Mission Shakti: The Indian Anti-Satellite Test

Jeffrey Lewis 0:01

I mean, we're not gonna do it. Like, we're gonna it up, don't get me wrong. You are listening to the Arms Control Wonk podcast, the leading podcast on arms control, nonproliferation, and disarmament. I'm Jeffrey Lewis, the founding publisher of the Arms Control Wonk blog and a scholar at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey.

Aaron Stein 0:24

And I'm Aaron Stein, the director of the Middle East Program at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in a still-cold Philadelphia.

Ankit Panda 0:30

And I'm Ankit Panda. I'm an adjunct senior fellow at the Federation of American Scientists based here in New York City.

Jeffrey 0:37

Aaron, we have a guest.

Aaron 0:39

We do. You know, test a missile, get a pod. We had a missile test yesterday. Or was it two days ago? I've already lost count of the days. There's been so much news.

Jeffrey 0:47

Ankit, you're the guest.

Ankit 0:48

When was it? Well, it was the 27th in India, so I guess we can say a day ago. Yeah, it's the 28th while we're recording this on the east coast of the North American continent.

Jeffrey 0:57

Well, you're on the east coast. I'm up here in Canada. What side of Canada are you on? Somewhere in the middle. Ottawa. Okay, got it. The capital.

Aaron 1:05

Is it spring there yet?

Jeffrey 1:08

The Canadians reliably inform me that this is what spring feels like, but I don't fucking believe it.

Aaron 1:15

Well, they're our friends to the north. So what happened, guys? I mean, was this expected? I mean, I'm going to be honest. I woke up to this. This was all over my Twitter feed, and I had to do a double take because it's been a while since we've had an anti-satellite test, although I know Jeffrey doesn't like that word.

Ankit 1:36

Yeah, I mean, I don't think anybody was really sitting around expecting India to do one of these kinds of tests any day now. As far as the Indians having the technology, I would say that was expected in the sense that, you know, we've remarked going back to 2011, 2012 from pretty senior people at the Defense Research and Development Organization or the The egghead scientists were tasked with coming up with all these interceptors and technologies and ballistic missiles and all that good stuff, basically saying that we have the building blocks in place to conduct one of these tests.

And maybe that's something we can talk about later with the general, I guess, the applications of hit-to-kill technology against ballistic missile reentry vehicles and satellites alike. So in that sense, it was expected. But no, I wasn't sitting around in early 2019 waiting for the Indians to blow up a satellite.

Jeffrey 2:24

Well, I predicted this back in 2007, but that was so f***ing long ago, I forgot I had told you so.

Aaron 2:30

Is it written on the old Arms Control Wonk archives?

Jeffrey 2:33

No, it was actually in a paper I published for Unidear on hit-to-kill technologies, the spread of missile defenses, and the possibility that other countries, particularly India and Israel, would develop anti-satellite weapons using their then-nascent hit-to-kill ballistic missile defenses.

Ankit 2:53

Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. And 2007, everybody was talking about this with the Chinese tests against the Fengyuan-1C satellite and all the debris, and it was a much higher altitude intercept than what the Indians did.

Aaron 3:06

Yeah, no, I think that's a good segue. I mean, let's just talk about what it hit and where, because there are some differences from that Chinese test that was in 2007. And it looks like the Indians tried to be a more, quote-unquote, responsible actor in this anti-satellite test or this test.

Ankit 3:22

I mean, so I think one of the reasons the Indians didn't do this test in 2012, which is when I think – the DRDO scientists, if you listen to comments being made by – I forgot what his initials are – VP Saraswat, who was the director of DRDO, he's been on the record in the past 48 hours talking about – What DRDO was really ready to do back then.

And he seems to be a little bit upset at the fact that the then government in India didn't give him a long enough leash to carry out one of these things. But basically, yeah, as far as being a responsible power goes, I think one of the reasons India didn't do it back then is because they knew that this would be something that risks getting a little bit more international condemnation So I think the political space now with the Trump administration not really caring about these sorts of things too much may have given New Delhi an idea that he could probably get away with this now.

