Space war and other distractions

When Troy Meink, the chief of the U.S. Space Force, announces for no obvious reason that the United States “now has on-orbit space-control weapons,” people naturally assume that something is up. Why is Meink admitting the truth now? He’s even boasting about it!

It can’t be to frighten the Chinese or the Russians, because they have long been watching U.S. military activities in space. They regularly monitor the flights of the semi-secret X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle, the re-usable uncrewed spaceplane that the U.S. Space Force launches from Florida but sometimes lands at Vandenberg in California (eight missions so far).

The Chinese can’t complain, because they have their own ‘secret’ spaceplane, and sometimes they even play ‘silly buggers’ in orbit with their American and British counterparts. (‘Silly buggers’ is the old naval game of high-speed manoeuvres of warships in formation, a frequent cause of collisions.)

Reuters reported a year ago on a joint U.S.-British operation in which the U.S. Space Force, working from a base in Colorado, directed an American military satellite to swoop in close to a British satellite just as China’s Shiyan 12-01 satellite passed beneath it. What for? Who knows? They may have done it just because they could.

There are also the Russians, of course, but they have many fewer satellites and take a firmly pragmatic approach to the whole question of ‘war in space.’ They have enough ground-based rockets to take out the key satellites of their likely opponents and that’s enough.

This is not to say that people who worry about war in space are fools or that the whole business of weapons in space is harmless and irrelevant, but there is considerably less here than meets the eye. Meink’s revelation was no news to America’s adversaries, but it did create a hook on which articles like this one could be hung.

Meink wears two hats, as the civilian head of both the U.S. Air Force (created in 1947) and the U.S. Space Force (created in 2019). The Air Force has been getting lots of publicity recently over the Iran war, which will keep its share of the defence budget high. The Space Force is getting almost no publicity, so it’s Meink’s job to create some for it (and for himself too).

Job done, you might say, but now that we have had our nose rubbed in the fact that they have weapons in space, should we worry about it? Not much.

The ‘high ground’ has always been an advantage in land warfare, but that is not necessarily the same for space. It’s certainly important for surveillance and communications, but the only worthwhile targets for weapons in space are other things in space. That’s why there are probably not currently any nuclear weapons in space, just lasers and projectile weapons.

The Outer Space Treaty of 1967, signed by all the major powers, bans all ‘weapons of mass destruction’ from space, but only nuclear weapons are relevant. (Poison gas and germ warfare don’t work well in vacuum.) And nuclear weapons aren’t very effective in space either. Without atmosphere, the blast effect is only short-range and radiation effects are quite limited.

However, the electromagnetic pulse (EMP) generated by a nuclear weapon detonated at high altitude (500 kilometres, say), would disable most satellites on that side of the planet and damage or destroy unshielded electronics and the electrical grid on the ground over a very wide area.

Scary stuff, but since any other country with even one nuclear weapon could immediately do the same damage in reply, it’s not clear how doing that would serve anybody’s interest — and anyway, creating an EMP does not require nuclear weapons in orbit. Any one of ten countries can do it just by launching a nuclear-tipped rocket to the right altitude and exploding it.

We cannot say that there could never be war in space. In any full-scale war on the ground, each side would certainly target the other side’s surveillance and communications satellites, but that can be done without nuclear weapons. In fact, several countries have already experimented with that tactic by targeting their own satellites.

It’s just hard to imagine a war fought only in space. In any war fought directly between the great powers, there would be a grave risk of escalation to nuclear weapons, but all of them are on the planet’s surface at the moment. Moving some of them into space would confer no significant advantage.

It’s clear that some American non-nuclear weapons are now in orbit. Other countries will probably follow, on the flimsy rationale that if the Americans are doing it maybe we should too. It’s deplorable and completely unnecessary, but frankly it’s not very dangerous.

Gwynne Dyer’s new book is Intervention Earth: Life-Saving Ideas from the World’s Climate Engineers. The previous book, The Shortest History of War, is also still available.