Putin has launched an expanded campaign to fight the West.
The main known unknown, publicly at least, is whether this is a space-based nuclear weapon in the most conventional sense of the term — nuclear warheads, atomic reactions, mushroom clouds. Or if, as many experts suspect, this is a nuclear-powered satellite carrying electronic weapons, which could cause havoc on Earth by crippling satellites that drive everything from weather forecasting and phone calls to wars and the global economy.
If it is the former — actual space nukes — that would be a violation of the United Nations’ Outer Space Treaty of 1967. One of its clauses says that countries are not allowed to “place nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction in orbit, or on celestial bodies, or station them in outer space in any other manner.”
One of the reasons this treaty was signed is the same reason that stationing nuclear weapons in orbit would be so dangerous: a country could loose a nuclear bomb from the heavens with very little warning. The sources said the Russian technology in question is designed to target American satellites, something experts say Russia — and other nuclear-armed powers — is more than capable of doing using intercontinental ballistic missiles, or ICBMs, launched from the ground.
Nevertheless, actually deploying nuclear weapons in orbit “would be a new escalatory step by the Russian Federation, which has already trashed a lot of arms control treaties,” said Mariana Budjeryn, a senior research associate at the Project on Managing the Atom, part of the Harvard Kennedy School. “This would be putting a nuclear weapon in space — where there have been none before.”
Other experts, reading between the lines of the reports, believe that this weapons system would be nuclear-powered rather than nuclear-armed. There has also been speculation that this is all linked to a classified Russian satellite, named Cosmos 2575, launched last week.
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