US confirms for first time it has deployed weapons into space
Analysts warn of an acceleration in high-risk arms race with Russia and China in Earth’s orbit
The US has deployed weapons in space, the US military has confirmed, in an extraordinary public announcement that analysts warn will accelerate a high-risk arms race with Russia and China in Earth’s orbit.
US secretary of the air force, Troy Meink, announced that Washington had active “on-orbit” weapons, meaning they had been deployed and were currently circling the globe.
“Today, we continue to ensure we remain ready to meet the challenges of evolving threats wherever they exist,” Meink said on Monday at the annual Air, Space, Cyber Conference. “This is why the United States now has, on orbit, space-control weapons.”
Meink said he would not go into the “specifics” of the weapons. However, a US Space Force spokesperson said that space control can refer to “employing kinetic [combat] and non-kinetic means to affect adversary capabilities”.
The statement added that “these capabilities can be employed for offensive and defensive purposes”.
Responding to the US announcement, China’s foreign ministry said Washington was “preparing for war in outer space”, and warned against turning space “into a battlefield, as well as an arms race there”.
It has been an open secret that the US, Russia and China are working on space weapons, which could include signal jammers to disable other satellites or more “kinetic” options including those that fire projectiles.
Still, space experts warn a public confirmation of such capabilities in orbit for the first time could accelerate a risky arms race.
Astronomer Jonathan McDowell who has spent decades compiling a list of rocket launches, told the Guardian it was reasonable to assume Washington had such weapons in space, likely jammers, as it had already deployed several satellites with secret payloads.
He said that after the announcement, Russia and China would now “respond in kind” and deploy their own weapons.
“In the long run, I find it questionable whether this is in the US national interest, and for sure we will see comparable systems from China, if they don’t already have them,” he said.
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Even radio jamming would be a big escalation of military activity in space, said McDowell, who worked at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics until he retired this year.
Victoria Samson, the Secure World Foundation’s chief director of space security and stability, told the Defence One website that the US now has to accept that the Chinese and Russians will do the same. “Well, that’s huge, because I don’t think any US government official has ever said that before,” she said.
While the militarisation of space began in the 1950s with both Washington and Moscow exploring ways to destroy satellites, there have been attempts over the decades to preserve the emptiness around Earth for peaceful means.
In 1967, superpowers and other countries signed the Outer Space Treaty, which banned weapons of mass destruction in orbit. The end of the cold war in 1989 brought a moment of cooperation – including the in-orbit assembly of the International Space Station by multiple nations – but the 21st century has seen space gradually become a potential battlefield.
Russia sparked international criticism in 2021 when it struck one of its defunct satellites in orbit in a test of a ground-based anti-satellite missile. The blast created thousands of pieces of orbital debris.
As satellites zip around the Earth at thousands of miles an hour, the fear is that an orbital confrontation will lead to a domino effect where the space near Earth becomes cluttered with tiny, high-speed bits of metal.
McDowell, the astronomer, said that in the US, the mentality of working towards the solely peaceful use of space is changing. “The US sees conflict in space as something that is conceptually normalised, whereas 20 years ago it was ‘no, we will never want to do that’,” he said.
“I think this is wrong,” he added. “I also think it is still not too late to change course on this. To work mainly with China, because they are the real competitors in space now. I hope the US establishment takes a step back and rethinks some of this.”
Agence France-Presse contributed to this report
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