杏吧原创

AS RUSSIA struggles to restore links with four military satellites following
last week鈥檚 fire at a relay station, experts say the incident illustrates the
advanced decay of Russia鈥檚 space-based defences. They warn that Russia鈥檚
inability to detect US missile launches from space could inadvertently cause a
nuclear war.

Anatoly Perminov, head of Russia鈥檚 Space Forces, has admitted that the fire
at a satellite relay station in Serpukhov, 200 kilometres south-west of Moscow,
prevented data being downloaded from four military satellites for a day. He
declined to say what the satellites were for.

One may have been Russia鈥檚 sole surviving early-warning satellite, designed
to detect missile launches from the US. There used to be nine circling in high
orbits from which at least one could always see any tell-tale plume of heat over
US missile sites. The surviving satellite, says Geoffrey Forden of the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, allows Russia to monitor the US for a
mere six hours a day.

鈥淭hat is frightening,鈥� says Forden. He says early-warning satellites have
saved the world from nuclear war three times after ground-based radars detected
possible missile attacks鈥攖wice in the US and once in Russia. The
satellites reassured the military that there had been no launches.

Forden says that the most recent incident, in 1995, was sparked by a research
rocket launched from Norway. Russian president Boris Yeltsin convened his
nuclear emergency command. 鈥淏ut in 1995, the full fleet of early-warning
satellites kept a 24-hour watch on US missile fields,鈥� says Forden. They saw no
follow-up missile launches from the US, and Yeltsin stood down his forces.

鈥淭hat early-warning capability may well have prevented nuclear annihilation,鈥�
writes Forden in a report this month for the Cato Institute, a defence think
tank in Washington DC. 鈥淚f another benign event sets off the nuclear alarm, the
Russians no longer have the fleet of satellites to reassure them.鈥�

Russia has six new early-warning satellites ready for launch, but the
military is spending its limited funds elsewhere. Forden says that in its own
interests, the US should pay Russia the $160 million needed to launch
enough satellites to give it a continuous view of US missile sites. Another
$340 million would complete the joint Russian-American Observation
Satellites project, which was started in 1992 to develop better space-based
missile detection, but is now languishing for lack of funds.