And I think we can talk about the American statement later. But yes, Aaron, I'm going to talk about what the Indians actually did. So everybody's favorite Indian missile range, Abdul Kalam Island off the coast of Odisha and the Bay of Bengal. Was where they emplaced this experimental interceptor that DRDO is calling a ballistic missile defense interceptor, which I think is interesting, you know, capital B, M, and D in the statement that came out.

So that's what they're calling this thing. They're not calling it a bespoke sort of anti-satellite weapon, which I think is actually pretty interesting. So they use this weapon early morning, we think, based on the trajectory of the satellite that a few smart people on Twitter have been able to identify as Marco Langbrook. Exactly. Marco Langbrook and a few other people.

I don't want to leave them out because I think it was it was a collaborative effort. But but yeah, it seems to be this Indian satellite that was launched on January 25th this year. So the Indians pretty much put something up there and immediately shut it down. The satellite was, I think it was called a Microsat-R. Don't let that fool you.

It wasn't a small object. It was about the same size, actually, as the Fengyin-1C in terms of mass. It was a 740-kilogram object. I believe the Chinese one was 750. But the altitude for the actual intercept makes the better comparison the shootdown of USA-193 in 2008 in Operation Burnt Frost. When an SM-3 Block 1 interceptor was used to shoot down that satellite at an altitude of around 240 kilometers.

So the Americans basically got away with saying that the debris dissipated pretty quickly, and that seems to be what the Indians are doing too. Just before we started doing this, I saw an article in Reuters quoting a bunch of Indian officials that basically say they expect the debris to be entirely vanished, quote-unquote, in 45 days. And, you know, in the same article, they note that they're still doing the math.

So that could be entirely wrong. But that's that's kind of what happened.

Jeffrey 6:03

I would be shocked if actually all of the debris is gone in 45 days. I would bet the vast majority will be gone. But, you know, we've seen in the previous tests and we should put on the list, you know, there's the mid 80s test the US did. Sometimes you get debris that pops up in like a higher orbit.

Ankit 6:22

Yeah.

Jeffrey 6:23

So, you know, I don't know when we looked at the Chinese test, there's like a whole, I don't know why don't you call it like a whole political aspect to debris calculations? Because. Like the Chinese didn't think that the amount of debris they created resulted in an unreasonable hazard, which I think statistically is probably true. And so they were like not prepared for how like how upset people got.

Yeah.

Aaron 6:52

So let me stop you here just because I think it's important to talk about what that debris is and like maybe the difference in altitudes between the Chinese test and this Indian test for like why people were so upset about the Chinese test.

Jeffrey 7:02

It's probably important to talk about what debris is because, you know, this is a hit-to-kill system. And so the interceptor is going to collide with the satellite and it's going to be just kinetic energy and it's going to smash those two things. And since things are in orbit, like orbit... Orbit's not flying, right? Things are falling. It's just that they're falling at such a fast speed that they're falling over the horizon.

So a lot of the fragments and remnants are going to remain there. And then because they're low, they'll sort of degrade for a while. But it's going to, like, take a long time.

Ankit 7:40

Yeah, I mean, one of the analogies that I heard, or at least remember reading from a physicist about these kinds of interactions, and I'm not a physicist, so if I get this wrong, I do apologize, is that when you have something like a hit-to-kill interceptor colliding with a satellite, it's actually easier to think about this in terms of two almost liquid objects colliding.

You know, the analogy that's often used that India, you know, quote-unquote, shot down a satellite is very misleading because nothing gets shot down. You have these two objects colliding, one of which is much smaller, the interceptor colliding with the larger object. And you basically have a blob of debris of various sizes, mostly remaining on the trajectory that the original satellite was on.

