Russia’s Nudol Anti-Satellite Missile Test

Jeffrey Lewis 0:05

You are listening to the Arms Control Wonk Podcast, a podcast on arms control, disarmament, and nonproliferation. I'm Jeffrey Lewis, the founding publisher of the Arms Control Wonk blog and a professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey.

Aaron Stein 0:23

I am Aaron Stein, the dual-hatted director of the Middle East and National Security Programs at the Foreign Policy Research Institute.

Anne Pellegrino 0:30

And I'm Anne Pellegrino, an independent analyst in Monterey, California.

Scott LaFoy 0:35

And I'm Scott LaFoy, super producer on the Arms Control Wonk podcast and consultant.

Jeffrey 0:40

Woohoo, all four of us. What are you baking this week, Anne?

Anne 0:45

Oh, this was a good week. I made four loaves. We've already gone through two of them, but they are roasted garlic, olive, and fresh rosemary. That's delightful.

Jeffrey 1:00

Have you considered making pasta? We do make pasta.

Anne 1:04

We've made lasagna with homemade lasagna noodles. And we do, well, we used to do pasta nights with all of our friends before. The bad thing.

Jeffrey 1:15

Do you make noodles? Oh, my gosh, yes. Oh, Jesus.

Anne 1:21

That's a, oh my gosh, I'm so glad you did that.

Jeffrey 1:24

Yes, listeners, today we are going to talk about Russia's test of the PL-19 noodle, which is N-U-D-O-L. It is a Russian direct ascent anti-satellite weapon. Russia tested it again, and some people's hair is on fire.

Aaron 1:46

My hair is on fire. Test a missile, get a pod, right? Yeah, launch a missile, get a pod. That's right, launch a missile, get a pod. Sorry, it's been a long week.

Jeffrey 1:54

Yeah, so just for listeners, so Russia tested a direct-descent anti-satellite weapon, the PL-19 Noodle. This is the, how many tests?

Anne 2:03

So it's 10 tests, and they've all been flight tests. There have been no intercept tests yet.

Jeffrey 2:09

So these are tests against points in space?

Anne 2:13

Yes.

Scott 2:14

Which is nice, because they don't create any debris, right?

Jeffrey 2:18

But bad because it's a horrific event for space security. Yes.

Aaron 2:23

Which is a long project of yours. I think going back to your graduate days, Jeffrey.

Jeffrey 2:28

I think this is one of the ways Aaron and I bonded early on because Aaron did a ton of work on anti-satellite weapons when he was a student at the Middlebury Institute back when it was the Monterey Institute. But that was only like 10 years ago.

Aaron 2:40

Yeah, it was 10 years ago. It was my first project ever. It was an intro to public policy.

Jeffrey 2:44

Yeah, I am older, and I used to go to Geneva every year for a conference on space security. I think I went every year between like 2002 and maybe 2006 or 2007, where – Those of us in civil society begged, pleaded, asked nicely for the US government to take seriously the possibility that many, many, many countries were going to begin building kinetic energy anti-satellite interceptors.

And we got nowhere. No, we got the Nudol, didn't we? We have a lot. And I guess I would say for listeners, at that time, I was working on strategic stability issues with China. And The reason we were in Geneva was the Conference on Disarmament used to have an annual meeting on space security funded through the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research, which Patricia Lewis, a friend of the pod, used to be the chair of, no relation.

But the Canadian government funded a lot of those and At the time, the big issue was the Russians and the Chinese had this demand that we talk about preventing an arms race in outer space, which to be fair, was mostly talking about US missile defenses. But it is a serious issue. It was a serious risk. And now that kind of process sort of I basically stopped going after China conducted an anti-satellite test.

But since then, China has conducted a kinetic energy anti-satellite test. India has conducted one. We'll talk about the US and Russia's developing them too. So I'd say we have a problem.

Aaron 4:37

I'd say we're in the midst of that arms race that you were trying to prevent, wouldn't you say?

Jeffrey 4:43

Yes, and I mean, I think the thing people don't quite understand, I noticed this a little bit on Twitter, is people don't quite grasp that these things are piggybacking on hit-to-kill missile defense interceptors. You know, I had a really tough time because I would be asked to give papers about anti-satellite weapons, and I hated that term because...

