Comment by icegreentea | Hacker News Reader

Comment by icegreentea | Hacker News Reader

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There's a difference between militarization and weaponization. As noted, space has been militarized for a long time. There's a crap load of military equipment floating up there. "True" weaponization of space would be putting orbital to surface or orbital-orbitcal weapon systems in orbit. You know, death lasers, nukes, KEMs, sat-killer sats, whatever.

People want to keep the weaponization down for two reasons. The first is more or less idealism. It would sure be nice not to fuck up everyplace we go with our nation-state rivalries. The second is because orbital weapons is just a huge game changer. You put a sat with a bunch of KEMs on an orbit that just happens to pass right over Beijing or Washington, or Moscow? Cost/energy effectiveness aside, the warning time for such a strike would be tiny (far less than sub launched nukes). Does the government just go nuts everytime the sat comes over the horizon?

Yeah, not pretty.

> "True" weaponization of space would be putting orbital to surface or orbital-orbitcal weapon systems in orbit.

Both have been going on for a long time. Russia has satellites in high orbit that carry nukes. Russia's very first step in WWIII, would be to detonate those nukes to create a huge EMP that would fry every unprotected electronic device in North America. It will also severely cripple the communication infrastructure. It will also be the first step because it can some without warning, as it only takes a couple of minutes to take effect. ICBMs will be launched simultaneously or right after the EMP attack. ICMBs can take up to half an hour to an hour to reach their targets.

> Russia has satellites in high orbit that carry nukes.

What? There is a treaty outlawing this.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_weapon#Orbital_weaponry

The nature of the weapon is such that when deployed, treaties won't matter much after that. Before that, it is hard to check what each satellite has on-board.

Also, EMP waves are not designed to kill people, so I am not sure what they classification as far as any treaties are concerned.

The level to which our infrastructure is vulnerable to EMP has dramatically increased since the 60s. That means, there is a much larger incentives to deploy such weapons now.

You've been watching too many movies.

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