US White House's Intelligence Committee chairman, Mike Turner, has warned of a "senior national security threat" related to Russian nuclear capabilities, according to an ABC News report.Multiple sources familiar with the intelligence have disclosed that the United States possesses new information on Russian military capabilities, specifically concerning its endeavours to deploy a nuclear anti-satellite system in space.

"I am requesting that President Biden declassify all information relating to this threat so that Congress, the Administration, and our allies can openly discuss the actions necessary to respond to this threat," Turner said in the statement.

House Speaker Mike Johnson has acknowledged that the threat is associated with a Russian anti-satellite weapon deployed in space. This type of weapon has the potential to pose a significant risk to U.S. satellites responsible for transmitting billions of bytes of data every hour. “We just want to assure everyone steady hands are at the wheel. We’re working on it and there’s no need for alarm,” he said.

Current and former officials said that the launch of the antisatellite did not appear imminent, but that there was a limited window of time, which they did not define, to prevent its deployment.

It is not clear whether the new intelligence alert is connected to a Russian launch on 9 February of a Soyuz rocket carrying a classified defense ministry payload.

“Russia has been conducting several experiments with manoeuvring satellites that might be designed to sabotage other satellites,” Hans Kristensen, director of the nuclear information project at the Federation of American Scientists, said. He pointed out that any such deployment of nuclear weapons in space would violate the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, to which Moscow is a signatory.

“The issue is not so much about an increased nuclear weapons threat per se but that it would increase the threat against other countries’ space-based nuclear command and control assets. It would be highly destabilizing.”

Other countries have tested anti-satellite weapons in the past, but this would be an escalation,Kristensen said, and the US has made clear that it would react “very forcefully” to an attack on its nuclear command and control satellites.

“If it’s orbital, it’s a new level of threat [to the system], whether it’s nuclear or not,” said Kristensen, who added that even conventional weapons on an orbital anti-satellite system could pose a significant threat to the US.

Daryl Kimball, the head of the Arms Control Association, said a nuclear anti-satellite weapon made little practical sense.

“You don’t need a nuclear weapon to blow up a satellite in orbit. All objects in space are so delicate, that you can do something with much less than a nuclear detonation,” Kimball said. “Plus, it’s completely illegal.”

In recent years the US has seen both China and Russia pursue new ways to jam satellites, intercept their feeds, blind them, shoot them down, and even potentially grab them with a robotic arm to pull them out of their programmed orbits. Due to this rapidly evolving threat in space, the US established Space Force in 2019. One of the key missions of the Space Force is to train troops skilled in detecting and defending against those threats.

In its 2020 Defense Space Strategy, the Pentagon said China and Russia presented the greatest strategic threat in space due to their aggressive development of counter space abilities, and their military doctrine calling for extending conflict to space.

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