US abandons long-held treaty to prevent space becoming warzone

Jamie Seidel

The sky isn’t falling. Yet.

But it could. Soon.

“The United States now has on-orbit space control weapons,” Trump Administration Air Force Secretary Troy Meink told a conference on Tuesday.

It’s the first official admission the United States has abandoned a long-held treaty to prevent space becoming a theatre of war.

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“Is there any question in the room, by anybody, about whether or not the Chinese or Russians have been developing these sorts of weapons?” Meink added.

The 60-year-old Outer Space Treaty and related limitations within the Law of Armed Conflict promised to reserve “the province of all mankind” for “peaceful uses” only.

To eliminate ownership. To ban weaponisation. To minimise fallout.

It lasted longer than most.

“For over a decade, we’ve been talking about the fact that the Chinese and Russians were developing weapons for space. We need to focus on making sure we can protect ourselves operating in that environment,” Secretary Meink confirmed.

All now seem determined to fight in an orbital arena that could end humanity’s access to space for centuries to come.

Commercial and military satellites are already being equipped to dodge.

The obvious cause is the mass of space junk gathering in vital orbits for decades, or even millennia.

Another is the appearance of mysterious “inspector” satellites that come unnervingly close on suspected spying and sabotage missions.

Some are believed to be armed.

“It won’t look like a dogfight from Star Wars or Battlestar Galactica, but in a future war, US satellites may need to maneuver to survive,” states Federation for the Defence of Democracies technology analyst Emmerson Overell said.

Claiming the High Ground

“It is critically important that we maintain our dominance not only in the air, but in space, and so we’ve had to take steps to make sure that when we’re threatened, we can take care of that,” Secretary Meink said at the Air & Space Forces Association’s (AFA) 2026 Air, Space & Cyber Conference.

The Trump Administration has been telegraphing this move for some time.

The 47th President of the United States, Donald Trump, signed the Ensuring American Space Superiority executive order in December.

“Superiority in space is a measure of national vision and willpower, and the technologies Americans develop to achieve it contribute substantially to the Nation’s strength, security, and prosperity,” he wrote.

China’s Chairman Xi Jinping and Russia’s President-for-life Vladimir Putin clearly agree.

Both nations are well advanced in orbital-technology tests, giving them the power to manoeuvre, intercept, and engage target satellites.

The most recent demonstration came in June.

China’s Shenlong spaceplane (essentially a small robotic space shuttle) launched a small device while orbiting within a crowded spacelane. Analysts say this was observed to practice “dogfight” manoeuvres before returning to its mothership.

“In a future conflict, the side that can manoeuvre, preserve, and reposition its space capabilities will be better able to sustain communications, intelligence, targeting, and other space-enabled operations that increasingly determine military advantage on Earth,” argues Overell.

But Russia and China have been observed preparing an orbital “doomsday” weapon: electromagnetic pulse nuclear explosions.

“The blast would damage any unshielded satellites in line of sight and, as a 1962 U.S. test demonstrated, leave behind a belt of radiation that would continue killing satellites for months,” warns Stanford University international security analyst Jeffrey Lewis.

The Kill Cascade

“[I am] not going to go into specifics on the type of weapon,” Secretary Meink told media shortly after his conference address.

“Me talking about the details of what we’re doing would actually not benefit deterrence, so we’re not going to talk about the specifics of what we’re doing, whether we’ve tested it, not tested it, or anything else.”

Space has been a military terrain since Nazi Germany built the first V2 ballistic missiles in World War II. It quickly became home to surveillance platforms, communications relays, navigation markers, and missile-warning sensors.

Getting rid of these is now a military priority.

But what form such a “space control weapon” takes matters.

The United States, Russia, China and India have all tested “direct-kill” missiles in recent decades.

The lethal spray of metallic fragments they left behind is still cannoning through the spacelanes.

Occasionally, one of these strikes something: A satellite, an abandoned rocket body, larger pieces of junk.

And that just adds to the amount and coverage of this orbital hail of steel.

The European Space Agency estimates that about 56,000 such objects are being tracked. And hundreds of thousands of other fragments are too small for radar to detect.

Space war would cause this chain reaction to escalate dramatically.

“The higher the altitude, the longer the orbital debris will typically remain in Earth orbit,” assesses NASA.

‘Debris left in orbits below 600km normally falls back to Earth within several years. At altitudes of 800km, the time for orbital decay is often measured in centuries. Above 1000km, orbital debris will normally continue circling the Earth for a thousand years or more.”

Earlier this year, astrophysicists announced a Collision Realisation and Significant Harm (CRASH) clock. With every new collision, it calculates how long the world has left before orbital debris blocks access to space.

Mutually Assured Destruction

“It is critically important that we maintain our dominance, not only in the air but in space. So we’ve had to take steps to make sure that when we’re threatened, we can take care of that,” Secretary Meink stated.

All eyes are on Russian and Chinese tests.

Moscow recently put one satellite in an extremely unusual 1600km orbit. It sits inside a band of intense radiation that almost all other satellites avoid like the plague.

“US officials believe [this] is a testing process for a nuclear anti-satellite weapon that could one day take out satellite systems en masse,” explains Lewis.

This prospect was raised in 2024, when Republican Ohio representative Mike Turner accused Russia of moving to put a nuclear weapon into space.

But nukes aren’t needed. Yet.

Satellites can already grab, thump, blind and confuse each other.

“The United States, Russia, and China are now all able to harass one another’s satellites in ways that have real consequences,” Lewis adds.

Physical warheads are the big concern. These immediately generate immense debris clouds.

Electronic weapons delay the impact. These permanently blind or electronically disable a satellite, which then orbits until it falls to the Earth - or is struck by debris.

Others are closer to law-enforcement weapons, designed to temporarily dazzle, deafen, stun or disorient the targeted device.

Every such new offence prompts a new defence.

Which is why the race is on to build small, reliable, enduring orbital thruster technology.

“Satellites already shift to maintain or adjust their orbits,” says Overell. “Dynamic Space Operations (DSO) envisions something more demanding: spacecraft able to reposition more frequently and responsively as threats and missions change. In practice, that could mean relocating away from a threatening spacecraft or repositioning to monitor an adversarial satellite.”

Space has already become another domain for posturing, gunboat diplomacy, and brinkmanship.

It all heightens the risk of war.

“The mere possibility of losing its critical space assets in a surprise attack could push the United States to use its forces early or to delegate [nuclear] launch authority in ways that raise the risk of an accident, to avoid the devastating consequences,” Lewis concludes.