Commercial Satellites--Telecom’s Achilles’ Heel
When federal officials recently launched an effort to make Intel Corp.’s Pentium microprocessors impervious to satellite-killing radiation, it highlighted a growing vulnerability in the U.S. communications infrastructure: the threat of nuclear terrorism faced by commercial satellites.
The existing fleet of Pentagon spacecraft is already sufficiently “rad-hardened” to operate in the face of both cosmic radiation coming from solar flares and exposure to the severe radiation caused by a nuclear explosion.
But scores of critical civilian satellites, some of which are also used by the Defense Department, don’t have that same protection, and a single nuclear blast in space could suspend the era of modern telecommunications.
Major manufacturers are unlikely to use the improved Pentium chips--which have never before been rad-hardened--in future satellites, saying they believe the risk of a terrorist attack is so remote that it doesn’t warrant the cost of protection. (The price of a satellite could potentially double.)
The Energy Department recently began a $64-million, four-year research program to rad-harden Pentium chips for use aboard America’s defense and spy satellites. The current generation of military satellites rely on microprocessor brains that, although rad-hardened, are generations behind the Pentium.
The nuclear threat to satellites has been known for decades. But under the “mutual assured destruction” nuclear war doctrine of the Cold War era, attacks on satellites were considered almost incidental in an exchange likely to destroy or contaminate the entire planet. But since the demise of the Soviet Union, several factors have shifted those calculations.
Nuclear materials and missile technologies have proliferated, reaching nations such as North Korea and Iraq that have demonstrated a willingness to become rogues. Some arms-control experts fear that sophisticated terrorist organizations could also obtain nuclear weapons.
Meanwhile, in the last few years, the U.S. and world economies--as well as the Defense Department--have become highly dependent on commercial satellites. Much of the nation’s telecommunications and data-transfer capacity rely on an expanding fleet of low-Earth-orbit (LEO) satellites that didn’t exist three years ago.
The rad-hardened microchips will also be used in NASA space probes, which are subjected to long periods of intense cosmic radiation, but some analysts see those purposes as little more than window dressing.
“This is about nuclear terrorism,” said Allen Thomson, a satellite-survivability consultant and former CIA analyst. “I suspect that this is stretching to find nonmilitary applications” to justify the degree of radiation protection the Pentium chips will receive.
His conclusion is shared by Glen Buchan, associate director in the Air Force-funded Program on Force Modernization and Employment at Santa Monica-based Rand Corp., and by a knowledgeable source within the government.
The radiation emanating from a single nuclear explosion in the atmosphere could destroy a large portion of the nation’s commercial fleet of about 325 satellites.
That fleet cost tens of billions of dollars to put in place and generated about $51.2 billion in revenues worldwide in 1997, the most recent figure available, according to the Satellite Industry Assn. in Alexandria, Va. Nearly half of those revenues went to U.S. companies.
The White House also views an attack on satellites as unlikely but far from impossible. The prospect of such an attack is considered one element of “a new kind of emerging threat to our infrastructure and our national security,” said P.J. Crowley, spokesman for the White House National Security Council.
“A rogue nation or terrorist group wouldn’t be likely to attack us militarily. They would attack a telephone grid, a financial system, a communications system,” he added.
About 125 commercial satellites, including those owned by Iridium and Globalstar, operate in LEO. Satellites in higher-altitude geosynchronous (GEO) orbits would also be at risk, though somewhat less vulnerable than LEO satellites.
“You don’t have to shoot at any one thing in particular,” Thomson said. The radiation emanating from a single explosion in the right part of the atmosphere could disable most of the satellites orbiting Earth within a few weeks or months.
“We’ve looked at a variety of scenarios using established capabilities at the Air Force research lab in Albuquerque,” said the government source, who declined to be identified. “Based on the simulations, one can conclude that very-low-yield nuclear weapons exploded at very low altitude could cause a very significant radioactive activity [that could] end up in the demise of satellites in low Earth orbits.”
The Energy Department’s Sandia National Laboratory in Albuquerque will conduct the work required to harden the Pentium processors. Microprocessors are composed of millions of circuitry pathways so small that they can easily be disrupted or damaged by ionizing radiation, emitted by radioactive materials as well as by the Sun and other stars.
Sandia scientists will mitigate the effects of radiation by improving the circuits’ insulation and increasing the size of tiny wires etched into the chips. (Thicker wires can better withstand radiation-induced currents.)
Because the number of commercial satellites is rising rapidly as satellite-killer technologies proliferate, some experts see an unprecedented degree of exposure and view the prospect of nuclear attack as potentially enticing to a desperate nation or group.
Such a risk was one of the reasons for launching the Pentium project, which will be jointly conducted by the Energy Department, NASA, the Air Force and the National Reconnaissance Office, which administers U.S. spy satellites, according to Robert S. Blewer, deputy director for strategic partnerships at Sandia.
Protection against atmospheric nuclear blasts is “one of our main benefits out of it,” Blewer said, voicing concern about commercial satellites that are used for military communications.
“Whenever you are depending on a system from a military standpoint, you have to be very sure that it operates under all conditions,” Blewer said.
Yet commercial satellite makers, such as Orbital Sciences in Dulles, Va., and Hughes Electronics in El Segundo, say their customers have not requested protection against radiation from a nuclear blast. They instead rely on insurance policies to recoup losses that could occur in the event of satellite failure.
No government agency has pressured the industry to harden satellites to withstand radiation from a nuclear blast. And not the White House, the satellite industry nor the military has attempted to estimate the possible economic and social dislocations that could follow the detonation of a nuclear weapon in space.
The effect of such an attack could go well beyond the loss of tens of billions of dollars in revenues for the satellite companies.
“Life as we know it would not be possible,” said John Pike, an analyst with the Federation of American Scientists in Washington.
In particular, pagers, geographic locater devices, weather forecasts, and a wide range of financial, business and military communications that depend on commercial satellite transmissions could be severely disrupted.
When a single communications satellite, the Galaxy 4, failed in May, it briefly knocked out service to 90% of the nation’s 45 million pagers and shut down communication links for thousands of manufacturers, hospitals, news organizations and financial companies--including National Public Radio, Ford dealerships, the National Weather Service and the Chicago Board of Trade. This was a hint of what would be in store on a far broader scale for months or years in the event of nuclear terrorism in space, analysts say.
“Some of these [communication links] could be recovered quickly by rerouting to fiber-optic cable,” Pike said. “But you can’t do pagers via fiber,” and a wide range of businesses that conduct inventory control via satellite would need to develop new systems.
Pike said the replacement of affected satellites would take about five years, given lingering radiation effects and the industry’s current production and launch capacity.
Ted Postal, a professor of science, technology and national security policy at MIT, considers the likelihood of nuclear terrorism in space remote because such an attack would not be likely to support plausible military goals or garner political sympathy and would probably elicit devastating retaliation.
Still, given the recent proliferation of nuclear and missile technologies, the tools for such an attack are more available now than ever before, he said.
“Probably a Scud [missile] would be enough” to deliver a warhead into the correct position in the atmosphere, Postal said. “And everyone has access to a Scud these days.”
Clayton Mowry, director of the Satellite Industry Assn., suggests that the military consider subsidizing private industry to increase radiation hardening, not unlike the Civil Reserve Air Fleet program, in which the military covers the cost of design changes to commercial airliners so they can accommodate military needs in wartime.
“The same type of philosophy is being talked about for these commercial satellite systems,” Mowry said. Because LEO satellites must be replaced every five to seven years, radiation protection for the low-altitude fleet could be improved fairly quickly, he added.
