During the 1980s, Soviet authors frequently listed space mines as potential counters to space-based elements of a strategic defense system. For example, in the 1986 book "Weaponry in Space: The Dilemma of Security," the authors note: "Another good way of simultaneously putting out of action several stations would be to use the so-called 'space mines,' which are essentially satellites with high-yield explosives placed into orbits close to the opponents' battle stations, which explode on command from the ground. The mines could be supplied with all sorts of fuses, in particular mechanical- or thermal-actuated ones." ( More ... )

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Wilson, Tom. Threats to United States Space Capabilities. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Space Commission, 2001. [ 8 quotes ]

 

The absence of hostile anti-satellite systems during Desert Storm also made the achievement of space control for the positive uses of space extraordinarily simple. Not too long ago, however, the United States could not take the liberty of planning for war without providing for satellite survivability. During the cold war, the United States had to defend against an enemy that had developed the capability to disrupt and destroy space systems. For almost two decades, until its collapse, the Soviet Union maintained a dedicated co-orbital interceptor in readiness at its launch site at the Tyuratam cosmodrome. The Soviets also deployed exoatmospheric nuclear-tipped anti-ballistic missiles around Moscow, which could have been used against U.S. satellites in low Earth orbit. It was believed that Moscow also sponsored research and development of directed-energy weapons, lasers, and nonnuclear direct-ascent interceptors for use against enemy satellites. Today, Russia continues to deploy nuclear interceptors and may still have an operational co-orbital anti-satellite (ASAT) weapon. ( More ... )

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Lambakis, Steven. "Space Control in Desert Storm and Beyond." Orbis. Vol. 39, No. 3 (Summer 1995). [ 6 quotes ]

 

“Moratorium” is the wrong word, often deliberately so, because Moscow insisted it had never done anything it now had to stop. Once it became clear that the Reagan Administration was going to respond to a decade of space-to-space combat tests of an operational Soviet “killer-satellite”, Soviet premier Andropov applied diplomatic and propaganda pressure (to encourage Western political forces) by announcing that “the USSR would never be the first to test anti-satellite weapons”—a cynically-phrased promise that belied the fact that they had already been the first many years earlier. The promise was widely described in the West as a declared cessation of acknowledged space weapons testing, but Moscow insisted it was not, since it claimed that since it had never began testing, there was nothing it was doing that it was obligated to stop. That sounds like the way space lawyers (and space propagandists) quibble.

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Oberg, James. "The Dozen Space Weapons Myths." The Space Review. March 17, 2007.

 

While Western advocates of not developing space weapons could not, with a straight face (as Moscow did), proclaim there were no Soviet space weapons, they found a next-best-thing argument. Sure, the weapons existed, but they didn’t work, so they were nothing to worry about. But the widely-reported “low reliability” numbers were generated by often guessing about a test’s success, and then conflating results from operational, deployed models with research missions with more advanced and experimental guidance systems (which did fail a few times before working right, at which point tests of that variant were stopped). Following the Soviet collapse, Russian military space historians were able to release documentation that demonstrated the high reliability of the operational Soviet “killer satellite” and thus the wish-away delusions of many Western experts. Determining it was operational into the early 1990s was also easy: US spy satellites observed that the rail lines from the hangars to the launch pads were the first areas plowed of new-fallen snow.

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Oberg, James. "The Dozen Space Weapons Myths." The Space Review. March 17, 2007.

 

The Chinese test was shocking because space was thought to be quite safe. That was an illusion. In the 1980s the Soviets conducted a few antisatellite tests and then stopped. U.S. experts thought that proved the Soviets had concluded that attacks on satellites were not in their interests, essentially because they thought the Soviets had accepted U.S. reasoning about the stabilizing effect of satellite reconnaissance. After the Cold War ended, however, the Russians published detailed accounts of their space activities. It turned out that the tests had ended because they had proved the system successful. The Soviet antisatellite system was deployed, and it stayed deployed throughout the Cold War, clearly without the United States being aware of it.

