Contacted by space.com, the U.S. military's Space Command, in keeping with its normal policy, would not confirm that it had detected Russian launches. "Unfortunately, we don't talk about specific events," said Army Major Mike Birmingham, a spokesman for Space Command.

Birmingham added, however: "Our Defense Support Program satellites can detect missile launches worldwide. And we're rarely surprised."

Satellite reconnaissance experts at private organizations disagree about the likelihood that DSP satellites would have detected Russian missile attacks against Chechnya.

Jeffrey Richelson, a senior fellow at the nonprofit National Security Archive, says that "medium-range Scud-type missiles could be detected" by DSP satellites, and that such rockets plausibly would have been used by Russia. "They've detected thousands of Scud-type missiles," he says, referring to the satellites' monitoring of the Iran-Iraq War and other conflicts.

However, John E. Pike, space policy director at the nonprofit Federation of American Scientists, says that rockets fired from Russia at Chechnya "would almost certainly have been artillery rockets with a range of dozens of miles." Such rockets, he believes, probably would not have been large or high-flying enough to be noticed by DSP satellites.