Mutually Assured Destruction in Low Earth Orbit

In the early years of the Cold War, strategists developed terminology to describe the unprecedented scale and severity of nuclear war. The most enduring of these terms came from Game Theory. Coined by Donald Brennan at the Hudson Institute in 1962, “mutually assured destruction” epitomized the existential terror that peace through stalemate posed in a nuclear world. Mutually assured destruction stems from a game theory model; once two sides have the capability to completely nullify each other, it is in no side’s best interest to act. Applied to the real world, if a nation were to launch a nuclear offensive on the other, the annihilation of both nations, and possibly the world, would be assured. The same relationship exists today, albeit with less severe consequences, in low Earth orbit.

In order to maintain a stable orbit around the Earth, objects must travel at least 17,000 miles per hour: roughly 10 times as fast as the average bullet. At these velocities, even the smallest, most mundane things become deadly projectiles. The windows of the International Space Station have been cracked by flecks of paint, and there were over 2,000 recorded incidents of tiny pieces of shrapnel impacting the Space Shuttle. It is estimated that over 500,000 objects “the size of a marble or larger” orbit the Earth. If the damage inflicted by minuscule specks of paint is any indication of the kinetic energy involved, objects with significantly more mass like loose spacecraft parts or larger pieces of debris pose a serious threat to space infrastructure. The implications of this are harrowing.

In 1978, NASA scientist Donald Kessler proposed a theory of cascading orbital collisions that form a feedback loop of increasing devastation. With one inciting incident, a chain of collisions and their resulting debris fields result in more collisions and larger debris fields that can grow exponentially over time. (Scientific inaccuracies aside, the movie Gravity is a great visual representation of this phenomenon.) The vicious cycle of orbital destruction described by “Kessler Syndrome” threatens to render low Earth orbit completely useless and encase humanity in a tomb of ever-increasing debris; access to space would potentially be cut off for centuries. Even if you don’t care about space exploration, Kessler Syndrome would be the end of the host of modern technologies that rely on space to function. The satellite navigation and communications systems that support global commerce and society would come to a screeching halt as one satellite after the other is reduced to a cloud of orbital debris.

Four nations have proven their capability to destroy satellites in low Earth orbit: the US, Russia, China, and India. As space assets become increasingly important and great power competition between the US and China escalates, we walk a fine line between a thriving future in space and forced isolation on Earth. If a nation fires an anti-satellite missile at a rival, and the other nation responds, the resulting debris may serve as the inciting incident for a mutually assured Kessler catastrophe. To capture the severe consequences of low Earth orbit warfare, we must employ the same terminology and sentiment used to describe nuclear weapons to anti-satellite weapons.

 Harry Thomas is a senior in the College studying Economics and Science, Technology, and International Affairs (STIA). He is a Co-President and Co-Founder of Georgetown University Space Initiative.