American ASAT Controls

Aaron Stein 0:02

Unambiguously legalese.

Jeffrey Lewis 0:08

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

Aaron 0:24

And I'm Aaron Stein, Director of Research at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and a one-time contributor to the Arms Control Wonk blog, now full-time postcaster with you.

Jeffrey 0:34

Yeah, yeah, you did.

Aaron 0:37

You contributed. Back when blogs were a thing, Aaron. We go back a long way. I tell people we were podcasting before everybody had a podcast. Now we're just part of the ebb and flow of life.

Jeffrey 0:49

Well, now I have a blog now that no one has a blog anymore.

Aaron 0:54

They'll come back in style. So at some point, it'll be cool to be vintage. My retro blog. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You were ahead of your time.

Jeffrey 1:03

Hey, you know what other retro things are back with us?

Aaron 1:08

What? You got to tell me. Extending the arms race to space. That's right. We have to say we are the leading podcast on space arms control. I think we have that niche market cornered.

Jeffrey 1:23

There are other people who do space. I've met both of them.

Aaron 1:28

So have I. It's a small but distinguished group of people.

Jeffrey 1:34

I mean, it is very funny that the universe of people who work on space issues, while admittedly more than two, is really just a handful of people. It is so important, so important in terms of the stability of the arms race, but so important in terms of the functioning of our economy. And yet... There is zero foundation support for anybody working on arms control in space.

And has been zero since the early 2000s when I got into this gig.

Aaron 2:08

Although I'll plug our own podcast. The new sort of space guru over at DOD is a friend of the pod, Vipin Narang. He's been on this show. That's true.

Jeffrey 2:17

But I bet you Vipin has not gotten one dime in the millions of dollars he has raised over the past decade for doing space arms control.

Aaron 2:27

I will venture to guess you are correct, but I've never seen his financials.

Jeffrey 2:31

Yeah, I have to say, boy, it makes you pipe down when they appoint one of your friends to a position of authority. Yeah.

Aaron 2:43

No, we have to be careful because we want him to come back on the podcast when he burns out and he wants to go back to the ivory tower of his university job. But I think we should talk about what the vice president said on April 18th at one of our favorite places on this podcast, Vandenberg Air Force Base, because of its proximity to good wine country in Lompoc, California.

Jeffrey 3:08

Yeah, so Kamala Harris went out and gave a speech, and her speech was designed to make news. And the news in her speech, which is contained both in the speech but also in a handy-dandy fact sheet that the White House released in her capacity as the chair of the National Space Council, she gave a speech where she announced that the United States would not, and I'm quoting here, quote, Conduct destructive direct ascent anti-satellite missile testing, and that the United States seeks to establish this as a new international norm for responsible behavior in space.

So it's an extremely limited ban on some types of anti-satellite testing, which is good.

Aaron 4:00

I think it's unambiguously good, but I also think it's unambiguously Legalese and how they parse the language that they put out there. And so while I like it, I also think the backdrop matters in that this comes very closely after Russia conducted a direct destructive anti-satellite test and how You can do similar types of tests without the actual destruction.

Does that make sense?

Jeffrey 4:28

Oh, absolutely. Look, I remember when we were trying to convince the Obama administration in late 2008, early 2009 during the transition to pick up space arms control, and we wanted a much more comprehensive ban on anti-satellite testing. And I was really disappointed with the people who were pushing for just literally banning debris-creating ASAT tests. And, you know, like I was like, you know, it's like, oh, sellouts.

But like we didn't get shit. We didn't get anything out of Obama. We got the late Ellen Tauscher who – Hung out a little bit and then announced, like, not only were we not going to do any of that, we weren't even going to sign the European Code of Conduct, which is the thing we can talk about.

Like, we just weren't going to do anything. So, you know, the commitment to do this limited ban, the commitment to do this limited ban is better than nothing. But the fact that it's embedded in a recognition that we want to create some new norms or some new rules for managing space, like... That is a sea change from not just where Trump and Bush were, but also from where Obama was.

Aaron 5:43

Yeah, and I think for listeners, because we were joking at the top of the spot that there are like four people who do this – You would be in a good position to describe what it is that they're actually talking about. It is self-evident in the language, but perhaps you could also talk about the non-destructive elements of this.

I think it would be important, how it's not entirely self-limiting in terms of being able to develop or at least test certain aspects of an anti-satellite weapon.

Jeffrey 6:14

Right. So I think the first place to start is space is not really a place because really what we're talking about is orbit and orbit is like a condition. In orbit you're moving at a certain speed and you're falling around the earth and so You have to be moving at a certain speed at a certain angle. It's not really about being high, right?

