“Any nuclear detonation in space would also violate the 1963 Limited Test Ban Treaty which confined nuclear weapon testing to underground locations only. These prohibitions reflected the realization by the Soviet Union and the United States, at that point the leading space powers, that any nuclear detonation in outer space would have devastating effects on everyone’s spacecraft.
“While positioning a nuclear weapon in orbit is unlikely, a troubling development that has been occurring over the past few years has been a resumption of testing destructive anti-satellite weapons (ASATs). These so-called kinetic weapons are launched by missiles with guidance systems able to direct them on a collision course with the target satellite. China was the first to employ such a direct-ascent ASAT in 2007, followed by the US in 2008, India in 2019 and most recently Russia in November 2021.”
Read the full essay in Open Canada: https://opencanada.org/the-russians-are-coming/