Is Russia looking to put nukes in space?

Good morning! Today is the day two years ago when Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered his troops and tanks to march into neighbouring Ukraine. It is also the 10th anniversary of Putin’s invasion and eventual annexation of Crimea. Unlike 2014, in 2022 the world was barely hobbling out of a debilitating pandemic that disrupted the global economic system. Putin’s war ripped up the fragile international political framework as well, forcing countries into new alignments and strategic arrangements. On the eve of the second anniversary, arch-rival US imposed a fresh set of sanctions on 500 Russian people and entities. Meanwhile, Putin is upping the ante. This time he could push the world into unprecedented instability. Read on to understand the implications of Putin’s nuclear gambit. Plus a list of the best weekend reads curated just for you.

If you enjoy reading us, why not give us a follow at @thesignaldotco on Twitter, Instagram, and Threads.

Spenser A. Warren

Fresh US intelligence circulating in Congress reportedly indicates that Russia is developing an anti-satellite weapon in space with a nuclear component.

News reports speculating about what the weapon could be abounded after Rep. Mike Turner, R-Ohio, chair of the House Intelligence Committee, released a cryptic but alarming statement on Feb. 14, 2024, regarding the information, which he framed as a “serious national security threat.” Some sources suggested a nuclear weapon. Others suspect a weapon that is nuclear-powered but not a nuclear warhead.

The White House confirmed the following day that the Russian system under development is a space-based anti-satellite weapon and that if it were deployed, it would violate the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which bans weapons of mass destruction in space. The Kremlin responded by dismissing the reports as a “malicious fabrication.”

While the exact weapon remains unknown to the public, the events raise the spectre of nuclear weapons in space at a tense time. Relations between the United States and Russia are at their lowest in decades, and Russia is currently waging a war of aggression in Ukraine.

As a scholar of nuclear strategy, I know the US reports come at a time when the nuclear world order is shifting significantly. China and others are expanding and modernising their arsenals. Iran is close to being able to produce a nuclear weapon. Other countries may eventually want their own nuclear weapons.

At the same time, several countries are developing new weapons to attack targets in space. This list includes Russia, the US, China and India, although none currently field weapons in space.

Cold War schemes

The recent revelations about Russian space weapons raise the spectre that countries may decide to deploy nuclear weapons in space at some point. Some have tried before.

The US and Soviet Union researched nuclear detonations in space during the Cold War. In the late 1960s, the Soviets tested a missile that could be placed in low Earth orbit and be capable of coming out of orbit and carrying a nuclear warhead to Earth.

Neither country placed nuclear weapons in space permanently. Both were parties to the Outer Space Treaty and the 1963 Partial Test Ban Treaty, which outlawed nuclear detonations in space. Moscow and Washington negotiated these treaties to contain the Cold War arms race.

These treaties constrained behaviour in the late Cold War. However, Russian violations of nuclear arms control treaties, as well as US and Russian withdrawal from various treaties since 2002, suggest they may not in the future.

Nukes in space

But why would a country want space nukes? There are a few reasons.

Countries could point space-based nuclear weapons toward Earth. In theory, weapons from space could avoid early detection radars and missile defenses. However, there are significant disadvantages to firing nuclear weapons directly from space.

Placing weapons in space to strike targets on Earth may have defensive or offensive motivations. Weapons that evade missile defenses might ensure nuclear deterrence. This is a defensive strategy intended to prevent aggression against the state that placed them in space.

Alternatively, these weapons may help a country achieve a first-strike capability. A first strike requires the ability to destroy enough of an adversary’s nuclear weapons – or the nuclear command, control and communications systems necessary to manage them – to prevent nuclear retaliation.

Countries could point space-based weapons toward other regions of space, like the Russian weapon under development. This conjures images of nuclear weapons striking asteroids to defend Earth from a collision.

Satellite killers

The reality is less dramatic but no less worrisome. The most likely use would be to destroy an enemy’s military satellites. Damaging navigation satellites would hinder an adversary’s ability to fight a war. Both precision-strike weapons and ground-based forces rely on satellite constellations like GPS or the Russian GLONASS system to find and reach targets.

