government official warned that Russia could be developing a new satellite designed to carry nuclear weapons into space. The statement followed the launch of a suspicious Russian satellite into low-Earth orbit in 2022, just a few weeks before the country’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. A nuclear detonation in low-Earth orbit — the region about 100 miles to 1,200 miles above Earth’s surface — would release trillions of highly energetic electrons that would destroy many of the satellites in space, disrupting telecommunications networks, GPS, space-based internet, and more. The 1967 Outer Space Treaty bans the placement of nuclear weapons in space, but there’s currently no way to verify satellites don’t contain nuclear weapons. In fact, no verification methods have even been proposed in unclassified, peer-reviewed literature. Now, MIT Professor Areg Danagoulian is prop…

Why would you put a satellite in that orbit? Well, that location is likely the best point for trapping electrons if you were to detonate a thermonuclear weapon.” Danagoulian notes most research on nuclear detection is highly classified, making it hard to know how much progress has been made in national labs. But he wanted to show that scientifically proving the presence of a nuclear weapon in space is possible. The approach Danagoulian developed centers on a reaction known as spallation, caused by highly energetic protons in radioactive environments. “When an energetic proton slams into elements with a high atomic number, like uranium and plutonium, each proton may knock out something like 40 neutrons,” he explains. “That’s a ridiculously large number. We’re talking about millions of protons per second per square centimeter, with many of them generating 40 neutrons. T…