You know, an anti-satellite is a mission. It doesn't actually talk about what the underlying technology is. And the real proliferation threat, I actually even wrote a paper about this, was very poorly received, arguing that the real proliferation threat was hit to kill interceptors, which are what we want to use for missile defense, but are, you know, not that effective because it turns out it's really hard to hit a missile in the atmosphere.

But they make fantastic anti-satellite weapons.

Anne 5:39

That's a good distinction. I like how you, well, I know that obviously it makes sense how you phrased it, but that's good for me to, for how I can conceptualize that it's anti-satellite and anti-ballistic missile. Those are the missions, not the technology. I like that.

Jeffrey 5:59

Yeah, because there's all kinds of stuff you can use to shoot down a satellite, right? You can laze it. You could, right? That's the whole idea is you fry it with a laser. You can use a kinetic energy interceptor to like smash into a million billion itty bitty little pieces. But, you know, the Russians were afraid that we would use the space shuttle's arm.

Right. Remember the Canadian arm. Yeah, could like take things out of the shuttle and put it into orbit. Well, you could you in theory could just kind of pass on by take the alarm grab something and bring it home. Although I suppose they'd be really like sore about that. We were talking about banning anti satellite weapons, but there are a ton of different ones and and in fact I am looking at it right now, the paper I wrote, which got published in the Unidear Journal in 2007, was Hit to Kill and the Threat to Space Assets.

And the opening is, although discussions about ASATs often focus on a variety of capabilities, including direct descent weapons, lasers, and microsatellites, the principal threat to satellites arises from missiles that use their kinetic energy to destroy an object in orbit.

Aaron 7:14

And it's an easier mission than missile defense. So good job by you in 2007. Well, you know, nobody listened. True. You were very prophetic in 2007, but there was somebody on Twitter who was very prophetic in 2020 that knew that this was going to happen.

Scott 7:33

Yeah, that's right. On Twitter, user Michael Thompson on Twitter actually called this test. He was a little cryptic about it at first because in mid-April, slightly before the test occurred, I say mid-April as if it wasn't this week. He hinted that there was something fun that he was looking at. And then after the actual test occurred, revealed that he had been watching NOTAMs publicly placed by the Russians outside of, can someone who speaks more Russian pronounce?

Jeffrey 8:06

The Plesetsk Cosmodrome.

Scott 8:08

Basically, there were two NOTAMs there, one for a launch, one for a splashdown, indicating that a missile test was about to occur, which gave him enough time to start preparing models and simulations to try to figure out if it had a target or if it was going to be another point-in-space flight test.

Anne 8:28

Yeah, this thread, major props, because it's super cool, because he goes through methodically, if this was going to be the first intercept test of this system, what would be the potential targets? Obviously, Russia would not Hit somebody else's satellite. They would likely hit one of their own objects. And so he went through and calculated, based on the splashdown zone, what the options were if If it was going to be an intercept test.

And so basically after he went through all of those options, kind of everyone has kind of come to the conclusion that it was a flight test because the best possible options for intercept are still up in space. And also I believe SpaceCom said that they were not currently tracking any debris at this time.

Jeffrey 9:26

Yeah, and I have to say, this is one of the things I think is really cool about space because it's one of the very first areas we saw where open source analysis could replicate a lot of the functions of government, right? Because there are amateur observers around the world, like space is transparent. So you can see satellites as they pass overhead and you can derive their orbital elements.

And so, you know, the US maintains databases of satellites, but it omits the classified ones. But this is an utterly pointless experience because all it means is that there is a dedicated group of human beings who use just basic physics and a little bit of computing power to spot the satellites that aren't in the catalogs and keep track of them.

And so this is a really cool example where that community, which is known, it's the CSAT listserv. Which I, when I was a young fledgling space person, I just loved it because they would track all the classified satellites. And then when you'd have a big breakup in orbit, which kind of happened with the Chinese test, there was a huge breakup.

And they actually, you know, you could, first of all, see in the catalogs, the satellite breakup, right? Because then the pieces get all logged. And they were pretty, you know, pretty easy to figure out what had happened. So like space is transparent and he did this incredible job Of both using the NOTAMs to figure out when the test was coming, but then also being able to say like, if it was going to be an intercept test, it would probably be this satellite.