But some of it does get thrown up to higher altitudes depending on the angle of the intercept. So I bet that's what the Indians are trying to figure out at this point. And I will say, and we're going to get to this, but the U.S. statement suggests to me that, you know, Washington hasn't finished its calculations. The State Department simply noted that they had noted India's statement on the debris, but they offer no assessment of the damage that had been caused.

Jeffrey 8:43

And I guess it's important to mention why people are worked up about debris, because there are, you know, because things in orbit tend to stay in orbit, you know, I mean, I think that 45 days, probably most of it will be gone, but... Some of it will remain a little bit longer than that. That's like a prolonged period of risk where those fragments could then cross paths with and shatter other satellites, right?

And so there is for some orbits, this is low enough that it's probably not a risk, but there are some orbits where there's so much mass. In that orbit, that there's a genuine fear of what's called collisional cascading, which is a situation where if you had a breakup at the wrong time, it could break up other satellites in a way that would be like functionally a chain reaction.

And so you could really lose a lot of satellites and then for a long time lose access to a particular orbit if your debris event was in the wrong place at the wrong time. I don't think that's going to happen here, but it's like the reason like none of us are crazy about the development of hit to kill anti-satellite weapons.

Ankit 9:50

Yeah, and I think that's how Alfonso Cuaron's Gravity uses that as a bit of a plot point, if I'm not mistaken. I haven't seen that movie in ages, but all I know is that George Clooney tragically dies to an anti-satellite test causing a cascading collapse, so there you go. If you want a dramatic Hollywood representation of that, you can watch that movie.

Sandra Bullock's actually lovely in it. I can't speak to the accuracy of the orbital dynamics or anything, but

Aaron 10:17

It's visually stunning, but it's also one of those movies that you need to see in the theater. But now we've gone off topic. But, you know, that is actually the plot.

Jeffrey 10:25

Well, you know what? Before we get back on topic, though, I have to ask Ankit, do you know? So I'm so old. I remember when Abdul Kalam was a scientist rather than a famous dead person. Yeah. So I still think of it as Wheeler Island. Who the hell was Wheeler?

Ankit 10:42

That's a good question. I don't have the answer for you right now. Probably an old British guy is my guess.

Aaron 10:51

Oh, that's funny. I was talking – I was at a conference in the Middle East yesterday. We were talking about old British guys. They never seem to go away. But the Indians have put out – Pictures of the missile. I think they put out two images. One of which is pretty clear, and then they described it in the statement announcing the test.

I think it's a three-stage system, and you can clearly see that in the picture.

Ankit 11:16

Yeah, it's an interesting-looking missile. It's new. It's not one of the existing interceptors. I was trying to do some mental, I guess, walkthrough of Indian systems and what they might have used, and the most promising candidate was the Prithvi defense vehicle, which was their most promising exo-atmospheric system before they showed off this new missile. It seems to me that they used the actual...

Third stage, the the third stage from the, from the parentheses in use in this new system, they're just calling the BMD interceptor, I suppose but yeah, the rest of it looks pretty new. And I have to say, as far as the aesthetics of Indian missiles go, this is probably one of the better looking ones we have out there. It's true, it's not a bad looking missile. Have you seen the pictures, Jeffrey?

Jeffrey 12:00

I have. I also agree with Ankit that generally Indian missiles are ugly, and I can't figure out why that is. They generally look like the missiles that my children draw. The original Agni is very long and thin, and the Prithvi looks like a chode. I don't know what else to say. But this thing looks... It does. You know, Ankit, I'm curious.

We haven't really sat down and had the time to kind of try to measure the diameter. But I don't know. Like, I was expecting this to be a Prithvi with some extra stuff up on top. Yeah.

Ankit 12:42

Yeah, I mean, it doesn't look like they reused the booster from the Prithvi defense vehicle. What it does look like, and again, I think this really comes down to the measurements, is that it might be an Agni 3 or Agni, probably not an Agni 5, probably too big, but Agni 3 derived booster, which would actually be sort of similar to what China did in 2007, right?

