Europe Joins U.S. In Arming For Russian Nuclear Strikes In Space

Europe’s top space powers, like the U.S., are racing to defend against Russian nuclear strikes in orbit (Photo by © CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images)

Corbis via Getty Images

As Russia threatens atomic attacks on Ukraine and its Western allies, and prototypes a nuclear-armed spacecraft, space powers across Europe are racing to defend against nuclear strikes in orbit.

Leaders stretching from Paris to Berlin are stepping up space defenses while warning Moscow’s military provocations are now spreading across the celestial sphere.

Even as Vladimir Putin escalates his missiles blitzes on Ukraine, as part of a greater plan to restore the Russian empire, he could be lowering the threshold on actual use of nuclear warheads to conquer target countries, says Spenser Warren, Stanton nuclear security postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government.

One of the world’s leading experts on the Kremlin’s crusade to modernize its nuclear arsenal, Warren told me in an interview that Putin could be moving closer to detonating tactical bombs on the current and future battlefronts of Eastern Europe, and to launching satellites that secretly conceal atomic bombs.

In a book he co-authored on the defense-tech race now pitting Moscow against Washington, published by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Warren predicts the looming face-off between these rivals could play out not just across the Earth’s northern hemisphere, but also in the heavens.

The White House has accused Moscow of developing nuclear bombs, to be lofted into orbit, in violation of the Outer Space Treaty’s ban on weapons of mass destruction anywhere in space.

Russia’s nuclear-tipped ASATs could stalk the thousands of Allied satellites that now circle the globe – from American missile tracking sentinels to SpaceX spacecraft beaming broadband to besieged Ukrainians.

In a future conflict, Warren forecasts, Moscow might unleash the space version of a surprise Pearl Harbor ambush, using space nukes to preemptively level the orbital battlefield.

“Russia may be willing to degrade its own satellites as part of a broad anti-satellite (ASAT) strike,” he says, “as it is less space-dependent than the United States and expects an American ASAT strike in the early stages of a conflict.”

President Donald Trump called the worldwide build-up of nuclear missiles one of the greatest threats facing the U.S. when he ordered the construction of the Golden Dome missile defense system, featuring space-based interceptors designed to destroy ICBMs within their first 180 seconds of flight. Next-generation interceptors could also be adapted to blast Moscow’s atomic ASATs orbiting the globe without their warheads exploding.

Moving in lockstep, Europe’s top space powers are also rushing to expand their orbital defenses.

President Emmanuel Macron, while launching France’s new Space Command center, recently warned: “Today’s war is already playing out in space and tomorrow’s war will begin in space.”

“We are experiencing the espionage, for example by Russia, of our satellites by patrol ships, the massive jamming of GPS signals, cyber attacks against our space infrastructure, the tests of anti-satellite missiles, the development of anti-satellite weapons, and even the particularly shocking Russian threat of nuclear weapons in space.”

To counter these skyrocketing threats, President Macron said he is channeling 10 billion euros into France’s new national space strategy to “carry out military space operations” projected ahead, and to strengthen its space alliance with NATO.

Macron, commander-in-chief of the armed forces, is also pushing for the build-up of the army, echoing a call to arms delivered to the French National Assembly and Senate by defense chief Fabien Mandon.

General Mandon told legislators that Russia could be ready to attack NATO “in three or four years,” but added: “Russia cannot scare us if we are willing to defend ourselves,” reported Le Monde, France’s leading broadsheet newspaper.

France’s closest space ally, Germany, is ramping up its mapping of threats in orbit, and emanating from ground-based launch pads, to prepare for potential space assaults ahead.

In Berlin, German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius declared that while satellite networks now form the foundation of modern societies, “Anyone who attacks them can paralyze entire states.”

Kremlin space commanders have “rapidly expanded their capabilities to conduct war in space in recent years,” he said, including the ability to “kinetically destroy satellites.”

“Every attack on satellites does not only affect the military or the space industry – it affects millions and millions of people.”

To protect German security and freedom in space, the defense minister said, 35 billion euros is being pumped into the Bundeswehr Space Command over the next five years.

Pivotal spacecraft will be hardened against attacks and protected by “guardian satellites,” while Germany’s space fleet is augmented by state-of-the-art missile warning systems.

“The conflicts of the future are no longer limited to the Earth’s surface or the deep sea,” Pistorius warned. “They are also played out openly in orbit.”

Michael Mulvihill, a vice chancellor research fellow focusing on nuclear warfare at Teesside University in the UK, told me in an interview that President “Macron’s comments about future wars fought in space” are being echoed by space security scholars across Europe and around the world.

After writing his doctoral dissertation on Britain’s defense masterplan to safeguard government elites during a doomsday nuclear war, and to provide aid to any scattered British survivors who emerge from fallout shelters in this final conflict, Mulvihill teamed up with filmmakers at the British Broadcasting Corp. to transform his research into the documentary “A British Guide to the End of the World.”

