Star Wars, the remake? The arms race in space is nothing new. As early as 1985, in the midst of the Cold War, the Pentagon used a missile to destroy a satellite during a test. At the time, the United States was battling with the USSR over who would take control of space, driving Moscow to ruin. Since then, its rivals have demonstrated that they have the same skills: China did it in 2007, India in 2019. And at the end of 2021, Russia pulverized one of its own satellites with a missile launched from Earth.
Space has “fundamentally transformed” in a few years, under the effect of an exponential arms race, estimated an American general in Munich, now designating China as the “biggest threat” to be countered, ahead of the Russia. “We see a whole range of weapons produced by our strategic adversaries,” General Bradley Chance Saltzman, chief of space operations in the US Air Force, told three media outlets. “The biggest threat comes from the People’s Republic of China, but also from Russia,” he said on Saturday evening on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference.
Satellites armed with bombs and ships firing lasers
“Space, as a contested domain, has fundamentally changed. Our way of operating there must evolve, mainly because of the range of weapons that China and Russia have tried and sometimes used, “he insisted, pointing to directed energy weapons, anti-satellite missiles and others. orbital intercepts. His remarks, rather expected in view of the military space activities of the great powers, resonate all the more after the tense meeting, on Saturday in the German city, between the heads of American and Chinese diplomacy following the destruction of a Chinese balloon which flew over the United States.
Indeed, potentially bomb-armed satellites and laser-firing spacecraft are no longer just science fiction. “Our adversaries are taking advantage of space to target (us) and extend the range of their weapons,” General Saltzman noted. Countries are increasingly secretive about their military activities in space, but the race is such that in 2019, the year the Pentagon launched its Space Force, a senior US official believed that the Russia and China had the potential to overtake the United States.
General Saltzman met in Munich with Norwegian Defense Minister Bjørn Arild Gram and participated in a panel discussion. “We talked about responsible behavior,” explained the soldier. “There is a good way to behave, which does not generate debris, which does not interfere, which maintains safe distances, with communication in the event of problems”, he noted. Because space is bound to be “increasingly congested”. Hence the need for normative rules, via new international treaties, the existing texts no longer responding to technological developments.
