The United States, Russia, China and India have all tested anti-satellite weapons in low-Earth orbit – and these tests need to stop. Even attacking a small number of satellites produces massive, long-lasting space debris. This fuels growing concerns over the Kessler Syndrome, a catastrophic chain reaction where continuous orbital collisions could render low-Earth orbit unusable for every country on Earth.

The US stands to lose the most in a space war as the largest spacefaring nation. It operates over 10,600 active satellites and SpaceX aims to eventually have up to 42,000 satellites.

Space weaponisation is a core part of President Donald Trump’s Golden Dome project for missile defence. Its design hinges on space-based interceptors because ground-based defences cannot reliably hit missiles during their brief boost phase. Only orbital platforms can deliver persistent global coverage to destroy rockets soon after launch.

Yet, Trump’s claim that “we must have American dominance in space” is nothing more than a fantasy. Leaving aside its astronomical costs and extreme technical difficulties, no defensive system can fully counter the full spectrum of attacks by ballistic missiles, manoeuvrable hypersonic vehicles, fractional orbital bombardment systems and dual-use satellites at the same time.

It takes little imagination to realise a space war would inevitably escalate into a large-scale, all-out conflict. Strikes targeting satellites would not remain confined to space; they would immediately cripple critical national infrastructure on the ground, triggering cross-domain retaliation and dragging adversaries into a full-spectrum war.

And no conflict in space can remain confined to conventional warfare. It is almost surely part of a nuclear war or a prelude to it. Any major-power strike against rival space assets is impossible to conceal and will invite overwhelming retaliation.

“A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” This hard-learned consensus emerged from the Cold War nuclear arms race, and all five nuclear-armed states still officially uphold this principle, at least on paper.

It is interesting to note that during the Cold War, despite decades of bitter geopolitical rivalry, the two superpowers still managed to cooperate in peaceful space exploration, most notably the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project – humanity’s first international crewed space mission.

It is a bitter irony, then, that the weaponisation of space – which even the Cold War rivals had the wisdom to avoid – is unfolding before our eyes. Three centuries after Newton admitted he could not calculate the madness of men, that madness has reached the stars. To march down this self-destructive path is not merely a strategic error; it is a doomsday scenario of our own making.