They used a DF-21 booster with a new kill vehicle on top. So that wouldn't be... Crazy for them to do. But yeah, I'm curious about the measurements to get a sense of what motor they might have used.

Jeffrey 13:17

I thought the Agni 3 and the Agni 5 had the same first and second stages and that the only difference was the addition of the conical third stage for the Agni 5. Am I wrong about that?

Ankit 13:31

I think you're right. I think there might be some differences in diameter, but I'll have to double check that.

Jeffrey 13:35

Oh, okay. Sorry, I got you got me distracted now because so this is the why it's the problem. Anytime you want to like we like start talking missiles, I make for a podcast because I want to go look up all the I want to look up all the details. You know, I mean, I think one other thing that it's a thing that I always forget the Prithvi.

There are two Prithvis. So there is the Prithvi that's in service, which is best I can tell is a liquid-fueled missile. And I don't know why the Indians did this, but they have developed the Prithvi defense vehicle, which is for missile defense and air defense missions. I guess it's an oversized air defense, but missile defense missions. And it's solid-fueled.

Ankit 14:23

That's right. Yeah, it is a bit confusing.

Jeffrey 14:26

And that makes no sense whatsoever. I don't understand why they didn't just give it a new name.

Ankit 14:35

Do you have any idea, Ankit? I have no idea. I honestly don't have an idea because these systems have been in development for a pretty long time, right? So the Indian Ballistic Missile Defense Program really starts in 1999, and of course you have the Prithvi already in development and testing before that time. So yeah, they could have very easily come up with a different name.

I'm sure part of it does have to do with making it just more difficult for people to talk about these things in general, because I guess the Indians don't really like it when people talk about their weapons too much. But yeah, I don't have a clear answer for why DRDO wouldn't give it another designation that would make it a little bit more disambiguated from the ballistic missile.

Jeffrey 15:14

I guess the thing that is notable here is that India has now... You know, now has so many different solid-fueled missiles under development, right? Because they've got the Prele, which is going to partially replace the liquid-fueled Prithvi. They have, you know, the Prithvi defense vehicle. They have this thing. And then they have, you know, the whole Agni series.

So... I mean, I don't know. Maybe if you've just come to this late, this is just like what India has always been like. But, you know, if you started like 20 years ago, like I did, it's really shocking how far they've come.

Ankit 15:50

Yeah, I mean, one answer to your question about the Prithvi and the missile defense Prithvi is that you have the Prithvi air defense system, which is another Prithvi that's not designed to serve as a ballistic missile.

Aaron 16:00

And that was a liquid fuel system.

Ankit 16:01

Oh, God, there was another one? Yeah, it was a liquid fuel system based on the Prithvi. So I think they... Basically reuse the Prithvi name and they call it Prithvi Air Defense and it's a liquid fuel system. And then for some reason, the program develops to the point where they have a solid fuel hit to kill system and they decide to call it the Prithvi Defense Vehicle.

It's madness.

Aaron 16:19

I was about to say, if you're following that, good luck at home. But like one of the things that I think before we switch to like the underlying technologies about this sort of the idea of hit to kill is we sort of skipped over it at the beginning. But I think it's important is one is there's political reasons that is going on.

India is going to have an election and to something that Vipin Narang, friend of the podcast, has done as well that I think you talked about on a podcast. On the Warcast over at our friends at War on the Rocks about in terms of how they want to actually use these things as part of their nuclear doctrine.

Ankit 16:53

Yeah, that I think is the thing that very few people are talking about. I haven't seen it really talked about in most of the coverage. So the way that this has been covered kind of generally, and I'm not one to really be a media scold or anything like that generally, is that India is going to use these weapons to shoot down satellites in a conflict.

And I think that's a little ridiculous because Pakistan, I think, has only ever launched six satellites, and it's quite a... You know, quite an inadept space actor in general. That might change, of course, in the future, but I really don't think it's about actually using what was demonstrated on Wednesday in a conflict to shoot down satellites. With China, I think there's a different discussion, but I think a shooting war with China where India thinks it actually makes sense to shoot down satellites is probably a shooting war that India's already lost, to be honest.