And then, oh, lo and behold, you see it within a few hours, it's still alive.

Aaron 10:59

And what you should say, and I think for listeners who maybe aren't as familiar as with you are, is what the difference is between like a point in space test, you know, like aiming at a point and shooting at it, but not actually wanting to hit anything versus an actual intercept test.

Jeffrey 11:11

Well, Aaron, a point in space test is aiming at a point in space and not trying to hit it, isn't it? Your definition was fantastic.

Aaron 11:19

But some people, like, I'm not just trying to break it down.

Jeffrey 11:23

No, but you could have done it because that was a better answer than I could have given.

Aaron 11:26

Right. So you're using telemetry and computers to shoot at a point in space without actually hitting anything, but Pointing at a specific point in space versus the Chinese test or the India test where you actually hit something. And the reason why you do a point in space test is probably to test your diagnostics and flight controls and all those sorts of things without creating debris because creating debris creates a lot of problems politically.

Jeffrey 11:49

Yeah, and we saw the Chinese in 2007. It later came out. We weren't at the time tracking things, but it later came out. They had done a series of point-in-space tests where they just fired the interceptor, and that was followed by the final confirmation, which is when they busted up that satellite real good. Real good.

Anne 12:08

It was 3,000 pieces of debris, I believe, from that test.

Jeffrey 12:14

Yeah, it was an enormous mess. Gregory Kulaki and I actually did a series of interviews in Beijing afterwards with people who were involved in it. It was so funny because obviously for listeners, the reason that I am so vehemently opposed to anti-satellite tests is because particularly with hit to kill tests where you create all this debris, this debris tends to be pretty long lived.

You know, the Indians, for example, after their test last year said all the debris would be down within a year. Well, it's been a year and not all the debris is down. And so we all worry about a situation where you get what's called collisional cascading, right? Where it's basically a chain reaction where there's so much mass in orbit that one piece of debris creates more debris and then more debris and more debris.

And you may get a situation where some orbits are not available.

Anne 13:08

Especially at where these tests are occurring, which is in low Earth orbit, it is crowded.

Scott 13:14

But the flip side, and this is something that also Michael was tracking, was if you do tests in LEO, in low Earth orbit, at least you still have the atmospheric drag that eventually it will come down. Everything in low Earth orbit either needs to be boosted at a regular interval or it's going to eventually burn up. But if you test at, you know, 500 kilometers in space, it's going to take tens of thousands of years to come down if it comes down at all.

And also just in terms of the Kessler Cascade and whatnot of things just crowding so much that they keep going and going, this is for listeners literally the premise of the movie Gravity, where a Russian anti-satellite missile test leads to all of the sort of Stuff in Gravity, which is basically a series of high-speed collision particles resulting from that intercept destroy literally everything and generally ruin Sandra Bullock's day.

Anne 14:17

That's such a good movie.

Scott 14:20

It's a very fun movie.

Anne 14:22

Yeah, and I mean,

Jeffrey 14:24

Most of the debris does come down, but you know, the, in the case of the Chinese test, which was 2007, you know, there was a piece of debris that passed within six kilometers of the international space station in 2011. So that was like, you know, and really only takes one debris strike to really ruin your day. So, and so it's better when people do point in space tests.

But the problem is point in space tests usually lead to real tests. And then of course these systems are designed to be used.

Scott 14:54

Strategically dangerous, but tested in a relatively responsible way in so far as one can do that.

Jeffrey 15:01

Yeah. And so the long-term risk is, you know, in a conflict, if countries started using these things in any number, there would be a lot of damage to other satellites or at least a significant risk. The people we talked to in Beijing made the point that The internal technical analysis in China was that the statistical risk to other objects was still quite low, which of course it is, right?

In one sense, one piece of debris got within six kilometers of the space station, so you can just move the space station a little bit. There's very little statistical risk. On the other hand, that completely undersold the PR disaster that is creating one of the largest manmade debris disasters really was. And so there was this kind of interesting technical and political disconnect.

And it was wonderfully on display because I gave this talk at the Carnegie Endowment. And I explained this whole thing. And this freaking engineer in the front row, because I'd say it was something like, you know, like this is engineers talking to policymakers. This engineer raises his hand. It's like, well, actually, the statistical risk is quite low.

