Jessica West A clip from 195: Outer Space
Jessica West: The Outer Space Treaty is an excellent treaty but it’s a product of its era, the 1960s. It does ban the use or the orbiting or placement of weapons of mass destruction in outer space, notably nuclear weapons, but it’s otherwise silent on conventional weapons. There have been efforts to plug that hole in the treaty through the Conference on Disarmament for about 40 years now but instead it’s gotten bigger.
Metta Spencer: What conventional weapons could anybody use in space? Bows and arrows? Landmines? There’s not much you can do there, except with high-tech weapons like nuclear weapons or lasers. Are they forbidden?
West: No. What “conventional force” refers to now is non-nuclear— mainly the kinetic use of force to destroy an object in orbit.
Spencer: Meaning bombs?
West: We’ve gone beyond bombs. Some states have the capability to use a modified anti-ballistic missile system to target a satellite instead of a missile. China was first to kick off a new era of arms race in outer space. In 2008, China demonstrated its capability to modify its ballistic missile defense system by destroying one of their own satellites on orbit. The United States followed suit in 2008, although in a less destructive demonstration. And India is the latest to demonstrate this capability in 2019. That’s a kinetic use of force—a conventional use of force. You’re not exploding a nuclear weapon, but you’re using a weapon system to destroy an object in space. That is legal.
So, filling this hole is a focus of the International diplomatic and space community. War in space used to be taboo, but we’ve seen in the last few years a shift toward considering outer space a domain of warfare, the same as air and earth and the seas. We see it with the creation of the US Space Force. Spencer: The other day I think you said that countries already interrupt each other’s satellite transmissions all the time. I thought, Oh, my God, I didn’t know that. Did you say what I thought you said?
West: Yeah. Satellites are essentially data collection and dissemination systems. Their value lies in the information that they send back to Earth, usually through use of the radio frequency spectrum. That’s not protected or hardened. It’s easy to disrupt the radio frequency spectrum. Electronic warfare includes the jamming of satellite signals so that they’re temporarily unavailable or the spoofing of satellite signals. There have been news reports over the years of ships that were going the wrong way or GPS being jammed.
Spencer: You make that sound normal.
West: It is normal. It’s not unique to space. Electronic warfare also takes place against aircraft and any kind of weapon system that uses the radio frequency spectrum. The question is, how do you stop that from escalating further?