Countries may also want the ability to destroy an enemy’s space weapons, including space-based missile defenses. While no country has deployed these weapons yet, leaders may fear future capabilities and deploy space weapons first to hedge against this threat.

Most dangerously, these weapons could destroy or damage satellites critical to an enemy’s nuclear command, control and communications system, including early warning satellites that track missile launches and communication satellites that relay military orders.

The idea of attacking an enemy’s satellites has a long history.

Nuclear weapons damage satellites because of a wave of gamma radiation that is created by a nuclear detonation. This radiation damages critical subsystems within a satellite.

But such weapons produce significant drawbacks. A detonation would damage any satellites within range of the gamma radiation – including those of the attacking country, its allies and neutral countries.

However, a space-based nuclear anti-satellite weapon may have some advantages over other options for attacking countries. Ground-based anti-satellite systems can only reach targets in low Earth orbit.

Even a nuclear-powered anti-satellite weapon in space would create a novel threat without a nuclear warhead. Such a device would have a greater range than anti-satellite weapons on the ground and could perform its mission over an extended period of time. Both factors would increase the number of satellites it could damage or destroy.

Many of the satellites a country may want to take out are located at higher orbits beyond the range of ground-based systems. This is true for some of the US systems that Russia may want to target.

The Kremlin’s interest in space weapons could be an attempt to reduce America’s capability to fight a war; threaten nuclear command, control and communications systems; or hedge against space-based missile defenses. Alternatively, the Russian defence industry may drive their development for profit.

New arms race?

Whatever their initial purpose, placing nuclear weapons in space could be destabilising. While there is not a universally accepted definition of strategic stability, scholars frequently define it as a combination of crisis stability, based on the risk of nuclear escalation during a military crisis, and arms race stability – when countries can avoid actions and reactions that spiral into a costly and dangerous arms race.

Space-based nuclear weapons increase the risk that a country would resort to nuclear weapons during a crisis. Both weapons pointing toward Earth and those aimed at targets in space create incentives to use nuclear weapons preemptively.

The threat of either strike creates use-it-or-lose-it pressure, incentivising a preemptive nuclear strike to limit the damage an adversary can do. In turn, a preemptive nuclear strike would likely provoke further escalation, eventually ending in a total nuclear war.

Placing nuclear weapons in space could spark a new arms race. Because one purpose of space weapons is to destroy an adversary’s space weapons, the U.S. may respond to Russian weapons with their own. Russia may then counter with new weapons to maintain its advantage. Others, like China, may react to American weapons, which could prompt a response from India, followed by one from Pakistan.

Escalatory pressures and the threat of an arms race exist even if the first mover places weapons in space defensively. Introducing space weapons could create what international relations scholars call a security dilemma: actions that enhance one country’s security but make another insecure.

Defensive and offensive weapons are often indistinguishable. The weapons that could enhance one country’s security by hedging against space-based missile defence could also be used offensively against nuclear command, control and communications systems. Even if leaders in one country thought the other was acting defensively today, there is no way to know they will not act offensively tomorrow.

Spenser A. Warren is Postdoctoral Fellow in Technology and International Security, University of California, San Diego.

This article is republished from https://theconversation.com under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article at https://theconversation.com/is-russia-looking-to-put-nukes-in-space-doing-so-would-undermine-global-stability-and-ignite-an-anti-satellite-arms-race-223702 

ICYMI

How to build castles in the  air  UK: Bangladesh, ranked among the most corrupt countries in the world, does not allow its citizens to amass wealth abroad. At least, that’s what its central bank says. Yet, a former minister, Saifuzzaman Chowdhury, has accumulated property worth more than £200 million ($253.4 million) in the UK, this Bloomberg investigation found. These include tony townhouses in London’s richest neighbourhoods and cheap student apartments in Liverpool, even properties in Manhattan. What’s more, many of these properties have been bought and resold by companies owned by Chowdhury and funded by bank loans. These transactions have driven up prices of his homes, adding heft to his sprawling real estate empire. The UK has been trying to stem the tide of foreign billionaires laundering wealth in the country, especially since oligarchs began moving their money abroad during the Russian War. But the fines are paltry, and agents and lawyers have little incentive to say no to business worth millions, making the crackdown ineffective. Chowdhury’s wealth shows how the UK, for all its institutional strength, continues to be a safe haven for politically-exposed elites from around the world. 

