Biden is ‘sleepwalking’ toward a dangerous nuclear arms race in SPACE… here’s how the president can avoid it according to Intel president Mike Turner

The United States is ‘sleepwalking’ toward the next ‘Cuban missile crisis,’ top Republican Intelligence Mike Turner warned, as he once again called on the Biden administration to declassify Russia’s anti-satellite capabilities.

Months ago, Turner sparked nationwide alarm when she issued an ominous and seemingly unexpected statement calling on Biden to declassify information related to a “serious national security threat,” but did not go into detail.

It was later reported to be related to Moscow’s plan to place a nuclear weapon in space to attack and destroy satellites on which the world depends.

“I think the Biden administration is sleepwalking toward an irreversible catastrophic situation with Russia,” Turner told DailyMail.com after a talk reviving the dire warning at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).

‘This is the Cuban missile crisis in space. And President Biden is not rising to the charge like President Kennedy did, impacting the outcome and changing history for the better.”

Turner warned that the world could go dark for up to a year. Cell towers, Internet, GPS, banking systems, power grids, first responders, and military operations could be affected.

“This threat would mean that our economic, international security and social systems would come to a standstill,” Turner warned. ‘This would be a catastrophic and devastating attack on Western economic and democratic systems. Vladimir Putin knows it: checkmate.

He referred to the day Putin would use his anti-satellite capability as “day zero,” after which “humanity would be unable to repopulate low-Earth orbit and human space exploration would be deadly.”

The United States currently has no defenses against such a threat, and if satellite-based communications were destroyed, bringing them back online would require maneuvering the remaining satellites into place and launching new ones on rockets, in both cases within days or weeks. .

Turner insisted that public pressure would lead to more international sanctions that could force Russia to stop putting a nuclear weapon in space.

The conversation came as Russia’s Vladimir Putin and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un signed a mutual defense pact between the two nuclear-armed superpowers this week.

“Putin’s weapons plans and programs must be fully disclosed by the administration and understood by the world,” Turner said during the talk, accusing Biden of being “incredibly reluctant to take any action that appears to be escalatory.”

‘This should not be allowed to go into orbit, period. and management doesn’t even have it on their to-do list.’

White House national security spokesman John Kirby said it was “completely incorrect” to say the Biden administration was not taking the threat seriously.

“We’ve taken it very seriously, we’ve been working on this particular problem from every possible angle, including through intense diplomacy with countries around the world,” Kirby said.

“We said in February that when this highly sensitive intelligence information was made public it was very irresponsible,” he continued. “However, what I can say is that we will continue our efforts to convince Russia to put a nuclear weapon into orbit.”

The warning signs of such an attack are already there. In 2021, Russia demonstrated its ability to shoot down satellites with Earth-launched missiles, destroying one of its own decommissioned satellites.

And in 2020, Russia fired a projectile from a satellite into outer space, although Russian officials maintained that the projectile was not a weapon.

The decision to place a nuclear device in space would also go against the Outer Space Treaty, a 1967 agreement to which the then USSR was a party. One provision of the treaty is a ban on nuclear weapons in orbit.

In recent years, Russia may have violated another part of this treaty when it shot down its own 1980s-era Cosmos 1408 satellite in 2021.

And earlier this year, Moscow rejected Washington’s efforts to negotiate a new START agreement for when the current one expires in 2026.

Meanwhile, Turner insisted that the United States had not adequately prioritized missile defense capabilities over the past decade and a half.

“I really believe that the American public will think that we have an operational missile defense system that will defend us against China and Russia,” he said. In recent administrations, “there are policies that are anti-missile defense.”

‘This view that it is an escalation, that it is destabilizing its adversary, would think that we need more nuclear weapons because we have anti-missile defense, which would work and which was too expensive. But what we’ve seen is that it’s actually declining.”