But let's talk about the Pakistan half of this, right? So, I think what India demonstrated, so first of all, this was the highest altitude hit-to-kill test that India had ever completed, right? So, when you look at this from that angle, it starts to get a little bit more interesting, and it starts to get a little bit more interesting, especially if you're sitting in Rawalpindi or Islamabad, because you start worrying about, you know, you look at your missiles, you look at your Shaheen-3, and you think about the apogee at which that's going to be flying towards potential Indian targets.

And you look at what the Indians just showed off with this hit-to-kill system, and you start to think that, okay, maybe the Indians are getting quite serious about their layered missile defense system, right? They're acquiring S-400s. They have their own indigenous terminal defense systems that they're probably going to place around their major cities. And now they have a system that could potentially deal with Pakistani short- and medium-range systems in midcourse.

And that, if you're Pakistan... Gets you worried because as Chris Clary and Vipin Narang, who you just mentioned, showed in their recent international security paper, which I think is probably one of the most important things to be written about Indian nuclear strategy in a while, is that there is a very large body of evidence, including statements by former and serving Indian officials, that has cast a lot of serious doubt, first of all, on India's qualified no-first-use posture.

But also that India is very seriously thinking about breaking out of the trap that Pakistan has put it into with its development of battlefield nuclear weapons like the Nasser by thinking about disarming first strikes. And, of course, we can talk about how, you know, nobody really advocates this for India because, as we just saw in late February, the Indians seem to still have problems with ISR and actually hitting things accurately, right?

They hit the side of a mountain instead of the terrorist camp that they tried to hit at a balakot at the end of February.

Jeffrey 19:28

Oh, my God. We're going to get so much hate mail now. Yeah, exactly.

Ankit 19:31

It's okay. I can handle it.

Aaron 19:34

I just think that's the launch angle of the pilot. But anyways, I have my own theories on that.

Ankit 19:38

Well, yeah. But something went wrong and something will go wrong in a conflict. So the idea that ballistic missile defense is going to sweep up the residuals of Pakistani forces is probably not going to be something that India can rely on right now. But I think the evidence that Clary and Narang put together – Paints a pretty convincing picture that the Indians are thinking about this.

And yeah, so I think if you look at this as, broadly speaking, a high-altitude hit-to-kill demonstration with serious implications for the sophistication of Indian ballistic missile defense, I think that has serious consequences and can be pretty destabilizing with Pakistan.

Aaron 20:12

I was going to tee you up because this is your 2007 I told you so moment about the movement of the underlying technology, hit to kill rather than classifying as anti-satellite.

Jeffrey 20:24

I'm really struck at how similar I think in some ways this is to the Chinese experience where when both of these programs start It's not so much that somebody went out and said, get me an anti-satellite weapon or get me a missile defense. It's like there is this particular technology that these countries see the United States pioneering, and they're like, we can do that too.

And so in the case of China, they develop it. And initially test it as an anti-satellite weapon, get all the blowback politically and then say, oh, well, I guess it's really a missile defense interceptor. And then they just keep testing it that way. Right. And I think the inverse of that. Right. But it's really the same kind of story is I think the Indians start off saying, oh, it's a missile defense interceptor because that's a that's a technology everybody wants.

But in all of these cases and you see it in the U.S. case, too. Once you have that fundamental hit-to-kill ability, whatever the first mission you picked, there's always a desire to do mission creep because you're like, well, I can do this other thing, right? So you saw that with, you know, there was this U.S. program called the KEASAT that got killed, budgetarily killed, and After the Chinese ASAT test, the US was like, oh, we really want to do one too.

And so they, you know, they came up with that silly burnt frost thing where they used a US, an SM-3 missile defense interceptor, right? So I just think that once you put that underlying technology in place, it's sort of inevitable that the program advocates are going to go ahead and try to exploit or explore all of the different mission areas that they can put it to use.

