ASAT Weapons and Their Compliance With IHL and Environmental Law

This article examines the use and testing of anti-satellite (ASAT) missiles as a potential environmental war crime under international humanitarian law (IHL). Such weapons’ production of large quantities of difficult-to-track, hypervelocity orbital debris makes them a serious and long-lasting threat to the productive human use of space.While jurisprudence on environmental war crimes is sparse, there is potentially relevant law that has, thus far, avoided scholarly examination. The 1976 Environmental Modification Convention (ENMOD), while not intended to deal with ASAT weapons, contains language specifically inclusive of space activities. This paper makes the novel argument that Low Earth Orbit (LEO) constitutes a part of the ‘environment’ as delineated in ENMOD, and that ENMOD’s particular language renders the use of ASAT weapons to destroy on-orbit objects a per se violation of international law, in wartime and peacetime alike.