Should the world worry about America’s new space weapons?

When Troy Meink, the chief of the US 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? It can’t be to frighten the Chinese or the Russians, because they have long been watching US military activities in space.

They regularly monitor the flights of the semi-secret X-37B “orbital test vehicle”, the reusable uncrewed spaceplane that the US 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 highspeed manoeuvres of warships in formation, a frequent cause of collisions.)

Reuters reported a year ago on a joint US-British operation in which the US 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? Just because they could?

This is not to say people who worry about war in space are fools, or the whole business of weapons in space is harmless, but there is considerably less than meets the eye.

Meink’s revelation was no news to America’s adversaries.

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 importance 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.

However, the electromagnetic pulse (EMP) generated by a nuclear weapon detonated at high altitude – 500km, 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 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.

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.

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.