The United States and Japan are sponsoring a resolution to be discussed by the United Nations Security Council that, if approved, would reaffirm international commitments to the 1967 Outer Space Treaty (OST), which bans the deployment and use of nuclear weapons in outer space.
The call, chaired by US ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield and Japanese foreign minister Yoko Kamikawa, followed troubling reports that Russia may be developing a nuclear-capable anti-satellite weapon. As an expert on space and nuclear weapons, I find these reports alarming but not surprising, as nuclear anti-satellite weapons have been proposed since the Cold War in the 1960s.
So far little is known about this weapon. The White House said the facility was not operational and did not pose an immediate threat. Meanwhile, Russian President Vladmir Putin stated that Moscow does not intend to pursue a weapon that would put Russia in violation of its OST commitments.
The 1967 agreement was ratified by 114 countries, including the United States and Russia. Article IV of the treaty, which prohibits the deployment of nuclear weapons into space, arose out of serious concerns about the impact of nuclear tests in space conducted by the United States and Russia in the early 1960s.
The most well-known of these is Starfish Prime, a nuclear test conducted in low Earth orbit over the South Pacific in July 1962.
Nuclear explosions in space
I am a researcher at RAF Fylingdales, the ballistic missile early warning system (BMEWS) station on the North Yorkshire moors. I produced the Fylingdales Archive, which charts the station’s 60-year history of scanning space for signs of nuclear attack and tracking a growing number of satellites in low Earth orbit.
The performance of BMEWS electronic warfare subsystems was tested during Starfish Prime to understand resilience to power outages caused by nuclear explosions in space.
Unlike nuclear explosions on Earth, where the released energy superheats the atmosphere into a fireball, nuclear explosions in space release their energy as high-energy charged particles, X-rays, intense streams of neutrons, and an electromagnetic pulse (Emp). Emp occurs when gamma rays from a nuclear explosion strip electrons from gases in the upper atmosphere. This blinds radar, disables communications, and catastrophically overloads power networks.
Starfish Prime
Emp was first observed during the Starfish Prime nuclear test. The test weapon was launched by a Thor missile from Johnston Island in the North Pacific on July 8, 1962.
Just after 11pm Honolulu time, Starfish Prime exploded 250 miles above Johnston Island. The yield of the thermonuclear explosion was 1.45 megatons. This is 1000 times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
The glow from the explosion was visible across the Pacific, filling the sky with bright auroras from Hawaii to New Zealand. Reports from Honolulu described the aurora as consisting of blood reds and pinks.
However, the pulse of the explosion was larger than expected. It caused electrical damage in Hawaii, approximately 1,000 km away, by damaging the electricity supply, disabling street lights, disrupting telephone networks and triggering burglar alarms.
The impact on satellites in low Earth orbit was profound. High-energy particles from the explosion created radiation belts around the Earth. These were further intensified when high-energy particles from Russia’s nuclear weapons tests in space over Kazakhstan in October 1962 combined with radiation from Starfish Prime.
In the following months, radiation damaged and destroyed one-third of the satellites in Earth orbit. These included AT&T’s Telstar satellite, which was launched two days after Starfish Prime on July 10, 1962. Telstar broadcast the first live transatlantic television footage on July 23, 1962, before succumbing to Starfish Prime’s radiation the following November.
The impact of nuclear weapons testing in space spurred the governments of the United States and the USSR to adopt the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, adopted in August 1963, and the OST in 1967.
What would happen today?
At the time of the Starfish Prime nuclear test, there were only 22 active satellites in orbit. Today, there are almost 10,000 active satellites in LEO, including just over 8,000. These support all aspects of life on Earth, including banking, healthcare, food supply, communications, navigation, climate monitoring, earth sciences, and humanitarian aid.
The United States has more satellites in orbit than any other country; 2926 active loads versus Russia’s 167. These satellites include Space X’s Starlink space-internet services, which together with the US Department of Defense support the Ukrainian army in combat operations against Russia. forces.
As a result, the Starlink satellite constellation is cited as a potential target for a Russian nuclear attack in space that would use NEMP produced by a nuclear explosion to destroy the Starlink satellite constellations by frying their electronics. Residual radiation, like Telstar, would over time destroy the electronics of surviving spacecraft and make their orbits hazardous to other satellites.
But a nuclear attack on space infrastructure would also indiscriminately affect life on Earth. And this will have a disproportionate impact on vulnerable countries in the global south that rely most on space systems to optimize resources such as food security and water supply management. It would also destroy the space systems of Russia’s ally China and render the Tiangong space station uninhabitable by damaging onboard life support systems.
It is also important to note that satellites of NATO member states are protected under Article 5 of the alliance charter, which obliges members to respond collectively to an attack on any other member state. An attack could trigger retaliation with conventional weapons against the Russian military and strategic infrastructure on Earth. However, this would also risk further escalation of nuclear tensions.
Therefore, the deployment of nuclear weapons into space is not a new concept. However, Starfish Prime has demonstrated that it has no military value and presents indiscriminate dangers to life on Earth as a result of damage to satellite infrastructure.
Juliana Seuss, a space security expert at the Royal United Services Institute, emphasizes that such a weapon could be used when Russia “has exhausted most other options and the loss of an ally is no longer a valid deterrent.”
Instead, they fuel a terrifying political theater of nuclear threats and insinuations, and serve by strengthening Russia’s flagging space power. Meanwhile, in the United States, these stories increase nuclear anxiety and shake trust in the Biden administration.
It was therefore important for the UN to reaffirm its 50-year international commitment to OST and to reducing far-reaching damage from nuclear weapons in space.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Dr Michael Mulvihill has received funding from UK Research and Innovation for the project ‘Turning Fylingdales upside down: making visible applications at the UK’s ballistic missile early warning and space tracking station’ (AH/S013067/1).