The House Intelligence Committee Chair asked Biden to declassify intel on reported nuclear anti-satellite weapon
House Intelligence Committee Chair Mike Turner (R-Ohio) called on President Joe Biden to declassify all intelligence reports related to an unnamed “serious national security threat” on Wednesday, as reported by ABC News. Jake Sullivan, White House national security adviser, addressed the remarks in a press briefing, assured reporters the country faced no imminent threat of attack, and confirmed that he reached out to congressional leaders. Sullivan offered no further details of the supposed threat.
According to ABC News, two sources familiar with deliberations on Capitol Hill told the outlet that the classified intelligence involved Russian ambitions to put a nuclear weapon into space — not to drop a nuclear weapon onto Earth, but rather to possibly use against satellites. “It is very concerning and very sensitive,” one source reportedly told the outlet, calling it “a big deal.”
“Current and former officials said the nuclear weapon was not in orbit,” The New York Times reported, confirming ABC News’ report. Turner’s warning comes ahead of a previously planned Thursday meeting on the topic between congressional leaders and Biden’s top security advisers which Turner is scheduled to attend. Sullivan said he “was a bit surprised that Congressman Turner came out today.”
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KE payloads are probably the most useful. Scatter lead shot and let Kessler take over. Explosives are quite a bit weaker, though explosively formed projectiles might be useful- or something like a claymore spraying shrapnel.
In any case, they may be intending to detonate a nuke in orbit for the EMP effect. It would probably knock out everything that’s not military (like Starlink.), in an area much larger than what conventional weapons would do.
Nuking orbit like that would piss off a lot of people; including NATO. (And presumably China.)
Unless you want to take out a whole bunch of them. Swarm of nanosats with some kind of miniexplosives or even just one-use engines to force deorbiting would probably still be more efficient, unless…
Unless you want to go for geostationary. A real crowd of satellitrs which have a feature of always looking at the same part of the Earth. While it would be very easy to send a boom device to low earth orbit (also very crowded), erasing a bunch of satellites there would be a temporary inconvenience (let’s not talk about Kessler) since a lot of what’s important is either a global constellation (starlink, gps) or has redundancies (earth observation comes to mind). But explode a nuke in the geostationary over the US and suddenly America has no sat TV/radio, no weather sat coverage and it’s harder to patch up than “just” replacing missing nodes of a constellation.
I think they’d need to send something bigger than tsar bomba up there to do that, wouldn’t even a nuclear explosive lack it’s terran scale in space without the enhancing effects of an atmosphere? Edit: ohhhh nevermind, EMP.
Also that would certainly be a MAD event where we’d be forced to retaliate on a nuclear scale?