As of: February 19, 2024, 7:55 a.m
By: Karsten Hinzmann
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A nuclear explosion: Putin's EMP bomb detonates in the atmosphere without directly affecting people.
To do this, all satellites are destroyed by an electromagnetic pulse.
The consequences are unavoidable.
(Symbolic image) © Markus Gann/Imago
Their mutual assurances have long since become smoke and mirrors: Russia and the USA are once again threatening nuclear weapons.
Putin even wants to go back into space.
Moscow - What Donald Trump can do, US President Ronald Reagan had already managed to do: shake his supposed friends to the core and bring a sweat of fear to their foreheads.
That was almost three decades ago now, but apparently has lost none of its fascination in the minds of potentates: Star Wars.
Now Vladimir Putin is apparently also setting his sights on space to demonstrate his strength to NATO.
The
Financial Times
reports that Vladimir Putin may be considering a nuclear attack on Ukraine, but in a different way than previously thought: Instead of detonating a nuclear bomb over a Ukrainian city, i.e. a conventional nuclear attack, Russia could instead detonate a bomb high up in the atmosphere and in the process release an electromagnetic pulse (English: Electromagnetic Pulse; German: elektromagnetischer Impuls) that destroys almost all electronics on the ground - within a radius of hundreds or even thousands of kilometers.
This starts where Reagan failed so badly with his “Strategic Defense Initiative”.
The 40th President of the United States wanted to set up a missile defense umbrella in space over the USA - an ambitious project that Reagan had initiated in 1983 to defend the American nation.
Laser cannons and orbiting missiles should move future wars into space and Russia's nuclear teeth on the ground.
The Americans' vision: A battle of materiel without casualties.
After just a few years, however, it became clear that such a protective shield was not affordable and not even technically feasible.
Now Vladimir Putin is making another attempt at exactly this goal in the Ukraine war.
Putin's nuclear weapons threat: unlikely to be used on the ground
Forbes
magazine
currently considers Russia's idea to be rather half-baked: “This threat is real and must be taken seriously.
But there are also reasons to believe that such an attack may not happen, at least not in the near future.
This provides some certainty that the war in Ukraine will remain contained for the time being, but that does not mean that Europe is out of the woods yet.” Russian President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly threatened the use of force since the start of the war in Ukraine two years ago Nuclear weapons.
The EMP bomb would be the next, logical step, however, the magazine
Militaire Aktuell suspects,
because the use of nuclear weapons on the ground can be seen as fundamentally counterproductive.
The detonation of a nuclear bomb by Russia would permanently contaminate a larger area, including for its own troops, and possibly even decimate its own units on the battlefield.
And since an attack of this kind on Ukraine is likely to strengthen the will to resist of the entire population and that of Western countries, but would hardly bring any military advantages, an operation is probably just as unrealistic - at ground level.
Nuclear bomb in the atmosphere: long-term threat is absolutely real
Operations at high altitudes would be different, writes
Military Aktuell
: The radioactivity released by a tactical nuclear weapon detonated high in the air would hardly cause any fallout and would cost human lives.
However, the resulting electromagnetic pulse could briefly paralyze or even permanently switch off the electronic and digital infrastructure of entire countries outside of extremely secure networks.
So also military computers, radar systems, communication systems and precision weapons.
The threat posed by nuclear and EMP weapons of one to ten kilotons can actually be assessed as real in the long term.
But this type of warfare is by no means new, writes
Focus
.
As early as the 1960s, Great Britain test-fired nuclear weapons in space, which was banned by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1967.
With a view to wars like the one Putin is currently waging against Ukraine, such detonations could of course “cause great damage on the ground because satellite-based control of guided missiles such as drones would no longer be possible,” as former Air Force Colonel Ralf Thiele said
Institute for Strategy, Politics, Security and Economic Consulting
says.
Consequences of a nuclear strike: Thousands of tons of scrap in orbit
Thiele assumes that the goals of such an attack will primarily be the destruction of smaller telecommunications satellites: In an emergency, according to the military expert, it would only be smaller telecommunications satellites such as Elon Musk's “Starlink” satellite.
There are now an estimated 6,000 Starlink satellites orbiting the Earth.
It is precisely because of this number that other scientists are more cautious in their forecast: “It would cause irreparable damage to the low Earth orbit environment.
