The United States says that Russia is working on a “troubling” space-based anti-satellite weapon. This is a threat to national security, but it is not an immediate danger.
The spokesman for National Security, John Kirby, said that US intelligence officials knew that Russia had created the technology but that the weapon wasn’t ready to use yet.
Kirby said, “This is not an active capability that has been deployed. It is troubling that Russia is pursuing this particular capability, but there is no immediate threat to anyone’s safety.” The US media said that Kirby wouldn’t say if it was nuclear-powered or nuclear-labeled, but Kirby did say that the weapon was in space.
“We’re not talking about a weapon that can be used to attack people or do physical damage here on Earth,” Kirby said. That being said, he did say that it could kill people in space or mess up military and civilian satellites.
Even so, the US and UK did say in 2020 that Russia was working on a space bomb. Top politicians are waiting for more details about the weapon because it might be against the Outer Space Treaty of 1967. It is against the treaty to send “nuclear weapons or any other kinds of weapons of mass destruction” into orbit or to “station weapons in outer space in any other way.”
A speaker from the House of Representatives said there was a very serious threat to national security and asked Biden to make the information public so that politicians could start talking about how to fix it.
Many politicians spoke out, saying that there wasn’t a real danger yet but that Russia was involved and that the Biden administration was in charge of it. They said that everything was fine. The United States has said in the past that Russia and China are their biggest rivals as nations.
