China's strategic ambitions are clearly showing and perhaps nothing underlines this more than the country’s successful launch earlier this month of a ground-based missile to hit and destroy one of its weather satellites that had been circling the globe at an altitude of about 500 miles. In effect China has demonstrated an effective anti-satellite (ASAT) weapons capability in front of the entire world. This is highly significant for political reasons as well as for military technological reasons.The Chinese move has caught the world by surprise, because everyone was expecting the US to be the first state to move towards space weapons potential. Although the US does have a fairly advanced ASAT R&D programme based around high-powered microwave weapons or kinetic kill mechanisms, and has tested small satellites with ‘ASAT potential’, they have observed a moratorium on testing ASATs since 1985, and only once have they physically destroyed a satellite in space, using an air-launched ASAT, back just before the ban went into place. This means that China has chosen deliberately to ramp up competition in space weapons between the US and itself, and the proponents of space weaponisation in the US will seize upon this as justification for fast tracking the development of a US space weapons capability to provide a degree of ‘space control’ as argued for in the 2006 space policy document of the Bush administration.Doing this would seem to be counter-productive. Chances are that come January 2009, there will be a Democrat president in the White House, with a Democrat controlled Congress, and therefore a significant change in US space policy cannot be ruled out. But with a demonstrated Chinese ASAT capability, able to threaten critical US satellites in Low Earth Orbit (specifically ISTAR and tactical level communications satellites), any future president will find it very difficult to justify a ban on developing US capabilities while China continues with its ASAT programme. This brings us to the question, why then are the Chinese testing their ASAT now? One possibility is that the Chinese are sending a signal to the US that they can ‘hold at risk’ critical US space-based ISTAR capabilities in any future conflict, perhaps over Taiwan. With the US bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan, Iran looming on the horizon, and George W. Bush in real trouble domestically, are the Chinese planning something in the near term, thus laying a ‘marker’? It may also be a signal to Japan, which is launching its own spy satellites designed in part to monitor developments in North Korea, but no doubt also with an ability to maintain a watch over China. In other words, the step may be meant to signal the message that nobody should mess with China, because it has the means to respond effectively. Whether or not the Chinese are planning something, it may be useful to have that deterrent potential in their calculations.Another possibility is that by testing now, the Chinese are creating a bargaining chip so that in any future negotiation with a post-Bush US administration, China will have greater leverage to get the US to sign something like the proposed UN PAROS Agreement (Prohibition on an Arms Race in Outer Space), which would ban all space weapons. The 1967 Outer Space Treaty does not ban space weapons — only the deployment of weapons of mass destruction in space. Of course, agreements like PAROS would not prevent either the Chinese or the US from surge deploying ASATs in a crisis, because they both would still have the knowledge and technology to build ASATs and keep them in storage.Technologically, the Chinese test demonstrates that they have a viable ASAT capability comparable to US technology from the mid-1980s and Soviet/Russian systems from about the same time. The test reinforces China’s status as a true military space power, equal to the US and Russia, but more significantly it signals that key US space systems are now at clear risk in any future conflict with China. This cannot be ignored or dismissed lightly, and those groups in the US and globally that are opposed to space weapons have now had their wings clipped, courtesy Beijing. In effect, by conducting this test now, the Chinese — not the US — may have kicked off an arms race in space. India better be prepared.The writer teaches in King’s College, London