“We could potentially be dealing with a cascade of collisions of defunct satellites that would render large parts of low-Earth orbit unusable for all of humanity,” says Ankit Panda, for example, from the nuclear policy program at the think tank
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
.
Political analyst Rudolf Adam shares this fear in the magazine
Sirius
: “A cyber attack protects people and property, but destroys, so to speak, the blood and nerves of the economic cycle.
In classic war, we amputate the enemy bit by bit until they give up in order to survive.
Modern technology offers much more elegant approaches: Instead of slaughtering the enemy, we paralyze their neural pathways.
The new military technologies do not destroy objects, but rather functional connections.
They are practically impossible to control because it is difficult to distinguish between civilian and military uses.”
Putin's space plan: a Ukraine that is unable to fight on the ground
In mid-2019, NATO adopted a space strategy, making it possible to declare space an independent area of operations in the future.
To this end, additional resources will be made available to protect the member states' satellites from kinetic attacks and hackers and to treat possible attacks there in the same way as those on the ground or in air, sea or cyberspace.
Most recently, NATO declared “cyber” an independent area of operation in 2016 in order to better defend itself against hacker attacks that paralyze power grids or communications technology.
Now the threat from the East is apparently taking shape.
Forbes
suspects that this is exactly what Vladimir Putin will now speculate about in the Ukraine war - he wants to trigger chaos on the ground via the big bang in space: "The likely effect of such an attack would be to put Ukraine on the defensive, while it... is working on rebuilding its infrastructure.
Access to electricity and water is already a problem in Ukraine - this would massively worsen the humanitarian crisis.
The resulting chaos would provide Russia with perfect conditions for another major attack,” writes
Forbes
.
The nuclear treaties back then: proof of trust in the Cold War
After all, the nuclear powers wanted to keep the atmosphere free of radioactive contamination, as they agreed in the Moscow Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in August 1963;
for this reason
The USA, the Soviet Union and Great Britain signed a treaty banning above-ground nuclear weapons tests.
The agreement marked the beginning of a system of nuclear disarmament.
Its creation during the Cold War was also motivated by the worrying increase in radioactivity in the Earth's atmosphere that was discovered at the time.
This increase was due to nuclear weapon explosions, which took place in large numbers as part of military test programs of the major powers until the early 1960s.
In 1972, the USA and the then Soviet Union concluded the ABM Treaty (in German: Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty).
With this, the USA and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics committed themselves not to build nationwide defense systems against ballistic missiles.
The ABM Treaty limits the development and deployment of permitted strategic missile defense, so only two localized missile defense installations are permitted for each contracting party.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia, Kazakhstan, Belarus and Ukraine became legal successors to the treaty.
The nuclear treaties today: no longer worth the paper they are written on
This was followed in 1988 by the INF Treaty (Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces) between US President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Michael Gorbachev;
The treaty called for the elimination of all land-based ballistic and cruise missiles with a shorter range of 500 to 1,000 kilometers and with an intermediate range of 1,000 to 5,500 kilometers.
The most important contracts have now been overtaken by history.
The INF Treaty expired in 2019 because the Americans withdrew from it under US President Donald Trump.
In their opinion, Russia had violated the rules with a new arms program.
US President George W. Bush terminated the ABM Treaty in 2001 in order to be able to set up his own missile defense - as Der
Spiegel
wrote: “Bush had made his desire to develop missile defense clear in a keynote speech on national security.
For the sake of peace, Washington must ignore the ABM Treaty, which was written "in a different era for a different enemy," Bush said.
Washington must protect America and its friends against all forms of terrorism, “including terrorism that could arrive with a missile.”
Almost everything that was achieved between 1970 and 2000 in terms of arms control policy has been lost, the magazine
Sirius
analyzes : The ABM Treaty was terminated by the USA in order to have a free hand in the development of missile defense systems.
The INF Treaty was also terminated by Washington because Russia violated it.
The Open Skies Treaty was terminated by the Trump administration without further explanation.
The CFE Treaty (Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe) was terminated by Russia after the Western member states could not bring themselves to ratify the Adaptation Treaty (ACFE) as long as Russian troops were in Transnistria.
The Vienna document on confidence-building measures has become ineffective since Russia in particular has undermined this agreement by fragmenting its maneuvers.
Sirius
author Rudolf Adam therefore considers the missile policy of the 20th century to have failed: “The classic policy of arms control and non-proliferation is outdated.” (Karsten Hinzmann)