Jul 22, 2024 07:50 PM
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kevinholden...space-war/
INTRO: Moscow’s race to perfect spacecraft tipped with nuclear warheads could presage a rapidly expanding new phase of Space War I, say leading American defense scholars who have been war-gaming potential space clashes between Russia and the United States.
Russia’s detonation of a nuclear bomb in orbit - if it destroyed one or more American missile warning satellites - could in turn trigger a U.S. response that extends to its most powerful weapons, these scholars say.
While simulating potential battles - including in space - between the one-time archenemies of the Cold War, Washington-based nuclear arms experts predict an array of possible skirmishes, but not a full-scale exchange of intercontinental ballistic missiles.
The Kremlin’s drive to develop nuclear-capped anti-satellite weaponry might be principally aimed at destroying the SpaceX Starlink satellites that have enabled Ukraine’s president to communicate with his Western allies, his top generals, his soldiers and his citizens, says Peter Hays, a scholar at George Washington University’s Space Policy Institute who has helped shape national security space strategies at the Pentagon for the past two decades.
“I believe the Russian nuclear ASAT is primarily intended to hold proliferated LEO [low Earth orbit] satellites like Starlink at risk,” Hays told me in an interview. “Starlink is arguably the single most important system for the Ukrainians” directing the defense of the embattled democracy in the face of Moscow’s missile blitzkrieg on their cities and telecommunications towers... (MORE - missing details)
INTRO: Moscow’s race to perfect spacecraft tipped with nuclear warheads could presage a rapidly expanding new phase of Space War I, say leading American defense scholars who have been war-gaming potential space clashes between Russia and the United States.
Russia’s detonation of a nuclear bomb in orbit - if it destroyed one or more American missile warning satellites - could in turn trigger a U.S. response that extends to its most powerful weapons, these scholars say.
While simulating potential battles - including in space - between the one-time archenemies of the Cold War, Washington-based nuclear arms experts predict an array of possible skirmishes, but not a full-scale exchange of intercontinental ballistic missiles.
The Kremlin’s drive to develop nuclear-capped anti-satellite weaponry might be principally aimed at destroying the SpaceX Starlink satellites that have enabled Ukraine’s president to communicate with his Western allies, his top generals, his soldiers and his citizens, says Peter Hays, a scholar at George Washington University’s Space Policy Institute who has helped shape national security space strategies at the Pentagon for the past two decades.
“I believe the Russian nuclear ASAT is primarily intended to hold proliferated LEO [low Earth orbit] satellites like Starlink at risk,” Hays told me in an interview. “Starlink is arguably the single most important system for the Ukrainians” directing the defense of the embattled democracy in the face of Moscow’s missile blitzkrieg on their cities and telecommunications towers... (MORE - missing details)