In 2024, a U.S. government official warned that Russia could be developing a new satellite designed to carry nuclear weapons into space. The statement followed the launch of a suspicious Russian satellite into low-Earth orbit in 2022, just a few weeks before the country's full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
A nuclear detonation in low-Earth orbit—the region about 100 miles to 1,200 miles above Earth's surface—would release trillions of highly energetic electrons that would destroy many of the satellites in space, disrupting telecommunications networks, GPS, space-based internet and more.
The 1967 Outer Space Treaty bans the placement of nuclear weapons in space, but there's currently no way to verify satellites don't contain nuclear weapons. In fact, no verification methods have even been proposed in unclassified, peer-reviewed literature.
Now, MIT professor Areg Danagoulian is proposing a way to determine whether a satellite orbiting Earth contains a nuclear weapon. In a new paper published in Nature, Danagoulian describes his idea for a satellite-based sensor system that could orbit close to a suspect satellite and detect neutrons generated by high-energy protons colliding with radioactive material.
In the paper, Danagoulian calculates that a sensor system the size of a large encyclopedia could detect a nuclear weapon with 99% accuracy if it orbited within 4,000 meters of the suspect satellite for about a week. He also estimates that the detection time could be cut to a matter of hours if multiple satellite sensors were used or the sensor satellite was able to get within 1,000 meters of the suspect satellite.
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