Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by unchocked 1441 days ago
Worth noting that the Outer Space Treaty prohibits “weapons of mass destruction” in space, though that is generally interpreted to apply only to nuclear weapons.
3 comments

If there's anything we know about treaties it's that everyone always follows them
An asteroid (or even just a huge - say 100K tons - space transport barge full of ore) with a huge rocket engine attached - until it is targeted as a weapon, it is hardly can be considered a weapon (yet for example 2000 ton coming in at 10km/s would be a Hiroshima TNT equivalent). And for MAD you do need to have credible threat to wipe your opponents Mars/Moon/etc. colonies too.
"Starship Troopers" (the film) had an asteroid as a city-buster.
MAD in an ASW context means 'magnetic anomaly detection' not 'mutual assured destruction'.