So, you know, whether this is... Whether this is just a one-off demonstration or whether it, you know, foretells a big, you know, ASAT force that, you know, comes down the line. Like I, yeah, I don't think it's about Pakistan and satellites, right? I think it's far more about the underlying desire to develop certain technologies. And then once you have them, you know, the fact that these programs tend to do mission creep.

Ankit 22:43

Yeah. I mean, I actually think this might be a good point to talk about what the Indians actually said about the test, because a lot of it doesn't make sense. They're talking about how they now have, you know, deterrence against other people wanting to shoot down their satellites, which, first of all, you'd want counter ASAT capabilities if that's what you really wanted.

So, I mean, that's yeah, that's like been kind of the big Indian justification is that, yes, we we're now a space superpower and we can deter people from messing with our peaceful civilian satellites. OK, like, first of all, that makes zero sense. And then there's the second half of it, which is that Modi and DRDO both emphasized the promptness and the precision of this mission, right?

Modi really went to pains to emphasize in his public address to the nation that this was all done within three minutes and it was super fast and it was super precise. And when I'm listening to that, I mean, all of that is kind of... Maybe a little ancillary unless you are really thinking about your hit-to-kill technologies as primarily being for ballistic missile defense purposes.

I should note that obviously the word Pakistan never appears in any of the Indian statements to come out, or even China. India actually emphasizes that this does not threaten any other country. I wonder what non-state groups might be launching this. Satellites anytime soon. I don't think Jeshay Muhammad's going to be setting up a space camp anytime soon or anything like that.

But, I mean, these are ultimately... Oh, my God. Wait, can we just pause and imagine orbital jihadists for a second? Peter Pry might be listening, Jeffrey, and I really think we should talk about this.

Aaron 24:05

Well, if they can do that, then maybe the jihadists can even do EMP attacks. So like this is a brand new world.

Jeffrey 24:10

I heard we had an executive order. Why did you see Matt Duss said that the Venn diagram of people who believe in EMP and the circle – in the Venn diagram of people who believe in EMP and creeping Sharia law is basically a circle.

Ankit 24:28

Yeah, cosine, cosine.

Aaron 24:31

Shout out to Matt Duss, friend of the podcast. But anyways, yeah, that's a good one. But keep going. Sorry, we cut you off.

Ankit 24:37

No, I mean, so when I look at the Indian statements and the public messaging around this, I think a lot of it is confused. I mean, also, yeah, there is the electoral factor. In no universe did this need to be a prime ministerial announcement to the entire country, right? Let's look at the precedents on that. So the other time Modi did one of these announcements— Was when he took out about 86% of India's currency in circulation in the demonetization announcement in November 2016.

Okay, that's a big deal. That's probably something you want to tell everybody in the country about. And the other time was when, you know, another prominent example was when India became a nuclear power in 1998 with the Pocron 2 tests. And people have been kind of breathlessly comparing the anti-satellite test To those nuclear tests, you know, when India broke out as a nuclear power saying that this is just as significant.

And of course, many of these same people just a month ago were saying the Balakot strikes were just as significant as the nuclear test. So the messaging around this is all pretty garbled. And a lot of it, I think, really obscures the strategic logic. So when I say that this is really about the underlying hit to kill technology and India's broader ambitions at being a more proficient ballistic missile defense country, I really kind of see all of this factoring into that pretty well, too.

Aaron 25:43

Well, I think one of the things that you laid out at the top is actually relevant here, is that there was pushback from within the scientific community that they could have done this in 2012, but they were restrained. And now in 2019, basically the shackles have been taken off so that they can demonstrate their capabilities, perhaps technical achievements, and maybe prowess being the right word.

Yeah, that's right.

Jeffrey 26:07

So, I mean, I have to ask, I'm sure that the planning for this Has been sometime in the coming. Right. So I don't I don't mean that the planning for this, but I mean, isn't the attention that he devoted to this? I mean, don't we think that it's in part affected by the fact that like. Right. Right.

