The modern battlefield has extended to space. Although we’re not conducting laser battles in orbit (yet), satellite systems are regularly used to guide missiles and drones to their destination, facilitate communication between soldiers on the battlefield, and spy on adversaries. Given how critical space assets are for national security, it’s hardly surprising that militaries spend a lot of time developing ways to destroy their enemies’ satellites.

On Wednesday, the Indian Defense Research and Development Organization, or DRDO, launched a missile that destroyed one of the country’s own satellites in low Earth orbit. The successful demonstration, dubbed Mission Shakti, was revealed during a live televised address from Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who claimed that “India has no intention to threaten anyone.”

“The main objective of our space program is ensuring the country’s security, its economic development, and India’s technological progress,” Modi said. “India has always been opposed to the weaponization of space and an arms race in outer space, and this test does not in any way change this position.”

Mission Shakti made India just the fourth country to successfully destroy a satellite in orbit, following the US, Russia, and most recently China. Compared with the international backlash that followed China’s anti-satellite demonstration in 2007, though, the response to India’s test has been relatively subdued.

Daniel Porras, the space security fellow at the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research, says this is likely because the debris from the Indian anti-satellite test poses less of a hazard to other satellites. “The Chinese demonstration was carried out at 800 kilometers and was widely condemned because of the resulting space debris, which will likely stay in orbit for decades or longer,” according to Porras. “India’s demonstration was conducted at 300 kilometers, so the debris will likely be out of orbit in months. For this reason, the reaction has been much less.”

Anti-satellite missiles are generally touted as a deterrence mechanism, rather than a primary attack vector. The idea is basically to send a message to other space-faring nations: "If you destroy our space assets, we’ll destroy yours." The problem, of course, is that the debris created by a missile ramming into an adversary’s satellite makes operating in space more dangerous for everyone, including the country that launched the missile. In this sense, every successful anti-satellite missile attack is a Pyrrhic victory.

“One thing to keep in mind about knocking out satellites with military weapons is that it creates a debris field that all commercial and military satellites of every country will have to avoid for years to come,” says Daryl Kimball, the executive director of the Arms Control Association. Things are even worse if an anti-satellite missile is deployed during a conflict with a nuclear-armed nation. If that were the case, Kimball adds, the anti-satellite missile would be seen as an “extremely provocative step, because it could potentially mean that one side is trying to blind the other from detecting a nuclear attack.” This could, in theory, escalate the conflict toward nuclear war.

This is precisely why experts like Vipin Narang, an associate professor of political science at MIT, think that India’s anti-satellite test probably didn’t have much to do with satellites. From India’s perspective, its two greatest military adversaries are Pakistan and China—both of which have nuclear weapons, but only China has a robust military presence in space. Thus, Narang says, India’s anti-satellite test is difficult to make sense of because it is “both more dependent on satellites than Pakistan and it’s also less capable in a relative sense than China.”

“If Pakistan starts hitting Indian satellites, India can knock out Pakistan’s very few satellites,” notes Narang. “China can knock out all of India’s satellites whereas India cannot do the same to China. So it’s kind of a weird balance for India if it’s interested in getting into the anti-satellite deterrence game, [because] it doesn’t really have an advantage in either of its dyads.”