You can fire a missile up and it'll come back down and the North Korean missiles go much higher than the space station They don't enter into orbit because orbit is this special condition. And so we've always talked about how we Protect satellites once they're in orbit, and how we preserve those orbits so that everyone can use them.

And the big issue right now is debris. Because once things are in orbit, they stay in orbit. And so if a satellite breaks up into lots of little pieces, those pieces don't come back down. I mean, eventually, there's a little drag. Some of them do. But you can have really persistent debris problems. And if anybody saw gravity, right, you know that there is this theoretical possibility that there's so much mass in orbit that if you got a breakup of a big satellite, you could get what's called collisional cascading.

So it would be basically just a chain reaction, and that would render the entire orbit unusable for everyone. And so what we're really talking about here is one way of killing a satellite is hitting it with a missile. Right. And that's not the only way of killing a satellite. There are other ways of killing satellites. You can fry them with lasers.

You can have the space shuttle come up and grab it with its arm. You know, there's other stuff you could do. But that simple way, which is the direct ascent part of her statement of just having a missile that directly ascends and then uses its kinetic energy when it slams into the satellite to smash it is a very easy way to kill a satellite.

It's a very obvious way in the sense that if you zap something with a laser, you may or may not know if you killed the satellite, but if you break it into a million pieces, you know. But then obviously it has this really negative impact, which is the debris. So this is a capability that the U S tested in the eighties that Russia recently tested, which is what got everybody worked up that China tested in the mid two thousands that we sort of tested.

I, we pretend it wasn't an ASAT test, but we used a missile to blow up a satellite. And India has done it. So it's a real capability that a lot of countries are developing. And the United States is saying, we're not going to do this, which is good, because doing it would be dumb. And I'm always in favor of not doing dumb shit.

Aaron 9:07

Yeah. I mean, to bring this back full circle, that was the Obama doctrine is don't do dumb shit. But they did so much dumb shit anyway. Well, they couldn't ban or at least sort of positively outline that they wouldn't do this aspect of dumb shit. Their approach was like, what if we only did half the dumb shit?

Jeffrey 9:28

And it's like, okay, well, half the dumb shit is better than all of the dumb shit. But like... What about all the dumb shit you're still doing? And they're like, well, we're not getting credit for all the dumb shit we're not doing. It's like, yes, that's right. You're not getting credit for the dumb shit you're not doing.

You only get the blame for the dumb shit you do. That's how it works.

Aaron 9:47

I think for listeners, we are recording this podcast later than normal. So Scott, sorry about all the bleeps. But the other thing is, and I know you just recently wrote a piece about this, is the... Perhaps the emphasis is on creating this normative restraint against the direct ascent destruction of satellites with missiles. So it's, I guess, trying to create a rule, I guess an unenforceable rule, but a normative rule to refrain from doing these in the future.

Jeffrey 10:22

Yeah, so it's the cover story in a magazine called The American Scholar, which is the magazine of the Phi Beta Kappa Society. So, you know, one nerd writing for other nerds. I suspect we already have the Phi Beta Kappa Society vote, and so I may just be running up the margins.

Aaron 10:42

I mean, we are doing a podcast called the Arms Control Wonk Podcast. We have, again, we are the leading sort of corner niche market of nerddom in our little speak.

Jeffrey 10:52

I mean, maybe next I'll do the Mensa magazine, but we're really, I mean, we're not breaking out of our niche area here. But yeah, I was really asked this question of with the arms race restarting between the United States and both Russia and China, Is there some risk that that arms race is going to make its way to space?

And so the piece is a kind of discussion of the history of the way in which the arms race always threatened to go to space. And I think the answer is it like kind of sort of went there. And there's like a really long, probably belabored Stanley Kubrick story to illustrate it. But I think we're now in an era where like all that stuff that was maybe a little bit sci-fi that maybe slowed down the ability of the arms race expanding into space.

It's not really sci-fi anymore.

Aaron 11:46

No, I think this is the story of our field writ large, by the way.

Jeffrey 11:49

Yeah. And so you have this question of, well, if space is no longer just dominated by the US and the Soviet Union, if it has lots and lots of countries like India and China and the Europeans and – And rich dudes. And rich dudes. And I mentioned this. And then you start to ask like, well, what is the metaphor that we need to use to understand space?

And the old metaphor is always like land, which is stupid because space is definitely not land, right? Orbit is definitely not a mountain. But people are like, we have to seize the high ground. But you can't really seize orbit. You just pass through it, right? And so... I talk about how the best way to think about orbital space is as a commons.