Ankit 26:44

Yeah, I mean, you know, I thought about that. The fact that the Indian Air Force had a pilot shot down, lost one or two, I think it's still unclear, MiG-21s. The Pakistanis got to have their big gloating round. The international press sort of, depending on who you ask, you know, the Indians perceived that Pakistan kind of won the Indian public relations battle.

So, yeah, I mean, this is a way to kind of inject the country.

Jeffrey 27:04

What they missed!

Ankit 27:06

Well, yeah, they did. And this is a way for the prime minister.

Jeffrey 27:09

You got a pilot shot down and you miss. You lose. That's how it goes.

Ankit 27:11

Exactly. But no, I think you're right that this is a way to kind of shift the narrative nationally towards techno-optimism. Look, you know, we're not a incompetent air force still flying MiG-21s in 2019. But here we shot down a satellite. That's pretty cool.

Jeffrey 27:26

Right. So if only Pakistan would put those terrorist training camps in orbit, India will get them.

Ankit 27:32

Exactly.

Aaron 27:36

Find this funny? If we're gonna get hate mail, let's get really good. I'm like, my, my mentions are gonna just absolutely implode. I mean, I already get some really weird mentions like because I do the, the, the, the Turkey beat, and there's some really weird stuff that comes into my mentions, but this could like open me up to a much larger country. But I mean, Jeffrey, I mean, one of the things I, I think, as we, as we turn to wrap up here, is just, I mean.

I think you tweeted about it. It's just like the fundamental underlying technologies about hit to kill and then how they are applicable across, you know, basically, like, this is the mission creep if you begin to look at ways to shoot things down in orbit or at least shoot things down traveling in space.

Jeffrey 28:20

So, I mean, this is the paper that I wrote in 2007 where, you know, I used to go to this conference every year in Geneva funded by the Canadian government and the Simons Foundation who have brought me here to Ottawa to give a speech. And We always used to talk about anti-satellite weapons, right? But the problem is that's not a coherent intellectual category because anti-satellite weapons can be direct ascent hit-to-kill interceptors like we're talking about now.

They can be lasers. It could be the space shuttle with the little Canada arm grabbing satellites, right? Like anti-satellite, that's a mission, not a technology. And so at the time I wrote this paper saying a lot of those technologies are fanciful or impractical, but the thing that's spreading are missile defenses. And missile defenses make anti-satellite weapons, and we are entering a world in which everybody is developing these hit-to-kill missile defenses, right?

You've got them in the U.S., and we're co-developing them with Japan and Israel. And the Russians and the Chinese and the Indians are all developing these technologies. And so we're going to live in this world where lots and lots and lots of countries have the technical capability to shoot down satellites in a way that will create a lot of debris.

Which is a bad world to live in because one runs the risk that you're going to create so much debris in the event of a conflict that a lot of orbital environments will be unusable. So my point then was if you can't stop the spread of the underlying technologies, what you could do was try to impose a ban on anti-satellite or on debris-creating ASAT tests.

Don't let people test these systems because even if they have the underlying latent capability, what we saw eventually in the U.S. case is you still have to do a software fix and you still really want to validate that software fix. And unfortunately, it may be now too late for this because now the U.S. and the Chinese and the Russians...

And the Indians have all validated, you know, that they can indeed shoot down satellites, at least in low Earth orbit. But the positive note, because, you know, we try to end on those, is it's a little trickier to shoot down the higher value satellites that are navigation satellites that are higher and then communication satellites and warning satellites that are in geostationary orbit.

So it's still a good thing to ban ASAP flight testing.

Ankit 30:58

Yeah, I mean, the Russians are probably going to be next with the noodle. That system's been in development. Yeah.

Jeffrey 31:03

I mean, we're not going to do it. Like, we're going to f*** it up. Don't get me wrong. Yeah. But I'm just saying, in 10 years, I can come back and say, I told you so.

