Since time immemorial there have been wars and, since wars have existed, one truth has prevailed: he who strikes from above does more damage. Dionysius of Syracuse knew this when he began using catapults in the 4th century BC. C. and Lieutenant Giulio Gavotti knew it when he dropped the first bomb from an airplane in 1911 on the unfortunate soldiers of the Ottoman Empire. And the US government certainly knows it, alarmed last week by a mysterious space weapon that Russia has developed and about which little is still known.
That is why the history of war has been a race focused on climbing higher: occupying the hills, shooting over the walls, attacking from balloons and airplanes… and the next obvious step was beyond the sky. In 1944, for the first time, war reached space, when a V2 missile from Nazi Germany left the atmosphere very briefly on its way to England. Since then, space has been of high interest to all military powers, although it also remains the only place that humans have reached that has never been attacked or defended militarily.
The space race between the US and the Soviet Union is sometimes talked about as if it had only been a battle of prestige, but it was very much a military confrontation. Before Yuri Gagarin orbited the Earth and long before Neil Armstrong stepped on the Moon, their two countries had already achieved their great space goal: the development of intercontinental ballistic missiles that could carry nuclear weapons and detonate them in the enemy country.
The same can be said of satellites: since the sixties the two powers have been using them to spy on each other from space, and many of the technologies for which they are fundamental today (television, meteorology, GPS…) first had a military use. The next thing was to prepare for a nuclear space war. In the summer of 1962, the US detonated a hydrogen bomb 100 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb at an altitude of 400 kilometers above the Pacific. The explosion was such that the sky 3,200 kilometers away was illuminated. The Soviets did a similar test three months later.
To avoid the next step in space nuclear escalation, the UN promoted the Outer Space Treaty in 1967. It prohibits the hosting of weapons of mass destruction in space and military activities on “celestial bodies” such as the Moon. By then the US had already decided that moving and maintaining nuclear bombs in orbit was too dangerous, while the USSR was going to interpret that the treaty did not affect its space nuclear weapons because they were not “in orbit”: they would never complete a completes orbit around the Earth before hitting its target.
What has been proposed several times, especially by the US, is the installation of an anti-missile system in orbit. As part of President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, more popularly known as “Star Wars,” in the 1980s the possibility of having a massive network of tiny satellites programmed to detect and crash into a missile launched by the USSR was studied. The invention was discarded because it was too expensive and complex, and also because of the end of the Cold War.
If the US is now worried about this mysterious new Russian space weapon, it is because it would apparently allow Putin to launch nuclear attacks against satellite networks. For Washington it is an alarming prospect, because its military capacity depends largely on them: they guide weapons and planes, monitor what is happening on Earth and warn if an attack is coming through the air, maintain communications… A military power, Without its satellite network, it is blind and handcuffed. Not to mention that society in general relies on them to communicate, watch television, use Google Maps or know what the weather is going to be like.
The military problem with satellites is that they are easy to find and difficult to defend. As the general who commands the newly created US Space Force said at the beginning of the year, “in space there is nothing to hide behind.” The Soviets experimented with putting cannons aboard their satellites decades ago, but the biggest risk does not appear to be a boarding from another ship. Now, even countries like China or India already have missiles and lasers capable of shooting down satellites.
If in space attacking is easy and defending is difficult, this leads us to an obvious and worrying consequence: that whoever strikes first has a great advantage, and, therefore, the temptation to strike first is very great. These similarities with the nuclear race of the Cold War are noticeable in the importance that the great powers give to space: in 2015 Russia created its Space Army as an independent structure, the same as the US in 2019. France and, from 2022 , Spain also added the title “and space” to its Air Armies. For nine years, China has had a “Strategic Support Force” that deals with space warfare, cyberwarfare and the defense of electromagnetic space.
The goal, as the motto of the new service of the US armed forces says, is clear: to be “always from the top.” Right now, the great military struggle in space goes from the Earth’s surface to the most distant orbital satellites, about 36,000 kilometers away. In the future, it is foreseeable that the disputes will expand to at least the 385,000 kilometers that separate us from the Moon. The effort and investment required to be able to hit others from above has multiplied exponentially since the catapult of Dionysius of Syracuse, and will continue to do so even more.
