ABRIDGED FROM SOURCE [Opinion: You’ve got half an hour before a nuclear strike. Think NORAD in the Canadian Arctic will help? How about those sirens in your town? Where would you drive to safety in half an hour? Meanwhile, I'd rather be looking at stars instead of satellites.] ‘Most people don’t know we’ve set up a doomsday system’: physicist Laura Grego on satellites, nuclear weapons and the battle for our skies Aida Edemariam The Guardian:20 Jul 2026 SOURCE: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2026/jul/20/doomsday-system-physicist-laura-grego-satellites-nuclear-weapons-battle-skies-space-elon-musk SpaceX has 9,532 satellites in orbit (there are about 17,600 active satellites in total). However, Musk has just applied to a federal regulator for permission to launch up to 1m of them. If, so far, that has been “looking at the stars and being full of wonder, full of connection with the universe”, perhaps noticing the occasional streaking object that was not a shooting star, now “there are plans for tens of thousands more satellites, which would really change your relationship with what you see in the sky”. The whole ICBM trajectory only lasts half an hour, and “you’re compressed by detection, communication. So a president would have less than 10 minutes to decide whether to launch ICBMs or to wait it out … the system is built so that question gets asked right away. And it creates this intense time-pressure” – and on imperfect people, with incomplete information. She adds: “If the president decided to launch a counterattack, even if the initial attack was launched by accident, certainly the adversary is going to retaliate. That’s a civilisation-ending day – or an afternoon.” I’m so taken aback I laugh out loud. “I know,” she says. “I’m sorry. I’ve had many years to acclimate to this. But most people haven’t. Most people don’t know we’ve set up a system that is essentially a doomsday system. And we can dismantle it. We just have not.” And not only that, Grego says, but we are upping the ante. “All of the nuclear-armed countries are investing in improving or modernising or expanding their nuclear arsenals.” China tested an ICBM in early July; the US is accusing Russia of building (though not yet deploying) a nuclear weapon that would be based in space and target satellites, “which would be totally counter to the Outer Space Treaty”. Not to mention the possibility of AI autonomous systems that are likely to speed up decision-making times, and have less accountability. “Most of the nuclear-armed countries are involved in some kind of conflict somewhere,” she says. All arms-control treaties have expired, and if countries have learned anything from the Iran war, where the US bombed them in the middle of diplomatic negotiations, it’s that “if you don’t have a weapon right now, you might want to get one so this doesn’t happen to you.” As for the Golden Dome, “it’s a fool’s errand. It’s expensive. It’s strategically unwise, and technically just unachievable.”
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