Ankit 31:13

Yeah. Well, what do you think about the idea of just having an altitude cutoff? Because I think that's going to be more likely to gain traction, I guess. Like, I don't know, arbitrarily using 300 kilometers or whatever the Indians just did. Because I think, you know, one of the rationales that's been going around from certain Indian commentators is that India has been worried about an anti-satellite NPT, and they conducted the test to show that they have the capability, and if and when there is some kind of arms control arrangement, they have a seat at the table.

So that's kind of one of the factors that we have to contend with now, that India is really kind of the cat coming out of the hat, right? I mean, China... In 2007. But now India is the first country kind of outside of the core three powers that have demonstrated this against a satellite in the past kind of testing this technology.

So I think that's something to keep in mind. So yeah, we are a little bit too late for a test ban, just like with, I guess, hypersonic weapons, too.

Jeffrey 32:04

Oh, you know what? That was a proposal that was talked about a lot in the 80s, too, because I think we sometimes forget the U.S., to use that terrible phrase, shot down a satellite in the mid-80s. My preference would not be to do an altitude ban because I'm as much worried about preventing countries from validating the software.

Ankit 32:30

Okay.

Jeffrey 32:32

And so like getting a lot of practice shooting down things in low earth orbit, I think would probably support the software that one would use with a different interceptor to go like much further up. But like, having said that I mean, I guess it doesn't matter because, you know, you're still living with a lot of latent capability.

And what you're really trying to do is just forestall the, like, widespread deployment of those systems and their kind of integration into war planning. But you're not going to be able to get rid of the latent capability, which, you know, sucks.

Aaron 33:11

Yeah, it's like, is this the tragedy of the commons in space?

Jeffrey 33:15

Oh, it's exactly what it is, right? Like, orbit is not, like, I always, it makes me so annoyed when people are like, we need to seize the high ground as though it's ground. And it's not f***ing ground, right? Like, in orbit, you're falling. You're always moving. So you can't actually seize it. And you actually do have to cooperate with other spacefaring states if you want that orbital environment for it to be available to anyone else.

You have to have rules and it has to kind of be available to everyone, right? Because it's just, it's the physical nature of orbit. But explaining that never works because people just scream some bulls**t about the high ground.

Ankit 33:54

Yeah, I mean, also more so than any other spacefaring state, it is the United States that relies on space or LEO the most for military uses anyways. So it's really kind of in our interest to make sure that these rules come into place as quickly as possible. But of course, now it's starting to get a little bit too late.

Jeffrey 34:10

Yeah, well, I mean, I remember just having endless arguments over the last, I don't know, 10 to 12 years. And it just, you can't, I mean, it's funny, right? Because India does it with Pakistan too. Like, which of those two countries is more dependent on space assets? And which of those two countries has more to lose from starting a series of ASAP programs, right?

But like, that seems to be always the way it is, I think, because it's driven by technology, fundamentally, not strategy.

Aaron 34:39

That is a good place to end it because I think that drives a lot of government programs as technology or, as I say, tactics over strategy at the crudest level. Anything else that we missed that we should talk about before we sign off here and try and go and enjoy almost spring weather on the East Coast? No, I think we're good.

Jeffrey?

Jeffrey 35:01

No, I'm just going to make myself another cup of tea.

Aaron 35:03

All right. Well, Ankit, as always, friend of the podcast, thanks for joining us and chatting about this. And for those who enjoy the podcast but would like a little bit more. You can head on over to patreon.com slash acw podcast and if you have a dot edu address and or a student for as little as three dollars a month you can gain access to our slack channel and more importantly a second podcast that we do called brilliant pebbles which is a shorter podcast that discusses cool things in the non-proliferation disarmament and arms control world but That we don't necessarily talk about for a 30-minute podcast.

And for everybody else, that is $5 a month. So with that, Amkit, Jeffrey, thanks for hanging out this morning.

Ankit 35:49

Thanks for having me on, guys. It was a pleasure.

Aaron 35:52

And thanks, everybody, for listening.