War in space: another shared resource we seem determined to wreck

I was reading The Week’s summary of Sidharth Kaushal’s warning about warfare in space, and it’s a fairly depressing reminder of how quickly useful technology becomes something governments want to destroy.

Satellites help us navigate, forecast the weather, communicate and understand what’s happening on Earth. They also help armed forces find targets and coordinate operations.

Which means the infrastructure underpinning ordinary life becomes part of the battlefield. Even several hundred kilometres above us, apparently, we can’t have nice things.

The battlefield is already useful to civilians

The clipping describes a Russian satellite approaching a satellite supporting Ukraine, alongside concerns about weapons in orbit. A close approach alone doesn’t establish that an attack was intended, but the wider strategic problem is easy enough to understand.

If your opponent depends on satellites to see what you’re doing, interfering with those satellites becomes attractive. The difficulty is that civilian and military uses don’t always sit in neatly separate boxes.

You can’t fence off the debris

There are already rules. The United Nations’ explanation of the Outer Space Treaty makes clear that placing nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction in orbit is prohibited. That matters, although it should not be confused with a comprehensive ban on every military use of space.

The clipping discusses a possible nuclear detonation in orbit. I wouldn’t treat its precise damage estimate as a universal prediction: outcomes would depend on the weapon, location and satellites involved. The broader prospect is alarming enough without pretending there’s one simple number for the consequences.

Physical destruction also creates a problem which doesn’t respect national loyalties. Debris keeps moving. It can threaten spacecraft belonging to countries which had nothing to do with the original confrontation.

The European Space Agency’s 2025 environment report, using data through the end of 2024, estimated more than 1.2 million debris objects larger than a centimetre. It warned that fragmentation and further collisions threaten the long-term usability of orbital space.

That is the situation before anyone decides deliberately smashing things up is a good idea.

There’s a familiar collective-action problem here. Each government can claim that developing another capability improves its security. Together, those decisions can make the shared environment less secure for everybody, including the governments paying for the weapons.

Final thoughts

I’m not suggesting that military competition disappears if everyone signs a nicely worded agreement. Verification, enforcement and the difficulty of distinguishing civilian equipment from military capabilities are serious problems.

But protecting orbital infrastructure should be treated as a practical shared interest. Rules against destructive behaviour, better communication and greater transparency are worth pursuing precisely because distrust is so high.

We’ve already made a considerable mess of managing shared resources down here. Repeating the exercise in orbit would be an expensive achievement, especially when the people paying the price may simply be trying to use services they assumed would keep working.