And it's like, yes, that is precisely the thinking that went up to the Chinese leadership.

Aaron 16:20

The risk of me catching coronavirus is pretty low. I'm not allowed to talk about that. But I would go outside, wouldn't I? Shunned.

Scott 16:29

We're going to send you into the cornfields of the podcast.

Jeffrey 16:35

I think the point being, it is absolutely the case that the statistical risk of any one test is low. Yes. But just because The risk of each test is low. That does not mean that the cumulative risk when you have Russia, China, India, and with an asterisk, I will say the United States, we'll talk about this in a second, all developing these capabilities, you accumulate that risk over time.

And then of course, if you ever use them, if you ever start plinking each other's satellites, that risk is gonna be a lot higher.

Aaron 17:14

Yeah, and so I think the bookend of this part of the podcast is that this guy, Michael Thompson, is a must-follow on Twitter because he sniffed it out beforehand, and then we got official confirmation, I think, from Space Command, right?

Anne 17:25

Yep. Which then leads us into the statements by Spacecom and Robert Woods' tweets.

Jeffrey 17:37

Wait, was it Stratcom or Spacecom?

Anne 17:39

Spacecom.

Jeffrey 17:40

It was Spacecom. We have a Spacecom again. I forgot. It's actually Indo Spacecom. Indo Spacecom. It's Exo Space Comm. Oh my God, I remember when we had a Space Comm. Oh, and I remember when we got rid of Space Comm. It's back, man. Now we have a Space Comm and wearing Space Pants, a Space Force. Oh, my goodness.

Have you seen the Space Pants video with Peter Dinklage and then eventually Gwen Stefani?

Aaron 18:13

Oh, Jesus. Okay, hold on. Usually when we go off the rails, that's at the end of the podcast.

Jeffrey 18:19

I'm wearing Space Pants.

Anne 18:25

So there's a lot in this statement, though. So what are we... Which part do you want to focus on first? Okay, so there's, you know, a statement from General John Raymond, who is the Space Comm Commander and U.S. Space Force Chief of Space Operations. He says, Russia's direct ascent ASAT test provides yet another example that the threats to U.S. and allied space systems are real, serious, and growing.

The United States is ready and committed to deterring aggression and defending the nation, our allies and U.S. interests from hostile acts in space. Raymond then goes on to say that, quote, this test is further proof of Russia's hypocritical advocacy of outer space arms control proposals designed to restrict the capabilities of the United States while clearly having no intention of halting their counter space weapons programs.

Space is critical to all nations and our way of life. And then I'm not going to read the sentence about the bad thing.

Jeffrey 19:29

I am so freaking annoyed by this. It's a bad statement.

Anne 19:37

Well, okay, so there's a lot of flinging of hypocrisy because there's that Space Com statement and then what's his face? Well, it's just the official tweet from the State Department Arms Control Verification and Compliance Committee. Bureau, they tweeted, one day after hashtag Foreign Minister Lavrov said that hashtag Russia was ready to discuss initiatives to prevent the deployment of weapons in outer space, Russia tested a hashtag ASAT missile, hashtag hypocrisy.

Aaron 20:10

And then Robert Wood, the U.S. Ambassador to the Conference on Disarmament said, one has to assume, on top of that, one has to assume Russia received approval in Beijing before conducting the ASAT test. No, this makes any sense to me. I'm sorry. First of all, it's a ground-based anti-satellite weapon, so I don't understand what we're talking about with Russian proposals to ban weapons in space.

That's a different issue altogether. Why does Moscow have to go to Beijing before it does a point-in-space space test? I don't understand any of this stuff, and I don't understand why these people are tweeting about it.

Jeffrey 20:42

I have two bones to pick, and I'm going to start with the hypocrisy thing. I have two bones to pick about hypocrisy. So the first country to use a direct-descent anti-satellite weapon to shoot down a satellite was us. We did it in the 1980s. The F-15 has a cool little ASAT that the U.S. developed that they used to shoot down the Solwind satellite, which, by the way, that debris, there were still little pieces of debris floating around when I was in the field because I remember writing a little paper noting that some of the debris was still there.

And in that era, the U.S. had a program called the KEASAT, which was a – which, you know, really I think basically was a repurposed or very fundamentally similar to the hit-to-kill interceptor that the U.S. was developing at the time for midcourse intercepts. And – People wanted to do a test. And there was a big fight about it year after year.

