Atomic bombs in space are back to scare us again

In 1982, President Ronald Reagan was considering what became known as “Star Wars,” a plan to protect America from Soviet missiles by deploying up to thousands of weapons in space. At the same time, as a young science writer, so was I report about how the rays from a single nuclear blast in orbit can wipe out entire fleets of battle stations and laser death rays. “Star Wars: Pentagon Lunacy,” read one of the headlines.

Decades later, Mr. Reagan and the Soviet Union are gone, but fears of a high-altitude nuclear explosion live on, most recently brought back by Russian President Vladimir V. Putin’s apparent war aims. Last month, U.S. spy agencies told Congress, as well as foreign allies, that Mr. Putin could deploy and use a nuclear bomb in space that could take out thousands of satellites. Not only military and civilian communications links would likely be at risk, but also satellites that spy, track the weather, transmit broadcasts, boost cell phone cards, establish Internet connections and perform dozens of other modern tasks.

The very claim of such a commitment could help Mr. Putin scare his opponents.

“The goal is the same as Star Wars was for us in the ’80s,” he said Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist who publishes a monthly space report. “It’s to scare the other side.”

But to actually go to war, analysts say, this step is difficult to imagine — unless Putin wants some of his key allies and supporters to face the prospect of unspeakable pain.

Five nuclear experts in a Study from 2010 explained how astronauts hit by the most powerful rays would suffer from nausea and vomiting for two to three hours before radiation sickness left them with a “90 percent chance of death.”

The International Space Station usually accommodates seven astronauts: three Americans, one foreigner and – you guessed it – three Russians. The beams could also turn the space station of Putin’s main ally, China, into a death trap. Beijing’s shiny new outpost is currently home to three Chinese astronauts is about to expand to accommodate even more.

Chinese satellites – 628 by a recent count — would create an additional vulnerability. Stephen M. YoungerA former director of Sandia National Laboratories, which helps make the country’s nuclear weapons, said in an interview that a Russian space explosion could blind China’s reconnaissance satellites, ending the country’s main way in the Pacific. US Navy Fleet follows.

“That won’t go over very well,” said Dr. Younger on Beijing losing its eyes in the sky during the war.

Putin’s alleged bombing, he added, represented more blunder than a serious war plan. “Putin is not stupid,” he said.

The whole idea behind nuclear weapons, said David Wright, a nuclear expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is that “you are partially self-deterrent because the weapons would cause significant collateral damage to yourself and to other countries.” Such deterrence could also apply to a space bomb, he added, unless an attacker was desperate and deemed the risks acceptable.

“It would be dangerous for the Russians themselves,” he said Richard L. Garwina physicist and longtime advisor to the federal government who helped design the world’s first hydrogen bomb.

Since Mr. Putin invaded Ukraine, he has made nuclear threats analysts see as central to his strategy to deter Western intervention. If he were to place an atomic bomb in orbit, it would violate two fundamental treaties of the nuclear age – signed 1963 And 1967 – and signal a major escalation.

On February 20, Putin denied plans to launch a nuclear weapon into orbit. “Our position is clear” he said. “We have always been and are now categorically opposed to the use of nuclear weapons in space.”

But days later, on February 29, he returned to his usual saber-rattling in his annual state of the nation address, warning that the West was at risk of nuclear war. Mr Putin named states that helped Kiev attack Russian territory. The West must understand, he declared, that such aid risks “the destruction of civilization.”

Nuclear weapons in general, and space bombs in particular, are the antithesis of precision. They make no distinction – unlike conventional weapons, which are usually characterized by pinpoint accuracy. In 1981, when I first wrote about orbital nuclear weapons as a reporter for Science magazine, I said referred to the chaos from space as the ‘Chaos Factor’.

The unexpected phenomenon came to life in July 1962 when the United States detonated a hydrogen bomb about 250 miles above the Pacific Ocean. Dark skies lit up. In Hawaii, the street lights went out. In orbit, satellites failed.

President John F. Kennedy, unsettled by the technical surprises, Worried that continued radiation from nuclear explosions would endanger astronauts. In September 1962 he took cancelled a test codenamed Urraca. The hydrogen bomb is said to have been detonated at an altitude of more than 300 meters 800 miles – the highest of any test explosion, American or Soviet. The following year, Mr. Kennedy signed A treaty that banned experimental explosions in space.

The scientific community then made an important distinction about explosions in space that is missing from most current discussions. It is that the atomic explosions have both immediate and residual effects.

The first consequences are the best known. A bomb’s beams travel over great distances, producing lightning-like flashes of electricity satellites And ground networks, frying electrical circuits. Experts call them electromagnetic pulses, or EMP. The pulses turned off the lights in Hawaii.

But what caught Kennedy’s attention was a long-term effect: how radioactive debris and charged particles from a nuclear explosion pump up the natural, donut-like radiation belts that surround the Earth. These bands are intense, but look nothing like what they become when amplified by a bomb’s radiation.

The five nuclear experts who wrote the report Study from 2010 linked such belt overload not only to risks to astronauts but also, after the July 1962 test, to major damage to at least eight satellites. The most famous victim was Telstarthe world’s first communications satellite.

Over the years, I began to worry that the complex subject was being oversimplified. Fringe groups and aggressive politicians alarm signals sounded about Russian EMP attacks on the country’s power grid, although they rarely considered the risk to Moscow’s own spacecraft and astronauts.

Peter Vincent Prya former CIA officer, warned a 2017 report said Moscow was prepared for surprise EMP attacks that would cripple the United States and wipe out its satellites.

In 2019, President Trump ordered strengthening the country’s EMP defenses. Rick Perry, the Secretary of Energy, said the order “sends a clear message to adversaries that the United States takes this threat seriously.”

National security experts know how weapons of mass destruction become entangled in cycles of fear that come and go with the political winds. After decades of thinking about the basics of nuclear explosions in space, I have come to view the risks as extremely low to non-existent, because an explosion – like Drs. McDowell, Younger, Wright, Garwin and others have argued that this would not only harm the attacker, but also the attacker.

“Maybe the Russians will decide that their astronauts should take one back home,” said Dr. McDowell. “But I don’t think Putin, crazy as he is, will do that.”