Barons of wealth: Rothschild is a name deeply etched in the modern era of global finance and wealth. Perhaps the best comparison to be made would be the Italian banking family, the House of Medici. The Rothschilds are arguably one of the most influential bankers to the wealthy. There are two branches of the family, one based in Paris and the other in Switzerland, which were operating on separate turfs until recently. Now the Paris Rothschilds have entered wealth management, the traditional territory of the Swiss branch, Edmond de Rothschild Group, led by baroness Arianne de Rothschild. Alexandre de Rothschld, chairman of Rothschild & Co, is now muscling into Arianne’s territories, rapidly buying up companies and teams to add heft. The French Rothschild wants to merge with the Swiss one, but the latter does not want to. The two had fought over the family name in 2015 but settled in 2018 with a deal on how to use the family name. That has not stopped customers from being confused though, reports Bloomberg. 

Bought in parts, sold for parts: Paramount Global, owner of MTV and maker of Tom Cruise’s Top Gun franchise, is a child of a bygone Hollywood era. Its founder Sumner Redstone was best known for extravagant parties and a string of young girlfriends. Redstone is now dead, and his empire of movie theatres and cable TV is looking more and more like a relic. In this long story for Bloomberg Businessweek, Lucas Shaw breaks down how Paramount declined from a money making machine to a dying business gutted by the decline of cable and the rise of Big Tech in the entertainment business. After years of rebuffing lucrative takeover offers, heir Shari Redstone is now seriously considering new ones coming her way. But then, when Sumner was buying up businesses to build Paramount, it was advantage Redstone. Now buyers are circling the pit, willing to wait for a bargain as Paramount declines further. This is a warning for media entrepreneurs everywhere: if you can’t evolve with the times, just cash out. 

Not so utopian after all: Auroville was founded over 50 years ago as “the city the earth needs”. Conceived as a self-sustaining eco-city that’d support 50,000 people from 60-plus countries, it’s currently home to just 3,300 residents… perhaps for a reason. In this detailed ground report from Auroville, Atmos details the goings on about town: infighting that’s resulted in two councils and two working committees but most of all, the schism between its predominantly-white residents and the locals who helped build Auroville in the first place. As the city expanded, village lands were snapped up for thousands of rupees—land that would’ve sold for lakhs and even crores today. Several villages around the city still exist to “service” it, and even Tamil Aurovillians are relatively inactive in decision-making. That’s the bitter truth about a supposedly-egalitarian township.

Netting problems: For long, the most effective weapon in the war against malaria was cheap mosquito nets. Papua New Guinea (PNG) and its population of more than 10 million people experienced this firsthand. But whatever little progress they witnessed soon turned to dust. By 2022, PNG was grappling with an 88% spike in infections. Why? Because they relied on nets made by the Swiss company Vestergaard. Sometime in 2017, Vestergaard introduced an update to their nets called PermaNet 2.0. This was the root of the malaria upsurge, because the new nets were less effective due to the change. Older versions of the nets had ‘forever chemicals’, which were replaced with cheaper, inferior alternatives. This one decision has set back the fight against malaria by years. To understand more about how public health was compromised for business, read this insightful piece by Bloomberg. 

Betting the farm: You’d think a psychiatrist would know better; then again, no one’s safe from the dopamine trap. The reason gambling is so addictive is because anticipation—rather than the outcome of, say, spinning the slot machine—is what causes the high. The brain releases dopamine when you place a bet, which explains why so many continue gambling despite losing their life savings and sometimes, even their lives to it. . This story in The Wall Street Journal focuses on Kavita Fischer as a stand-in for Americans who’ve succumbed to the lure of betting apps. Despite multiple requests to her “VIP” customer representative at betting giant DraftKings to delete her account, the mental health professional never got the help she received. Instead, betting platforms kept her hooked with credits, cash bonuses, and other incentives as she continued losing nearly half a million dollars on the habit.