And Bob Smith, the senator from New Hampshire, kept making sure the money was in the budget. And then people kept taking the money out. So this was a thing that we were actively pursuing. And we really only stopped when they figured out that they could use US missile defense assets for this. And so the other time that we shot down a satellite, Is when we used an HS interceptor to shoot down a failing reconnaissance satellite called USA 193.

And I was treated at the time to all this about how they had to protect people from the threat of hydrazine, which modeling showed was absurdly small. And it's only now, this thing was called Operation Burnt Frost. There's a great memoir or recollection in air power strategy that finally in 2017, a decade later admits that of course it was an ASAT test all along.

And at the time people would say, you know, the joke was, you know, Hu Jintao was a leader of China. China had just done the ASAT test. It was anything who can do, we can do better.

Scott 22:52

Oh my gosh.

Jeffrey 22:53

So it was so obviously an ASAT test and, you know, like, yet it is presented with this utterly insincere assertion that this was about protecting human health from a tank of frozen hydrazine. And it's like, so when you throw around like words like hypocrisy, it's just like, my God, you know, The level of bullshit I have heard from the US military about this stuff, to me, it's just far worse than anything that Russians or the Chinese have ever said.

Aaron 23:32

When I wrote, when I did that first public policy memo, it was 2009, so it was like a year and a half after Burnt Frost, so it was fresh. I remember there was a cool animation video, I think that Lockheed or somebody put out, who was the developer of the SM3 Interceptor. You know, so it was a lot of stuff that was going on about this, a lot of marketing.

But yeah, we can also hit a satellite, too.

Jeffrey 23:53

And I think the thing that upsets me about, I mean, first of all, as a democratic government, I don't particularly like it when my government lies. I mean, I find that really objectionable. But it's that old saying, like, it's one thing, I don't mind when a man pisses on my foot. It's another thing when he tries to tell me it's raining.

So I find that aggravating.

Aaron 24:16

Yes.

Jeffrey 24:16

We've done two of these things.

Aaron 24:20

In my second foray into this, beyond this, was when was the European Code of Conduct come about? I can't remember the exact year that that one came out, but that seems to be something that we should talk about too.

Jeffrey 24:36

Yes. Well, this is like my lived experience. So at this point, this podcast is just becoming Jeffrey's rant. Is that different than normal? No, you're right. For the backstory, remember at the beginning I talked about how Russia and China had proposed this treaty banning or preventing an arms race in outer space? It was disingenuous. Of course it was disingenuous.

Well, wait. It was – I don't know what the right word is. The Russians and the Chinese were absolutely alarmed that the U.S. was developing missile defense capabilities. And it is absolutely clear from the stuff they were writing that the way they thought about disabling U.S. missile defenses was targeting assets in space.

Aaron 25:23

Yes.

Jeffrey 25:23

So if the U.S. went ahead, as we did, and deployed a missile defense system that had a bunch of assets in space, the Russians and the Chinese were totally going to develop the capabilities to take shots at those things. That's clearly where this was heading. And so I think the framing that they adopted was tendentious, but at the same time, I understood exactly what they were saying.

And it was utterly clear to me, 25 years old or 26 years old, that they were saying, if you put missile defenses with assets in space, we are going to develop the capabilities to shoot at them. And me, the peace loving hippie was like, this seems like a bad thing, we should not do this. And I understand, but I did understand why the US military didn't want a treaty, like the Russian-Chinese draft treaty was terrible.

It was awful. And it was designed merely to constrain missile defenses and like, whatever, that's fine. It's an opening offer. Like my opening bids and negotiations are usually pretty one-sided as well. But what was so frustrating about that process is the Bush administration made it clear that they would never, ever, ever, ever consider any legally binding agreement.

And so the Europeans led, as I recall, particularly by the Germans, developed this code of conduct for spacefaring activities. And the argument we were making at the time, which actually I think was right, was everybody's focused on military problems, but space is a commons. And if you don't use it sustainably, then no one can use it, right?

Like people in the military are like, oh, it's like high ground, you have to seize it. Like, well, you can't really seize orbit, you're falling. Like, that's not how that works, right? Like... So really the way to think of it is as a commons and everybody needs to act sustainably. And if people don't, then it's available to no one.