Aaron 12:39

Mm-hmm.

Jeffrey 12:40

Anyone can access it. Maybe it's a mountain meadow. Right. It's a mountain meadow. Right. With sheep grazing.

Aaron 12:44

Anyone can access it.

Jeffrey 12:45

The sheep grazing. Yeah. It's not possible for us to put up fences. And yet... By using it irresponsibly, you can use it so that no one can get the benefits. And debris is the best example of that, although there are a few other kinds of cases. And so it's really a commons where – If anyone wants to use it, you have to have rules that allow everyone to use it in a reasonably just manner that commands widespread support.

Because if you just allow everyone to put up whatever the hell they want in whatever conditions they want, Pretty soon those orbits are going to get overcrowded. And pretty soon you're going to have countries operating in ways that are unsafe, whether it's blowing things up with direct descent anti-satellite weapons or just crashing into each other or producing unnecessary amounts of debris through normal space operations.

And I think the example that we see of this is the Starlink constellations.

Aaron 13:47

Yeah, no, he's in the news a lot these days, Mr. Musk. But it's the total number of satellites that are associated with Starlink that have caught a lot of, again, of the four, that have caught the four people's attentions.

Jeffrey 14:02

And there's nothing to stop him from putting as many satellites in orbit as he wants, because there really aren't any rules.

Aaron 14:09

Right. But you think you should talk about the crowding of the commons with the Starlink and what that means.

Jeffrey 14:17

Yeah, the thing with Starlink is there are many, many, many little satellites. And initially they were upsetting to astronomers and other people who just found them to be an eyesore. And there's nothing really wrong with making a deliberate decision that we want to have this service and use space in this way. But again, the point is that orbits are getting increasingly crowded.

And you don't really want things to run into one another. And you want to make sure that... What happens if China decides it wants its own Starlink constellation? What happens if Russia then decides it wants its own? You really do have this resource, which again, it can't be partitioned all that effectively. You know, you can't put up fences to keep people out.

But people can, through their use, damage it or make it unusable for others. And so it just requires a really different way of thinking about the problem.

Aaron 15:22

And by the way, it's true for military and non-military assets.

Jeffrey 15:26

You know, it's not like we can have some special military orbits where only our military satellites go. You know, it just doesn't work like that.

Aaron 15:34

Mm-hmm.

Jeffrey 15:35

And so the whole point of the article was to say, when you really understand what orbit is and how it operates, it doesn't really make sense to think of it as much like, say, the high ground. But it's more like the law of the sea, where the Navy actually is a big fan of the law of the sea.

Because they feel like having predictable rules for operating at sea increases their flexibility rather than decreases it. And my complaint has been that the Space Force doesn't look at it that way. And I was hopeful when they created Space Force that there would be a kind of change. Because when the Air Force was doing space, it was like a bunch of fighter pilots who do not understand orbit.

And I'm mildly hopeful that... Space Force will be a little bit more thoughtful about this. But regardless of where they are on it, I mean, I'm very pleased that the Biden administration is at least making this decision. Again, not just to agree to refrain from destructive tests of direct descent anti-satellite weapons. But to see that as the first step in trying to develop some norms or some rules for the use of space for everyone, right?

All different countries, but also all different users, not just national security ones.

Aaron 17:01

Do you think there's flexibility here? You know, because like the Russians have – I can't remember it offhand, but like the Russians have constantly put out this idea of like space norms or even a space treaty, you know, It's cynical in the way that most of their things are framed, but like, I mean, and then we talked earlier about the European code of conduct.

I mean, like, do you think if there's enough normative push on this, that there could actually be some movement on this or that for now it's sort of baby steps rather than something that could be hunked off all at once?

Jeffrey 17:35

You know, I went to this conference that the UN put on every year between like 2002 and 2012 on preventing an arms race in outer space, where the Russian and the Chinese proposals Were a big central discussion point. And so, I mean, I think that conference still goes on. They just stopped inviting me, but I don't know why.

I mean, I wore pants at all the meetings. I didn't, no idea how I got dropped, but whatever. I'm not holding it against them, son of a . The podcast turned you into a celebrity. Yeah. They don't want celebrities. Yeah, that's right. And on the one hand, The draft treaty that the Russians and the Chinese presented was garbage.

It was garbage. They were garbage.

Aaron 18:24

I want to make that clear.

Jeffrey 18:25

Yeah, it was garbage. It reflected a real concern, and that is the Russians and the Chinese are worried about U.S. missile defenses. And for them, missile defenses are things that are going to be in space, whether – it doesn't have to be the interceptors, although the U.S. has looked at space-based interceptors, although it's a really dumb idea – But certainly the sensors are in space.

