China and Russia push for space demilitarization as US confirms orbital weapons

Analysts warn disclosure risks accelerating orbital arms race

China’s foreign ministry accused Washington on Monday of “preparing for war in outer space,” warning against turning space “into a battlefield, as well as an arms race there,” in response to a public US announcement that the country has deployed weapons in orbit. The remarks followed the first public acknowledgment by a US official that weapons are now operational in space, delivered earlier the same day at the Air, Space, Cyber Conference.

US Secretary of the Air Force Troy Meink told the conference that Washington now has “on orbit, space-control weapons.” “Today, we continue to ensure we remain ready to meet the challenges of evolving threats wherever they exist,” Meink said. “This is why the United States now has, on orbit, space-control weapons.” Meink declined to elaborate on the weapons’ “specifics.” A US Space Force spokesperson said space control could include “employing kinetic [combat] and non-kinetic means to affect adversary capabilities” and added that “these capabilities can be employed for offensive and defensive purposes.”

In Moscow, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told reporters that Russia believed “space must be free of any weapon” and called for “the complete demilitarisation of space.”

The astronomer Jonathan McDowell, who has tracked rocket launches for decades and worked at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics until he retired this year, told the Guardian it was reasonable to assume Washington had such weapons in space — probably jammers — given its history of launching satellites with secret payloads. He said even radio jamming would constitute “a big escalation of military activity in space.”

McDowell predicted that, after the announcement, Russia and China would “respond in kind” and deploy their own weapons. “In the long run, I find it questionable whether this is in the US national interest, and for sure we will see comparable systems from China, if they don’t already have them,” he said.

Victoria Samson, the Secure World Foundation’s chief director of space security and stability, told the Defence One website that the United States now had to accept that the Chinese and Russians would follow suit. “Well, that’s huge, because I don’t think any US government official has ever said that before,” she said.

The militarization of space dates to the 1950s, when both Washington and Moscow explored ways to destroy satellites. The 1967 outer space treaty banned weapons of mass destruction in orbit but did not impose a general prohibition on placing conventional weapons in Earth orbit. The end of the Cold War brought a period of cooperation, including the multinational assembly of the International Space Station, but the 21st century has seen space treated increasingly as a potential battlefield.

Russia drew international criticism in 2021 when it struck one of its defunct satellites in a test of a ground-based anti-satellite missile, an action that created thousands of pieces of orbital debris. Analysts have warned that any orbital confrontation risks a domino effect in which the space around Earth becomes cluttered with tiny, high-speed fragments.

McDowell argued that the US approach to conflict in space had shifted over two decades. “The US sees conflict in space as something that is conceptually normalised, whereas 20 years ago it was ‘no, we will never want to do that,’” he said. He added: “I think this is wrong. I also think it is still not too late to change course on this. To work mainly with China, because they are the real competitors in space now. I hope the US establishment takes a step back and rethinks some of this.”