And so the EU had this pretty decent code of conduct that included a call for states to refrain from debris creating ASAT intercepts. Which by the way is like the best, most one-sided deal you could ever make. Because at that point, You know, like I would think if we had to start plinking satellites, like we would be much better off developing like lasers and other things that wouldn't create debris.

We had a much better latent capability in our missile defenses. It really only bans the thing that the Chinese and the Russians wanted to do, which is actually practice hitting things in space. And the freaking Obama administration rejected it. You know, Ellen Tauscher at the time, so I think they started, they had a first draft in 2008.

And by like 2012, I think, maybe end of 2011, 2012, Tauscher, it's done and Tauscher rejects it. And I actually have a quote here. She says, it's too restrictive. And we're not going to be joining with the Europeans on their space treaty, which if she only called it their little space treaty, it is so frustrating. And then to be fair, they said they would go negotiate a better one and they weren't totally opposed, but no better one.

So like it just was very frustrating to me. And people are annoyed at me for saying this on Twitter, but we chose this. We decided that we did not want to talk about banning anti-satellite weapons because we were afraid that would mean we would have to talk about missile defenses. And Bush didn't want to do it because he loves missile defenses.

And Obama didn't want to do it because he was afraid to talk about missile defenses. And Trump doesn't want to do it because of the space force. But this is what we picked. We picked a world in which there is an unrestrained development of these capabilities. And that's bad for our security.

Aaron 29:12

Does, I mean, one of the things is, do you think, because we had a podcast recently about Joe Biden is, you know, he was part of the Obama administration too. Is this something he may be willing to revisit or is the cat already out of the bag?

Jeffrey 29:27

I'd be interested what other people think. I think the cat's out of the bag. I think we're deeply screwed.

Aaron 29:31

Yeah, I do too. I mean, I don't have any optimism about this. The technology, I mean, has become so much more accessible all over the place. I don't see why other countries would want to restrain at all, unless there is a sort of common level of restraint. And I don't think that we're going to get there.

Jeffrey 29:49

Yeah, I mean, I think at this point, we see that these capabilities are piggybacking on missile defense capabilities that, while they're not great at intercepting missiles, are pretty prevalent. At the point where Russia, China, the US, and India all have hit-to-kill interceptors, that cat is out of the bag.

Aaron 30:08

The orbits are synchronous. They're actually much easier to target, again, because there's just one of them moving around Well, you're falling. You're falling. That's what I'm trying to say.

Jeffrey 30:23

You're falling. You can't maneuver in space. I mean, you can do slight maneuvers, but they're not... That you have to really expend energy to change your orbit. It's not like, like there's no atmosphere. You don't have like winds. You can't turn. And you are still fundamentally bound by orbital mechanics. And so you could change your orbit and hope they don't know what your new orbit is for a day until they spot it, right?

But that's not the same thing. Is that a happy note? No, it's absolutely not a happy note.

Scott 31:01

The happy note is that STK is super cool and Michael Thompson's tweets are amazing.

Aaron 31:05

Yeah, I think the happy note is that I found Michael. I didn't know who he was up until somebody plopped that into a DM group I was in. I was like, oh, wow, somebody really did it here. And that was an immediate boop, hit the follow there. And professional jealousy because I can't do that stuff. Well, you could.

I could, but I actually would need some training.

Anne 31:27

You can download SDK.

Aaron 31:28

I'm certified. You teach me. You know what I think would help?

Jeffrey 31:32

If you had $5 a month.

Aaron 31:40

Well, the happy note is that a lot of this stuff is happening in our Slack channel, and our Slack channel is our place for listeners, and we are dependent on listeners for putting on this podcast. We are a listener-supported podcast. If you would like to be one of those supporters, head on over to patreon.com slash acwpodcast for $3 a month if you are a student or $5 a month if you are not.

You can be one of those supporters. You can support this podcast. You can help us out because this podcast takes time to put on. And you can join that Slack channel where I can learn how to do all this cool stuff.

Jeffrey 32:16

Aaron.

Aaron 32:17

Yes, Jeffrey.

Jeffrey 32:19

Anne. Yes. Scott. Yes. Thank you for joining me. And thank you for listening.