And the Russians and the Chinese, I think, have always imagined that the weak point of U.S. missile defenses will be the space-based assets and that there is just this natural relationship between the general concern one might have about the arms race migrating into space and Plus their specific concern about missile defenses. And, you know, the reality is the Bush administration, when this started, didn't want to talk about missile defense at all.

And the famous example is the Chinese were testing their freaking direct ascent ASAP. And the Bush people saw them do non-destructive tests, which, by the way, would still be allowed under this pledge. Mm-hmm.

Aaron 19:30

Mm-hmm.

Jeffrey 19:32

And they knew they were going to do a destructive test. And they made a decision not to try to talk the Chinese out of it, because they were afraid that if they started to talk to the Chinese about space security, they would have to talk about missile defense. And we have this absolute refusal to treat missile defense like any other strategic system that has to be part of arms control negotiations.

Aaron 19:55

You see it in Kamala Harris's wording. Yes. I mean, I didn't want to go there because we often sort of beat up on missile defense in this podcast, but it's right there in the speech if you know what to look for. It's the cutout. I mean, destructive direct descent test. It's right there. Yeah, that's right.

Jeffrey 20:14

So I don't think the Chinese and the Russians were wrong to say if the U.S. wants to prevent them from developing ASATs, the U.S. is not going to be able to have – Missile defense assets based in space. Like, that makes sense to me. Like, why do the Chinese and the Russians want ASATs to kill our space-based sensors for missile defenses?

What would cause them to forego developing these destabilizing capabilities? Us not building the thing they're trying to defeat. So, you know, like, I know the Russians and the Chinese are a pain in the ass diplomatically. And I mean, like, who the hell has patience for the Russians at this point? Yep, nobody. Nobody. But if, you know, your goal is to not die in a nuclear war, which is still my goal, you do want to think about strategic stability.

And the thing that is going to drag the arms race into space is missile defense. And I think that is a central part of this strategy. Debate that we've been having. And it's why that debate in Geneva was so dysfunctional, because space was a proxy about missile defense, and we wouldn't talk about it. And so one of the things that came out of that process, my experience is it was Michael Krepon who started walking around telling people, well, if you're not willing to do arms control, maybe you could do a code of conduct.

And I give Michael an enormous amount of credit for eventually convincing European governments to pick up this idea. And they worked really carefully with Bush administration civil servants who were fairly nonpartisan. And they developed a code of conduct. And I think they had every expectation that the U.S. was going to sign on. The Russians and the Chinese were not crazy about the code of conduct because they saw it as a – A half measure that didn't really address their concerns and was done in this very odd way in order to appease the Americans.

But like whatever, it had a certain amount of growing support and they were probably going to be dragged along into it. And things were teed up to get the code of conduct at least. And then, you know, St. Barry of Prague decided he wasn't going to do it. Well, maybe Biden can't. I mean, when they say that they want to set norms in space, it's like, I got a list of norms for you.

Aaron 22:42

No. Yeah.

Jeffrey 22:44

It's on weirdly sized paper.

Aaron 22:46

It is. It's A4 paper.

Jeffrey 22:47

They don't know how to spell center or defense or a bunch of other words, but, you know, it's a list.

Aaron 22:54

Yeah, no, it's there. And it's actually the first thing I thought about when I listened to the speech for the first time is that a lot of these things have already been articulated and that there's a next step here.

Jeffrey 23:07

Yeah, I don't think that the speech was any great conceptual breakthrough, but it was just nice to hear because it was a – Departure from the way that US officials both Democrats and Republicans had talked about these issues And you know, it's crazy to me that it has taken this long Because there is such an enormous commercial community in space and these are the people who are gonna get screwed you know, there are many many many billions, you know, maybe now even trillions of dollars of private commercial investment and And if people start plunking satellites and creating debris clouds, it's going to be a situation.

Aaron 23:57

Well, I think we should celebrate the vice president's speech as a step in the right direction. We should celebrate it because it was in California wine country, which is always a friend of the pod, you know, and But then I think that there's cause for concern that you don't get to celebrate this in Geneva with your colleagues at the next space conference.

Jeffrey 24:20

I mean, I'm just saying maybe the invitation got lost in the email.

Aaron 24:27

Maybe it's going to your spam folder. But with that, I mean, is there anything that we didn't hit that we should circle back to?

Jeffrey 24:37

Oh, you know, the one thing, this is like, I don't know if you ever listened to In Our Time with Melvin Bragg on the BBC.

Aaron 24:45

I have not, no.

