Russia detonating a powerful warhead in low-Earth orbit, says modernization researcher Spenser Warren Russia's nuclear power under Putin's rule at the Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation at the University of California.

“Russian nuclear threats have peaked at several points,” Warren told me in an interview, including her recent virtual detonations of tactical bombs on a mock Ukrainian battlefield, her suspension of the New START arms control treaty between the United States and Russia, and now its race for Russian nuclear power. perfect an orbital bomb to shake the skies.

Hypothetically, the White House could choose to respond to Russia's launch of a nuclear-tipped spacecraft by shooting it down with an anti-satellite missile as an act of self-defense, says Dr. Laura Grego, a leading expert on nuclear weapons, missile defense and space security at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

“You can use a conventionally armed interceptor of the type that the United States and others have developed to destroy the nuclear weapon,” she told me.

But this mission would be extremely risky, she warns.

“Russia could preemptively detonate the nuclear weapon if it saw the interceptor take off and suspected its destination,” she said.

As a co-author of the Outer Space Treaty, Russia is obligated never to send a nuclear bomb into orbit, she emphasizes. “The best way to verify compliance with the obligation not to place nuclear weapons in space is before launch.”

“It's much more difficult once such a weapon is launched.”

But Russia has suspended nuclear inspections required by the New START treaty and will almost certainly oppose any U.S. or U.N. request to visit its nuclear weapons centers to find the bomb in orbit.

“There may be some contextual clues as to whether a satellite is actually carrying a nuclear weapon,” says Dr. Grego, “but I think there are some very good techniques to disguise it as something else, less for a while. »

“At the time we had civil engagement with Russia, there was a general consensus not to put nuclear weapons in space,” says John Hamre, former deputy secretary of defense and now president. managing director of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, one of the top defense think tanks in Washington DC.

But Russia could now abandon this space détente, he told me in an interview.

In a fascinating fireside chat at CSIS hosted by Dr. Hamre, titled “The Nuclear Option: Decoding Russia’s New Threat from Space,” he said, “It implies that there is now a weapon in orbit or there could be a weapon in orbit and that’s a very profound thing. Nuclear weapons in space are really profoundly different from nuclear weapons here on planet Earth.”

“We're used to thinking about explosion effects, shockwave and all that kind of stuff. All of this is a product of a terrestrial environment,” he added.

In an interview just after this meeting, Dr. Hamre told me: “Much of the destructive power of nuclear weapons on Earth comes from heat (the detonation that warms air molecules) and blast effects ( the compression of air which violently passes through the atmosphere). Part of the energy of the explosion is consumed by the impact on the ground, generating ejecta. There's none of that in space. So almost all the energy is dissipated in the form of X-rays.”

“A nuclear detonation in space,” he said, “could reach hundreds of kilometers.”

Even during the greatest arms battle of the First Cold War, when Moscow and Washington vied to test thermonuclear bombs capable of setting entire continents ablaze, both sides agreed to ban celestial weapons to ensure that their race to the moon remained peaceful.

Russia's repudiation of the space pact by placing its apocalyptic nuclear warheads into orbit would end this long-standing truce.

Today, a shadow of the former Soviet space superpower, Russia operates “a structurally flawed space program,” says James Clay Moltz, a top U.S. space defense expert and a professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey.

To mask Russia's decline as a space power, “Putin seems to have decided that his only card is to threaten American satellites and even the space environment itself,” Professor Moltz told me in an interview.

“But the use of a nuclear weapon in orbit would be an act of international terrorism,” he said.

“The electromagnetic pulse and radiation would indiscriminately kill astronauts on the International Space Station and taikonauts on China's Tiangong space station. »

The explosion could destroy “thousands of satellites that provide critical information to the global economy and human security on land, at sea and in the air,” added Professor Moltz, who has written a series of internationally acclaimed books on the growing dangers of great-power conflict in space, including Crowded orbits.

“Any country that committed such an act,” he said, “would instantly become an international pariah. »

If Russia detonated a powerful nuclear warhead near the International Space Station, killing its American and European astronauts and destroying a series of American satellites, this act of aggression could quickly turn into a confrontation between superpowers, Professor Jack believes Beard, the world's leading expert on the patchwork of UN treaties governing space defense and director of the Space, Cybersecurity and National Security Law Program at the University of Nebraska School of Law .

Professor Beard, who recently published the world's first comprehensive “Handbook on the International Law of Military Space Activities and Operations”, says the explosion would likely wipe out not only a ring of SpaceX satellites, but also US defense spacecraft revolving around the Earth on the same orbital plane.

If this were a triple assault on the United States – including its astronauts, its New Space allies and its military satellites – it would likely be recognized as an “armed attack” within the meaning of the United Nations Charter which justifies the use of force in self-defense, Professor Beard told me.

Although this hypothetical warhead was not detonated on U.S. soil, he said, the White House and Defense Department would most likely treat it “as an armed attack on the United States itself.”

The president would likely quickly declare that the United States reserves the right to respond with military force.

And even if the bombings were carried out beyond US borders, Professor Beard says, that does not necessarily rule out a strike against the territory of the responsible state.

A former senior legal adviser at the Pentagon, Professor Beard says that when Libyan state-sponsored terrorists were involved in the Berlin nightclub bombing that killed three Americans in 1986, President Ronald Reagan responded with a series of airstrikes across Libya.

In addition to the deaths of American astronauts in space, the destruction of American military satellites could also justify the use of force in response, Professor Beard says.

If the United States chose to use force to defend itself, it could also seek to invoke Article 5 of the NATO agreement, which provides for collective defense following an attack against one of its members. the alliance, he said.

The beginnings of the next world war, unleashed in space, would be triggered.