He predicts that a series of Russian nuclear strikes hundreds of kilometers above the Earth could end all human spaceflight, and crewed orbital stations, for generations.

Russia’s nuclear ASATs, he says, are “a potential (and cheap) countermeasure to Golden Dome.”

But nuclear explosions in space are, he points out, “indiscriminate and would destroy satellites of both friend and foe.”

When the U.S. tested a powerful thermonuclear warhead at the height of the Cold War with the Soviets, he says, this Starfish Prime blast destroyed one-third of all satellites then circling the Earth.

These days, with 10,000 spacecraft now whizzing through space, the detonation of even one Russian super-bomb could take out thousands of satellites, along with the dual human outposts circling the planet.

SpaceX Starlink satellites, repeatedly excoriated by the Kremlin for extending internet lifelines to citizens across shell-shocked Ukrainian cities, likely remain a prime potential target of a Russian space assault, Mulvihill says.

Because SpaceX now flies 8000 satellites above the Earth, “shooting down a single unit with a ground launch missile would not impact operations.”

In contrast, he says, detonating a nuclear warhead near the orbital ring hosting these satellites could destroy vast swaths of the Starlink constellation.

“Throughout the full-scale invasion of Ukraine Russia has attempted to use nuclear threats.”

“Nuclear threats and spooky insinuation of orbital nuclear weapons form part of broader hybrid warfare techniques that encompass recent incidents of cyber attacks, drone disruption and sabotage in Europe.”

Bursting a thermonuclear warhead near the International Space Station, or the Chinese Space Station, would likely kill its astronauts, and render the outpost uninhabitable.

“Nuclear explosions in space release their energy as deadly radiation including x-rays and gamma-rays, that could kill a crew of a nearby space station.”

“Wreckage from a [nuclear] war in low Earth orbit could close space off to humanity” into the far-off future.

“Space warfare,” he predicts, “could also escalate quickly into nuclear warfare on Earth.”

Meanwhile, Mulvihill says the “End of the World” documentary that he co-created with the BBC presents the terrifying tableaux of a crushed civilization and future in the aftermath of an all-out atomic war of “Mutually Assured Destruction.”

Like this British vision on a post-apocalyptic nuclear wasteland, he says, “I think films such as ‘Oppenheimer’ and ‘House of Dynamite’ are currently doing important work of bringing the risk and implication of nuclear warfare back to public perception.”

If these doomsday broadcasts ultimately trigger a rising wave of popular calls to scale back or completely abolish all nuclear weaponry, government leaders across the Western democracies could ultimately act on those appeals.

“It is said that ABC’s ‘The Day After’ and BBC’s ‘Threads’ helped change the course of Reagan Administration nuclear policy in the 1980s,” Mulvihill says.

U.S. members of Congress petrified by the prospect of an intercontinental nuclear war with Russia, and by the Kremlin’s atomic brinkmanship on and above the Earth, are already moving to press for worldwide disarmament.

While championing the hyper-realism of the nuclear attack and compressed timelines for the American president to decide on a massive retaliation that could kill hundreds of millions of people depicted in “A House of Dynamite,” Senator Edward Markey is now using the film to push his pending resolution calling on the White House to “actively pursue a world free of nuclear weapons as a national security imperative.”

Markey, co-chair of the bicameral Nuclear Weapons and Arms Control Working Group, and a coalition of fellow-minded senators, are urging the president to convene urgent talks to convince “the other 8 nuclear armed countries” to collectively and simultaneously “eliminate their nuclear arsenals according to negotiated timetables.”

British nuclear scholar Michael Mulvihill says: “I think since the end of the Cold War public perceptions of nuclear weapons have been that they are artifacts that belong in the past.”

Victoria Samson, one of the top American scholars on space security, and on war and peace in orbit, says although Moscow has already launched one satellite, Cosmos 2553, suspected of being a precursor mission to lofting its atomic ASATs, “Even with Russia at its most aggressive posture, I don’t see them using this capability lightly.”

“I would not see them using this preemptively as it’s so escalatory, it would very likely lead to conflict on Earth,” adds Samson, who is Chief Director, Space Security and Stability at the Secure World Foundation, a globally influential think tank promoting the pacific use of space, for the benefit of all humanity, based in Washington, DC.

“The only reason to use one [nuclear anti-satellite missile] would be to eradicate a lot of satellites at one time and that would definitely be aimed at Western space capabilities.”

“Russia does understand that there would be consequences to detonating a nuclear warhead in orbit.”

Despite Vladimir Putin’s cascade of threats to deploy nuclear warheads against Ukraine and its Western backers, and his clandestine race to perfect the ultimate space bomb, Samson says: “This is still something that I would see using only in an end of days, Hitler in the bunker scenario for Putin.”