Star wars scenarios between the USA and Russia after the alarm raised in Congress over a "serious threat to national security", identified by the American media with Moscow's new nuclear capabilities in space.
Capabilities not yet deployed but capable of hitting the vast network of US satellites and therefore destroying civil communications, the surveillance system from space and also the command and control network of military operations by Washington and its allies.
Without the US having tools capable of countering such an eventuality, despite the Space Force created in 2019 by Donald Trump.
Moscow responded by obviously denying everything: "It's another ploy by the White House to try, by hook or by crook, to push Congress to approve aid to Kiev", accused Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov.
A reference to the 95 billion dollar bill, of which 60 for Ukraine, approved in a bipartisan way by the Senate but stalled in the House, where Speaker Mike Johnson refuses to put it to the vote because it lacks security measures on the border with Mexico.
"Malicious inventions", echoed Deputy Foreign Minister Serghei Ryabkov, a point of reference on arms control and Russia's nuclear policy.
“If the US makes any kind of claim, it should back it up with evidence,” he urged.
This is also what the head of the House Intelligence Committee, the moderate Republican Mike Turner, is aiming for, the first to publicly raise the alarm on the serious threat to US security by asking Joe Biden to declassify the information "so that Congress, The administration and all our allies can openly discuss the actions necessary to respond to this threat."
A bit like the president has already done in the past by revealing Putin's moves in Ukraine in advance to dictate the line to the West.
However, the release irritated the White House, partly due to the alarmism it aroused and partly due to the fear of compromising intelligence sources, even if some suspect - like the Kremlin - that it may have been an attempt to impose a acceleration of funds for Ukraine, of which Turner is a supporter, distancing himself from the Trumpists.
The information, according to the New York Times, has already been shared with allies.
And discussed today by National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan in an unusual limited meeting with the 'Gang of Eight', the eight congressional leaders authorized to deal with classified matters.
The exact nature of Russia's new nuclear capabilities in space is not yet clear and some experts wonder why Moscow should use atomic weapons to destroy enemy satellites when less lethal and sophisticated means are sufficient.
Furthermore, he would do so in violation of the 1967 Outer Space Treaty between the USA and the then Soviet Union (which bans nuclear weapons in orbit and in space), even though Putin has already recently abandoned other agreements on arms control dating back to the Cold War.
In any case, they are 'Star Wars' scenarios, those evoked in 1983 by Ronald Reagan's space shield and archived ten years later without fanfare by Bill Clinton.
But Washington has long been chasing Russia and China in the race for new weapons, not just in space.
Like hypersonic missiles, which are still in the experimental phase in the US but which Moscow has already used in Ukraine.
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