Canada was, as I mentioned, the first country to join the U.S. in committing not to test those direct-ascent, anti-satellite weapons, or DA-ASATs. We now have 37 countries around the world that have made that unilaterally binding commitment. Under international law, when a state makes a unilateral statement like that, it is binding upon itself.
On top of that, we have the UN General Assembly, where I think there are something like 130-something countries that voted in favour of the notion of a moratorium on testing those DA-ASATs. That doesn't mean that they're then bound. That's a political expression. As to whether or not we need to have a binding treaty on that, those are exactly the discussions ongoing right now, in fact, this very week at the UN in New York, and there will be a new open-ended working group that will look at what kind of non-binding agreements we can come up with—so norms of behaviour—and whether there is the potential to have a treaty that might prohibit it.
I'm actually of the mind that a treaty is not necessarily the outcome that we want. The point is, as Dr. Byers also mentioned, the amount of debris that's created. There are four countries that have tested them. In each case, there's an enormous uncontrollable amount of debris that is created. The Chinese test in 2007 still has some debris today that is in orbit. Thousands of pieces of debris are created, and things are moving at seven kilometres per second in low-earth orbit. As Dr. Byers said, something the size of a fleck of paint can be lethal to a satellite. It's uncontainable.
One of the reasons I don't think that a treaty is necessary is that the laws of international armed conflict will tell us that, if we are in an armed conflict on earth, it is prohibited to use non-discriminate weapons, and there is an impossibility in determining what the impact will be of creating that amount of debris on all of the satellites that the world depends on. Therefore, it is by definition indiscriminate. You're not able to target just a military objective. You're also impacting civilians and civilian infrastructure.
That also goes a little bit to the questions that we've heard around what the impacts are of cyber-attacks on humans and indeed on the question of whether an attack would be considered something sufficient to trigger article 5 of the NATO Treaty. It all depends on the effects of those kinds of attacks. When we're talking about DA-ASATs, they create debris, and it is impossible to contain the debris, so we do not know what the effects will be. However, we do know that at some stage that debris is going to hit something.
When it comes to cyber-attacks and these non-kinetic interferences, what is the physical effect of that attack on a satellite system? Is that cutting off people's communications? Is it impacting search and rescue? Is it impacting satellite systems that are part of the control system of water systems for the city, for example? Is that going to impact food security because of the dependencies on those satellite systems? It's all about the physical effects in the real world.
We know both from how the laws of armed conflict apply to cyber and how we think they apply to space, that as soon as we have something that is sufficient in terms of its effects in the physical world, we can determine that it is sufficient to say it is an armed attack, but it is a case-by-case decision.