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In remarks delivered during an online video conference this week, Christopher Ford, U.S. assistant secretary at the State Department’s Bureau of International Security and Nonproliferation, discussed this language in the context of space security. Ford emphasized that for the purposes of parsing that bit of the 2018 NPR, American adversaries should understand that U.S. space-based dual-use (nuclear and nonnuclear) command and control assets qualified as what the 2017 National Security Strategy had dubbed a “vital U.S. interest.”

Accordingly, Ford continues: “I need hardly point out — but I will nonetheless, for emphasis — that the U.S. National nuclear Command, Control, and Communications (NC3) architecture depends to some extent upon space-based systems.” He is clear therefore that nonnuclear attacks on this architecture would potentially rise to the level of a nuclear response: “Any harmful interference with or attacks upon such components of our space architecture at any time, even if undertaken only with non-nuclear tools, thus starts to move into ‘significant non-nuclear strategic attack’ territory, and would lead to a significant and potentially drastic escalation of a crisis or conflict.”

Much of what Ford says here is not new or surprising, but his remarks offer one of the starker presentations of these ideas by a U.S. official in recent years  — at least since the release of the 2018 NPR. The problem that arises is one of “entanglement,” where a crisis might escalate to the nuclear level inadvertently if an adversary — say China — is attempting to degrade U.S. conventional operations by taking aim at certain space-based assets. Though the United States openly acknowledges the role of space-based assets in nuclear command and control, there is no explicit tabulation of which American military satellites are “nuclear” and which are “nonnuclear.”….. https://thediplomat.com/2020/04/space-based-nuclear-command-and-control-and-the-non-nuclear-strategic-attack/