The U.S. says Russia is building a nuclear weapon for space. But how would you prove there’s a warhead inside a satellite 1,200 miles up?

U.S. officials say Russia is building nuclear weapons for space to target satellites that give Ukraine's military an advantage. But verifying that claim poses a unique challenge: detecting a nuclear warhead aboard a satellite over a thousand miles up is far harder than finding one on Earth. Per Meduza, the Outer Space Treaty bans nuclear weapons in orbit, yet enforcement requires sensing the faint radiation of a warhead amid the cosmic radiation background—a task so difficult that even smuggled uranium slipped past U.S. customs inspectors with standard detection equipment. Now MIT physicist Areg Danagoulian proposes a novel approach: using naturally occurring cosmic rays to probe suspicious spacecraft. A high-energy proton colliding with uranium or plutonium nuclei triggers a reaction releasing detectable neutrons, revealing whether a warhead is aboard—without firing a shot, which might otherwise be mistaken for an attack. A small detector satellite could theoretically do the job.

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