A key U.S. lawmaker warned Thursday that Russia is on the verge of ushering in the end of the Space Age with its new, nuclear anti-satellite weaponry.
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Turner, an Ohio Republican, told an audience in Washington that allowing Russia to gain such an advantage would be catastrophic. He called on President Joe Biden to mount an aggressive response.
“This crisis is the Cuban missile crisis in space,” Turner said, comparing the moment to the 1962 confrontation between the U.S. and the former Soviet Union, which took both sides to the brink of nuclear conflict.
But in this case, Turner said, Russia could unilaterally impose high costs on the U.S. simply by detonating a nuclear anti-satellite weapon in orbit.
“This threat would mean that our economic, international security and social systems come to a grinding halt,” he said. “This would be a catastrophic and devastating attack upon Western economic and democratic systems.”
Turner, who accused Biden of “sleepwalking into an irreversible day zero,” called on the White House to immediately declassify all of its intelligence on the Russian program to make the world aware of the full extent of the threat.
The White House on Thursday rejected Turner’s accusations.
“He's just wrong. He's just flat-out wrong,” White House national security spokesman John Kirby told reporters.
“We have absolutely taken this very seriously,” Kirby said. “We've been working this particular problem set from every possible angle, including through intense diplomacy with countries around the world and, obviously, through direct conversations with Russia.”
Russia has repeatedly denied the U.S. accusations, including last month when Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov dismissed concerns as “fake news.”
"The Americans can say whatever they want, but our policy does not change,” Ryabkov told the Interfax news agency, adding that Moscow, "always consistently opposed the deployment of strike weapons in low-Earth orbit.”
Turner first raised concerns about the prospect of a Russian anti-satellite weapons program in February, when he issued a statement warning of "a serious national security threat” and issued his initial call for the White House to declassify the relevant intelligence.
Biden responded by confirming that Russia was developing a space-based, anti-satellite weapons system but added there was no indication that Russia had decided to move ahead with the program and that there was no nuclear threat to anyone on Earth.
Concerns spiked last month when the U.S. accused Russia of using a May 16 space launch to deploy what the U.S. Defense Department described as an anti-satellite weapon “capable of attacking other satellites in low-Earth orbit.”
“Russia deployed this new counterspace weapon into the same orbit as a U.S. government satellite,” Major General Pat Ryder, Pentagon press secretary, said at the time. “So, you know, obviously that's something that we'll continue to monitor.”
