Hon. Peter J. Beshar
speaker
139 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 22 Jul
Hon. Peter J. Beshar’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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And those five words were carefully chosen in orbit around the Earth.
And the goal was to try to preclude a nuclear satellite
but not to prohibit, as was occurring when these were negotiated, an ICBM, for example, that transits in an arc through space.
And so that's an extremely important provision of the OST.
And it came into debate in the past few years because Chairman Turner, you may remember, of the House Permanent Select Committee said,
spoke publicly about the fact that there was a potentially destabilizing threat to our national security.
And over the ensuing days, it came out that that related to an anti-satellite capability that Russia was allegedly attempting to develop.
So the U.S.
turned to the Security Council to try to really reaffirm this prohibition within the Outer Space Treaty.
And the vote in the Security Council was 13 to 1, with Russia being the only country that vetoed it and China abstained.
So another key provision is in Article 9, the concept of due regard, that every nation, every state party to the treaty should be conducting its affairs with due regard.
And so the government, the US government has sought to flesh out some of those concepts, for example, to talk about really trying to limit space debris, trying to have safe separation between spacecraft and the like.
And in late 2021,
Russia fired an anti-satellite, an ASAT missile that destroyed one of its own satellites in Leo, but it caused something like 1,500 pieces of space debris.
They even threatened the cosmonauts who were on the ISS at the time.
So trying to avoid that type of activity, prior administration voluntarily agreed to a moratorium, for example, on destructive direct descent ASAT tests.
I think it's less from a legal capability because the OST has the provision that really prohibits that type of a development from occurring in orbit around the Earth.
I think it's more just from a question of physics and what the impact of any nuclear detonation would actually be in LEO.
You know, you need a nuclear scientist to take the audience through this properly.
But at a layperson's level from an English major in college, a nuclear blast in the orbit where there are thousands of satellites that are operating today, satellites that all of us rely upon.
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