The US moves to weaponize space are deeply destabilizing, the Russian Foreign Ministry has said
US President Donald Trump’s directive to create an American ‘Iron Dome’ missile defense system is a destabilizing step towards the weaponization of space, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova has said.
Trump’s executive order to develop advanced missile defenses, issued earlier this week, authorizes the creation of “space-based interceptors,” among other things, the diplomat told reporters on Friday.
“We see this as yet another confirmation of the US focus on turning space into an arena for armed confrontation, warfare, and the deployment of weapons,” Zakharova said.
This would “completely discredit” the previous US administration’s initiative to develop “certain norms, rules and principles” of behavior in space, and would violate the ban on testing direct-ascent and satellite-killer missiles, she added.
Trump’s decisions “indicate Washington’s intention to actively develop and expand deeply destabilizing military programs,” Zakharova said, noting that it would expand missile defenses “to a scale comparable to Reagan’s ‘Star Wars’.”
President Ronald Reagan had envisioned a missile shield as part of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), a Cold War program nicknamed ‘Star Wars’ at the time. Reagan’s proposal touched off an arms race between the US and the Soviet Union.
The US never managed to develop the space-based weapons Reagan wanted, however, and the tensions eventually waned with the signing of several arms-control treaties. Washington has since abrogated almost all of them, including the ABM treaty banning strategic missile defenses to the INF treaty limiting short- and intermediate-range missiles in Europe.
Trump’s program is “openly aimed” at devaluing the Russian and Chinese strategic deterrent, which “will not contribute to reducing tensions or improving the situation in the strategic sphere, including creating a basis for a fruitful dialogue on strategic armaments,” Zakharova said on Friday.
Such dangerous ideas reinforce the importance of Russia’s proposals to create legally binding instruments for preventing an arms race in outer space, including tools to prohibit the deployment of space-based weapons, she added.
The January 27 executive order instructs the Pentagon to create a plan for protecting the US territory from “ballistic, hypersonic, advanced cruise missiles, and other next-generation aerial attacks from peer, near-peer, and rogue adversaries” using a multi-layered missile shield.
Such an “Iron Dome” – a name borrowed from Israel’s short-range missile defense – would include the “development and deployment of proliferated space-based interceptors,” capable of shooting down incoming ballistic missiles during their boost phase, as well as unspecified “capabilities to defeat missile attacks prior to launch,” according to the text of the order.
