Minister warns of China space attack
It’s ‘new battleground’ after Russia satellite missile
BRITAIN must prepare for a new battleground in space as China and Russia develop weapons to take out satellites, Defence Secretary Ben Wallace warned yesterday.
He revealed that China is developing ‘offensive space weapons’.
His comments come after the Mail reported last Friday that Russia risked triggering a space war by test-firing an anti-satellite weapon into orbit.
Ministers are expected to channel more money and manpower to the domains of space and cyber-security as a result of a major ongoing integrated defence review.
Mr Wallace warned that Russia’s ‘provocative’ test firing was ‘threatening the peaceful use of space’. He said: ‘China, too, is developing offensive space weapons and both nations are upgrading their capabilities. Such behaviour only underlines the importance of the review the Government is currently conducting into our foreign, security, defence and development policy – the deepest and most radical since the end of the Cold War.’
He wrote in the Sunday Telegraph that terrorists releasing a chemical weapon or a highlevel cyber-attack are also possible threats that Britain faces in a post-Covid 19 world. He vowed that the UK will take steps to protect itself against the range of military threats in a sweeping review of the country’s defences, due to conclude in the autumn.
Mr Wallace said it will lead to his ministry ‘pivoting away’ from a focus on conventional warfare to ‘operate much more in the newest domains of space, cyber and sub-sea’.
He added that the world is ‘moving at an unprecedented pace and our defence must move with it’, stressing: ‘Our adversaries go further, deeper and higher. The binary distinction between peace and war has vanished.’
Mr Wallace insisted that access to space is ‘fundamental to our way of life’. MPs have warned that the type of anti-satellite weapon Russia is accused of firing could cripple the UK’s systems. Russia has dismissed the accusation as ‘propaganda’.
Mr Wallace wrote that, as traditional conflicts change, with space, cyber and data the new battlegrounds, Britain needs to take action to ‘outmanoeuvre our adversaries with a sharper technological edge and relentless focus on innovation’.
Russia’s anti-satellite weapons test caused widespread alarm, with UKspace – the trade association of the British space industry – warning such missiles could mean ‘the end of space’ as humans know and use it. UKspace president Will Whitehorn told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: ‘If you actually fired at other satellites, space would quickly become a field of massive shrapnel and...that would be the end of space.’
Lieutenant General Sir Simon Mayall, ex-deputy chief of defence staff, also urged the UK to push against anti-satellite weapon development, saying: ‘The consequences [are there] for every nation on Earth of some kind of catastrophic confrontation in space because we are so reliant on satellites.’
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