By Mary-Simone Collazo
Correspondent
The United States has officially deployed its first weapons into space, Air Force Secretary Troy Menck announced at the annual Air, Space and Cyber Conference in Maryland on Sept. 14, according to USA Today.
The purpose of the release is to defend American military forces against any potential hostile actions by foreign adversaries, said NPR.
“Today, we continue to ensure we remain ready to meet the challenges of evolving threats wherever they exist. This is why the United States now has on-orbit space control weapons capable of defending the joint force against hostile adversary action,” Menck said in the announcement, USA Today reported.
Menck did not say what the weapons were, how many there are or how they work, according to NPR.
Russia and China immediately accused the U.S. of initiating an arm raid in space after the announcement, Reuters reported.
Foreign Ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun urged the U.S. to “stop expanding its military capabilities and preparing for war in outer space,” according to NBC News.
Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said that space “must be free of any weapon” and called for a mandatory global treaty where all countries agree to weapons out of space, Reuters reported.
“Neither Moscow nor Beijing can credibly claim surprise that the United States possesses some form of space-control capability. Both governments have long accused Washington of developing space weapons, while advancing counterspace programs of their own,” The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists reported.
The United States and the Soviet Union signed The 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which states that no weapons should be placed in orbit. However, it only mentions nuclear weapons, which create city-sized explosions, and not conventional ones, which are limited to local targets, according to Al Jazeera.
The treaty also has had no system in place to enforce it, according to Live Science.
“It is critically important that we maintain our dominance not only in the air but in space, and so we’ve had to take steps to make sure that when we’re threatened, we can take care of that,” Meink said, according to USA Today.
President Donald Trump signed Executive Order 14369 on Ensuring American Space Superiority on Dec. 18, 2025 to establish clear U.S. technological and battlefield dominance, according to the White House official website.
“My Administration will focus its space policy on…(ii) ensuring the ability to detect, characterize, and counter threats to United States space interests from very low-Earth orbit and through cislunar space, including any placement of nuclear weapons in space,” states the second section of the executive order.
Trump also signed a policy on Aug. 20, calling for more than 1,000 rocket launches and reentries per year in the United States by 2030. This policy calls for new launch sites and upgrades to existing space ports. It also aims to ease environmental regulations on space launches, said USA Today, as first mentioned in a July 28 press release from the U.S. Department of Transportation.
Trump has made moves to strengthen military operations in space since 2019, as the establishment of the U.S. Space Force and reestablishment of the U.S. Space Command occurred that year, USA Today reported.
The Space Force is a branch of the U.S. military, and Space Command is one of the U.S. Department of War's 11 unified combatant commands that plans and directs missions using forces from multiple branches, according to Axios.
In a poll of over 280 people by Live Science aimed to gauge the public’s reactions to the U.S. deploying weapons to space, 80% chose the option: “Yes, I'm worried that space will become the next frontier for weapons.”