To the Soviets, antisatellite measures made perfect sense. U.S. reconnaissance satellites were and are extremely expensive, and they are made in very small numbers. If one is destroyed, instant replacement is not an option. ( More ... )

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Friedman, Norman. "War in Space?." U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings. Vol. 133, No. 3 (March 2007). [ 5 quotes ]

 

China, largely due to the recent demonstration of a physically destructive ASAT, may be the most dramatic example of threat to US space assets, but it is not the only one. Several states have developed capabilities that could be used against U.S. space systems. China may have surpassed Russia in space programs, but Russia maintains significant space threat capabilities that were developed by the USSR, including direct ascent capabilities. While Russia is not known to have tested the Soviet Orbital ASAT system, that system was tested in orbit some twenty times by the Soviet Union and may be maintained or resurrected. Russia also possesses laser, radio frequency, jamming, and electro-magnetic pulse (EMP) systems that could be employed against U.S. space capabilities.

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U.S. State Department. Study on Space Policy: Report of the International Security Advisory Board. Washington, D.C.: U.S. State Department, April 27, 2007. [ 9 quotes ] [ page 4 ]

 

Russia is the only other state with a dedicated Space Surveillance System (SSS), which functions using Russia's early warning radars in space and more than 20 optical and electro- optical facilities at 14 locations on Earth. The main optical observation system, Okno, located at an altitude of 2,200 meters in the mountains near the Tajik eastern city of Nurek, aims principally at objects of 2,000 to 40,000 kilometers in altitude. The system cannot track satellites at very low inclinations and the operation of Russian surveillance sensors is reportedly erratic. The network as a whole carries out some 50,000 observations daily, contributing to a catalogue of approximately 5,000 objects, mostly in LEO. While information from the system is not classified, Russia does not have a formal structure to widely disseminate information about observations.

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Graham, Thomas and William Marshall. Space Security 2007. Waterlo, Ontario: Project Ploughshares, August 2007. [ 20 quotes ] [ page 27 ]

 

Myth #8: Russia and China will be "forced" to respond by developing corresponding weapons.

This "blank check for the bad guys" claim seems to be a view espoused by spokesmen for DC lobby groups, for foreign governments, and for other associations who seem to favor one spin in common: any foreign action allegedly sparked by anybody's worries about US actions is excusable, while any US action sparked by activities of another nation is dangerously paranoid. But China has already "pre-responded" with its own test a year ago—a weapon with far greater capability (and leaving far worse space pollution) than the US missile. As for Russia, it's had its space-capable anti-missile defense shield deployed around Moscow for decades, and recently reopened a mothballed missile test range at Sary Shagan in Kazakhstan to test-fire upgraded missiles. They are probably launched so far only against imaginary missile or space targets, or potentially against real ones with no final impacts. Even if one of them is soon used in a demonstration against a satellite, it will represent nothing new in their arsenal, only the exercise of a latent capability that had always been there.

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Oberg, James. "Sense, Nonsense, and Pretense about the Destruction of USA 193." The Space Review. March 4, 2008.

 

A series of reforms in recent years subordinated the air-defense component of the service to the Air Forces and transferred space-related branches— early-warning systems, space surveillance, and missile defense—to the Space Forces. This transformation remains a contentious point in Russia, and many analysts argue that defense in airspace and in outer space should be considered together and advocate an organizational reform that would facilitate integration between various defense systems. Defense officials express the point of view that although integration is indeed essential, it does not necessarily require further organizational changes.

The degree to which defending airspace and defending outer space are considered to be part of a single mission varies, but most experts agree that defenses are, at the very least, united by the strategic nature of any threat that they would have to counter. As a result, some strong parallels between air and space defense are drawn, and it is in this context that experts most often mention the need to counter space-based assets of the attacker. In discussions of this possibility, little distinction is made between "strike weapons" in space and support systems like navigation or communication. This is understand- able, as all these systems are assumed to be highly integrated.

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Zhang, Hui and Pavel Podvig. Russian and Chinese Responses to U.S. Military Plans in Space. Cambridge, MA: American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2008. [ 16 quotes ] [ page 4 ]