White House Confirms Russia Is Developing Antisatellite Weapon

WASHINGTON—Russia is pursuing an “antisatellite capability” that represents a serious concern but doesn’t present an active threat to Americans’ safety, the Biden administration said Thursday after declassifying intelligence at the behest of a member of Congress.

The system is still in development, said John Kirby, a spokesman for the National Security Council. “There is no immediate threat to anyone’s safety,” he told reporters Thursday. “It is not an active capability and it has not yet been deployed.”

The intelligence the White House declassified was limited, and Kirby didn’t confirm if there is any nuclear component to the Russian antisatellite device—though he did say it would violate a decades-old treaty banning the deployment of nuclear weapons or weapons of mass destruction in space.

“It would be space-based and it would be a violation of the Outer Space Treaty to which more than 130 countries have signed up to, including Russia,” Kirby said of the capability.

Intelligence that remains classified indicates that Russia is seeking to develop a nuclear weapon in space that could be used to target satellites, The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday.

President Biden has been briefed on the developing capability for many weeks, Kirby said. Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, provided information Thursday to top members of Congress who have oversight of intelligence matters.

The disclosure by the White House came a day after Rep. Mike Turner, the Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, issued a cryptic statement about an unspecified “serious national-security threat” to the U.S. and requested that Biden declassify information around it. The unusual maneuver caught administration officials and lawmakers alike by surprise, and fueled fevered speculation in Washington about the nature of the threat that so alarmed Turner.

White House officials were eager to reassure lawmakers and the public that Russia’s capability, while serious, wasn’t something that posed an imminent danger to Americans or allied countries.

But frustration—and deep confusion—continued to mount around Turner’s vague warning. Rep. Andy Ogles, a Republican from Tennessee, sent a letter to House Speaker Mike Johnson requesting he open an inquiry, saying Turner’s disclosure was done with “a reckless disregard of the implications and consequences said information would have on geopolitics, domestic and foreign markets, or the well-being and the psyche of the American people.”

In a follow-up statement on Thursday, Turner said that his intelligence panel had “worked in consultation” with the Biden administration to notify the broader Congress of the national security threat and that the language he had used was “cleared by the administration prior to its release.”

Administration officials countered that they only approved a sentence to be used internally in Congress inviting members to receive more information in a secure space, but not the language Turner used in his press release that was shared widely, alarming Washington and the public at large.

Following the classified briefing with Sullivan on Thursday, Turner struck a more conciliatory tone toward the Biden administration.

“We all came away with a very strong impression that the administration is taking this very seriously and that the administration has a plan in place,” Turner said. “We look forward to supporting them as they go to implement it.”

The Biden administration has repeatedly declassified intelligence to share information with the public that officials say is in the interest of national security. That included declassifying intelligence prior to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and sharing potential arms deals between Iran and Russia, for example.

“We make decisions about how and when to publicly disclose intelligence in a careful, deliberate and strategic way, in the way that we choose,” Kirby said, adding that the administration won’t bend to pressure from disclosures, like Turner’s. “We’re not going to be knocked off that process.”

U.S. intelligence officials have had concerns about Russia and Chinese space capabilities for decades, and have long viewed satellite infrastructure as a vulnerable target in the event of a major conflict with either adversary. But those fears, which they have sometimes expressed publicly, have grown more urgent in recent years as satellites have become increasingly integral to military capabilities and global communications systems.

In 2022, the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center, a Washington-based think tank, conducted a wargame involving current and former U.S. national security officials that simulated the hypothetical use of nuclear weapons in space by North Korea. The results of the wargame were dire.

In the scenario, North Korea ends up detonating a nuclear payload in low-Earth orbit, immediately disabling a huge swath of satellites in space. The wargame concludes with global disruptions and North Korea invading South Korea.

Jen Easterly, the director of the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, said Thursday that the intelligence cited by Turner, which she didn’t speak to specifically, underscored security concerns.

“It reinforces the fact that Russia is a very real threat—a threat to U.S. national security and a threat to global security,” Easterly said, speaking at an event in Washington hosted by the German Marshall Fund. “It’s a threat to all of our critical infrastructure, and space is a piece of that.”

Still, lawmakers in both parties said they found Turner’s disclosure, and the timing of it, vexing and remained uncertain about his motivations. Rep. Jim Himes, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said he had warned Turner not to release the information publicly.

“My concern was specific that if we did that, we would be staring into a whole lot of cameras and microphones, and here we are,” Himes said.

Siobhan Hughes, Michael R. Gordon and Lindsay Wise contributed to this article.

Write to Dustin Volz at [email protected] and Gordon Lubold at [email protected]