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Shock Horror! Serious risk TO INVESTORS of nuclear war in space!

Are investors prepared for *checks notes* nuclear war in space? Space boom, meet actual boom

F.com Sinead O’Sullivan FEBRUARY 24 2024 Sinéad O’Sullivan is a former Senior Researcher at Harvard Business School’s Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness.

Imagine if a country launched a 1.4-megaton nuclear warhead into space and detonated it 400 kilometres above the Pacific Ocean, generating such a huge burst of electromagnetic energy that it resulted in an artificial aurora while disrupting electrical systems over land masses up to 1,500km away and destroying several satellites…………………………………..

This actually happened in 1962. And the actor, naturally, was the United States of America. In the early 1960’s, the United States conducted a series of nuclear tests in space, which were primarily aimed at studying the effects and potential military applications of deploying nuclear weapons in space. The explosion test, called Starfish Prime, was a high-altitude nuclear test conducted as a joint effort of the Atomic Energy Commission and the Defense Atomic Support Agency.

One of the test’s consequences was to catalyse Russian enthusiasm for some ground rules: the Outer Space Treaty was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly a few years later, in 1967……

Today, most people — including investors who have bet billions of dollars on SpaceX’s Starlink constellation — have probably not heard of Starfish Prime, and don’t worry much about the impact of mega-radiation war in space………………….

Regardless, what we do know is that any nuclear weapon in space would — along with a great number of other consequences — pose a huge risk to the $300bn of private capital invested into the space sector in the last decade………………..

It is unideal that there are currently no globally binding rules that protect investor interests and assets in space. Consider the $180bn valuation of SpaceX, which is largely credited to its Starlink satellite communications constellation. This constellation could disappear in the space of minutes with the use of a single nuclear anti-satellite weapon in space — Russian or otherwise. It is possible many investors have not considered that a single adversarial event could destroy value so quickly. …………………………………..

The Outer Space Treaty says that nations cannot militarise space, place weapons in space, or take ownership of any celestial space bodies. This makes it an established investor’s friend, not foe — especially if that investor is American.

It is overseen by the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (UN COPUOUS), but this body cannot legally mandate any nation to follow it. After all, in the jurisdiction of space, adherence is done via the complex mechanisms of diplomacy, something capital markets grossly lack………………..  https://www.ft.com/content/5a9c4477-6db9-4ea5-8ba2-7065f2370b02

February 28, 2024 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | business and costs, space travel, weapons and war