A new report from the American Foreign Policy Council finds the United States has no tested plan for responding to a nuclear detonation in space, based on a series of 2025 war games that tested possible responses to such a crisis. The report, published April 24, 2026, analyzed the outcome of two workshops held in May 2025 with former officials from the National Security Council, the Pentagon, the intelligence community, the Space Force, U.S. Space Command and the commercial satellite industry.
The war games used three draft contingency plans—for a suspected nuclear device in orbit, a confirmed device, and a detonation—applied to four scenarios using a fictional Russian satellite modeled on a real Russian platform and a Chinese adversary as stand-ins. In the second scenario, Russia announced it had a nuclear weapon in orbit and warned the U.S. to comply with its demands or lose its military and commercial satellites, a threat the workshop judged credible and one against which the U.S. “appears to lack response options.” The third and fourth scenarios detonated a weapon outright, first in low orbit and then in geostationary orbit as a Chinese demonstration during a Taiwan crisis, with strategists finding no capability in existence to recover from either.
Across all four scenarios, the report concluded that the U.S. can defend its own satellites against an adversary’s direct action, but it has no tested plan for detecting, managing or recovering from an adversary’s nuclear weapon in orbit.
The report follows Air Force Secretary Troy Meink’s confirmation that the United States “now has on-orbit space control weapons capable of defending the joint force against hostile adversary action,” the first public acknowledgment by any American official that the U.S. has such weapons. That confirmation prompted Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov to declare that “We believe that space must be free of any weapon,” according to AFP. Also last week, Ukrainian military intelligence said it breached the network of Russia’s Moscow Institute of Thermal Technology and obtained documents on a Russian orbital program, including “a scalable, unified space platform called ‘Tiporyad,’ aimed at enhancing the reconnaissance, communication, and command capabilities of the Russian army.”
Gen. Stephen Whiting, head of U.S. Space Command, said in April that Russia “continues to invest in counter-space weapons, with the most concerning reports being that they are potentially thinking about placing on orbit a nuclear ASAT weapon.” Such a weapon “would hold at risk everyone’s satellites in low Earth orbit, and that would be an outcome that we just couldn’t tolerate,” he said.
Context
The report’s findings come as the U.S. Missile Defense Agency on September 16 posted a pre-solicitation notice for a new mobile radar, called Forward Based Mode Radar Next, designed to be flown into a war zone aboard a C-17 and set up within hours. The agency says current forward-based radars are largely static or semi-mobile, making them vulnerable to counterattack. The notice is not a request for proposals, and no timeline for a formal solicitation has been announced.
Sources: USNI News · Defense News