US “sleepwalking” towards space disaster, legislator warns

A U.S. lawmaker warned Thursday that Russia is about to usher in the end of the space age with its new anti-satellite nuclear weapons.

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Turner, a Republican from Ohio, told an audience in Washington that allowing Russia to gain such an advantage would be catastrophic. He called on President Joe Biden to mount an aggressive response.

“This crisis is the Cuban missile crisis in space,” Turner said, comparing the moment to the 1962 confrontation between the United States and the former Soviet Union, which brought both sides to the brink of nuclear conflict.

But in this case, Turner said, Russia could unilaterally impose high costs on the United States simply by detonating a anti-satellite nuclear weapon in orbit.

“This threat would mean that our economic, international security and social systems would come to a standstill,” he said. “This would be a catastrophic and devastating attack on Western economic and democratic systems.”

Turner, who accused Biden of “sleepwalking toward an irreversible day zero,” called on the White House to immediately declassify all of its intelligence on the Russian program so that the world is aware of the full extent of the threat.

The White House on Thursday rejected Turner’s allegations.

“He’s just wrong. He’s dead wrong,” White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told reporters.

“We’ve taken this very seriously,” Kirby said. “We have been working on this particular set of issues from every possible angle, including through intense diplomacy with countries around the world and obviously through direct talks with Russia.”

Russia has repeatedly denied the US accusations, including last month when Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov dismissed concerns as “fake news.”

“The Americans can say what they want, but our policy does not change,” Ryabkov told the Interfax news agency, adding that Moscow “has always consistently opposed the deployment of strike weapons in low-Earth orbit.”

Turner first expressed concern about the possibility of a Russian anti-satellite weapons program in February, when he issued a statement warning of “a serious threat to national security” and issued his initial call for the White House to declassify relevant intelligence.

Biden responded by confirming that Russia was developing a space-based anti-satellite weapons system, but added that there was no indication that Russia had decided to move forward with the program and that there was no nuclear threat to anyone on Earth.

Concerns increased last month when the United States accused Russia of using a May 16 space launch to deploy what the U.S. Department of Defense described as an anti-satellite weapon “capable of attacking other satellites in low-Earth orbit.”

“Russia deployed this new anti-space weapon into the same orbit as a U.S. government satellite,” Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder, the Pentagon press secretary, said at the time. “So, you know, obviously that’s something we’ll continue to monitor.”

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