Exclusive: Why D.C. defense experts wrestled with a simulated space nuke
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Illustration: Aïda Amer/Axios
A dozen or so people gathered around a table in suburban Washington and were presented with a tense scenario: Someone had detonated a space nuke, American satellites were failing, and fighting in Europe and Asia was intensifying.
- How could this happen, they wondered. To whom could the attack be attributed? How quickly could the U.S. repopulate its constellations?
- Are world powers in contact? How could they avoid an exchange of intercontinental ballistic missiles? And how were the people back home, not bombed out but very much confused, stomaching crippled GPS and financial markets?
The big picture: While the mental gymnastics were very much real, the world-ending stakes were not. The deliberations were part of a tabletop exercise put on by Fuse, a fusion-energy company.
- Led by a former Pentagon official and longtime nuclear scholar, the exercise was attended by members of the defense, intelligence, arms control and lawmaking communities.
- Axios was invited to attend and observe, but asked to keep some details private.
What they're saying: "We felt like a war game was the best way to educate people" and help them "understand why the hell this matters and what the world may look like in five to 10 years," Fuse founder and CEO JC Btaiche told Axios.
- "When people think 'nuclear weapon' they think Hiroshima or Nagasaki and they say, 'Oh, that's never going to happen in this world again.'"
- Years after the end of World War II, the U.S. executed Starfish Prime, a nuclear burst in space. More recently, Russia was said to be tinkering with a nuclear anti-satellite weapon.
Zoom in: At the heart of Fuse's exercise — described by one person as "not Dungeons & Dragons" and without any dice rolling — was the issue of radiation hardening.
- In the first scenario, the hardening was inadequate and U.S. infrastructure fell short. In the second, Washington was more prepared. The difference was stark.
- "With space being more proliferated," Btaiche said, "the need for radiation hardening is going to be super critical."
Zoom out: Fuse in April announced a new facility in New Mexico dedicated to radiation testing, offering radiation-as-a-service to government agencies, defense programs and commercial players.
- Fuse's advisers include Lisa Gordon-Hagerty, a former National Nuclear Security Administration boss, and Maura Burns, a former CIA senior weapons-and-counterproliferation official.
What's next: Fuse and Btaiche expect to host more of these war games going forward. It's both a novel marketing tactic and a means to surface national-security concerns.
- "Some people would say the threat of nuclear war is higher now than it was at the height of the Cold War," Btaiche said.
- "The best way to accomplish peace is to be ready for war," he added. "We are building the future we want and preventing the future we don't want."
Go deeper: Russian nuke threats signal "weakness," NNSA boss says
