These materials paint a detailed picture of state leaders’ direct involvement in diplomatic discussions over armament and disarmament, with extensive coverage of the militarised aspect that joins discussions on space technologies with those on weaponry and defence capability.

9 Additionally, descriptive and analytical accounts of Cold War confrontations and negotiations are also rich with emphases on the intricate decision-making process of conventional state actors, mainly senior-ranked statespersons such as Henry Kissinger, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. Many note the defence-related applications of space technologies in these debates. Existing literature in strategic and military studies pays considerable attention to nuclear deterrence, security and historic details of the arms race during the Cold War. 8 There is strong historic evidence indicating the intertwining relationship of global discussions on the topics of space technologies and nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament ( NPD). We were all discovering how thin the line was that separated the two areas’. In 1971, Lyndon Johnson, the 36th President of the United States, observed in his memoir that ‘mid all the discussion of weaponry and defenses, we heard a great deal about space flight. In times of heightened political tensions in the past, how did leaders and policy stakeholders de-escalate potentially catastrophic arms and technology confrontations? What lessons can we learn from the role that space technologies played in relation to global nuclear (dis)armament? As space is once again seen as a contested domain, there has never been a more pressing time to review past experiences in averting catastrophes caused by worsening geopolitical discord. As such, the tension between the need for co-operation and the intention to contend for dominance in space cannot be overstated.

Space technologies and infrastructure constitute critical elements in both global peaceful pursuits (e.g., disaster management) and the advance of national security (e.g., military operations such as Desert Storm). As Chaisson notes, ‘oday’s space scientists might well pay a price for the early successes of these outer-space nuclear explosions’. 6 Many of the immediate consequences of these tests, whose implications only came to be appreciated years if not decades later, have surprised scientists. 4 A more recent study of unclassified materials in 2017 5 linked high-altitude nuclear tests conducted during the Cold War with examples ‘of some of the space weather effects frequently caused by the sun’. Chaisson contended that these detonations and particles damaged satellites and posed challenges to the HST as the telescope orbited through a zone that he called the ‘orbital analogy of the Bermuda Triangle’. 3 He notes that earlier nuclear detonations at the peak of the Cold War, such as Project Argus and Starfish, ‘created vast quantities of energetic particles at altitudes as high as 300 miles above the South Atlantic Ocean’. It is suggested that these man-made distortions subsequently affected the launch and operations of the HST. In Hubble Wars, Eric Chaisson, former senior scientist for the Hubble Space Telescope ( HST), argues that ‘some of the particles and distortion in the Van Allen belts might be man-made’. 2 In the engineering and aerospace sectors, historic debates often point to the threat of negative consequences that earlier nuclear-related activities posed to civilian or scientific activities in outer space. Past and ongoing discussions point to the impact that the degradation of the space environment could have on global scientific, civil and military endeavours. In asserting power and dominance in space, however, major powers must tread carefully in order to maintain an internationally co-ordinated space environment to avoid global catastrophic events, both on earth (e.g., nuclear winter) and in orbit (e.g., orbital collapse). Echoing heightened tensions during the Cold War, the domain of space has once again been portrayed as an arena of competition in recent years, leading to worsening tensions in major orbits.

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