Jeffrey 24:46

There's always a bonus time with Melvin and his guests, and invariably it's him saying, is there anything else that you wanted to talk about? And the guests talk about all the things they wanted to talk about, and it never gets moved into the conversation. The producers are always like, yeah, there's a reason we didn't ask you about that.

It's boring. One question I had, though, about Kamala Harris's Formulation is, would it prohibit the United States from again doing what the United States did under George W. Bush when we conducted an anti-satellite test while denying that it was an anti-satellite test?

Aaron 25:28

This is burnt frost. This is using the SM-3 to hit – what was the name of that satellite? I can't remember. USA-193. It was a failing reconnaissance satellite. Right.

Jeffrey 25:38

Explain your reasoning because I think I know where you're going, but go ahead. Well, so for listeners, China conducted an anti-satellite test and the Bush administration wanted to do the same thing. But it was a little bit difficult in part because a lot of the – at the time, maybe they had finally just gotten rid of – there was a space command.

But there had been a lot of opposition to debris-creating ASATs. There was a program that one particular senator kept reviving throughout the 90s and early 2000s. And the rest of Congress kept – they would let him put in a little bit of money. But the military hated this program. It was called the KEASAT. And so the Bush people really wanted to do an anti-satellite test, but I think they felt constrained.

And they wanted to use something off the shelf and they wanted to claim it wasn't an anti-satellite test. And so this reconnaissance satellite failed. And the math on this I just found very unpersuasive. But there was a claim that the frozen hydrazine in the propellant would pose a risk to people on the ground.

Aaron 26:52

It was some ridiculous number, but yes, that was the official reason. So they had to do something about it.

Jeffrey 26:59

It's funny because most people, like when Skylab came crashing back to Earth and other satellites come down, people kind of laugh that like the rubes think they're going to get hit on the head because the odds are so low. But now suddenly the rubes are like, oh, we got to shoot it down, you know? So people who should know better are suddenly very enthusiastic about shooting it down.

And the Bush administration – but they denied it. I mean they said like this is purely driven by humanitarian interests. We are not doing this for the purpose of an ASAT test. And now later, some of the – and Nick Johnson even wrote a piece where he was like absolutely not. This was not an ASAT test. But the lower level people have now written articles where they're like, we got to do an ASAT test.

Aaron 27:44

Right, yeah.

Jeffrey 27:45

You can judge whether the lower level people were just out of the loop or whether they just couldn't be bothered with maintaining the fig leaf. But I simply don't know if a future president might resort to some kind of stunt like that while also saying that we weren't going to conduct such a test. And if so, you know, then it does create this exception to the norm.

And so good norm creation means – Defining things in ways that are pretty clear. And I just think that burnt frost shows us that I think you really have to put the focus on, at least for such a limited measure, I think the amount of debris that gets created.

Aaron 28:38

We'll call it the hydrazine exemption.

Jeffrey 28:40

Yeah. I mean, but the downside of that is, and this is why I say it's a very limited measure, you can still do tests against points in space.

Aaron 28:53

No, that's what I was going for in the first sort of leading question I posed to you, is it doesn't actually really restrain you from developing and testing basically everything but the impact of an ASAT. The norm is against creating debris. Yeah. It's not against ASATs. That's right. Right. And like, I think that's partly due to missile defenses.

And I think that's partly due to the fact that like, you know, there's, that's still a step too far is some sort of moratorium on development of ground-based ASATs because of the interlinkages with missile defenses. And then obviously in that other countries are doing it themselves. And so why would we self-limit? It's a political challenge. So.

Jeffrey 29:37

But I'll take it. Hmm. I'll take it.

Aaron 29:40

This is good news. Not just the fact that this is in Lompoc and the undiscovered wine country of California. It's the New Paso.

Jeffrey 29:50

There was a whole movie made about Solvang.

Aaron 29:53

That's on the other side. I know, but it's off. It's all that weird Southern California wine. The Highway Ys. It's the left side of the Y.

Jeffrey 30:01

It's all that weird-ass Southern California wine.

Aaron 30:04

Yeah, you Northern Californians.

Jeffrey 30:07

All right.

Aaron 30:07

Well, with that, we've appropriately gone off the rails. So, Jeffrey, thanks for joining. As everybody, we're doing this a little later, so we're a little punchy. Thanks, everybody, for listening. And head on over to patreon.com slash acwpodcast. We can join our Slack community for $3 if you're a student, $5 if you're not, and join the conversation. That conversation could get you into the Washington Post or The Economist because it is where open source is happening all the time.

So with that, thank you everybody for joining.