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China successfully carried out its first test of an anti-satellite weapon last week, signalling its resolve to play a major role in military space activities and bringing expressions of concern from the US and other capitals, Washington said yesterday.
Only two nations — the Soviet Union and the United States — have previously destroyed spacecraft in anti-satellite tests, most recently the US in the mid-1980s.
The weather satellite hit by the Chinese weapon had circled the globe at an altitude of roughly 800 km. In theory, the test means that China can now hit American spy satellites, which orbit closer to Earth. The satellites presumably in range of the Chinese missile include most of the imagery satellites used for basic military reconnaissance, which are essentially the eyes of the American intelligence community for military movements, potential nuclear tests and even some counterterrorism, and commercial satellites.
Experts said the weather satellite’s speeding remnants could pose a threat to other satellites for years or even decades.
Arms control experts called the test, in which the weapon destroyed an aging Chinese weather satellite, a troubling development that could foreshadow an anti-satellite arms race. Alternatively, however, some experts speculated that it could precede a diplomatic effort by China to prod the Bush administration into negotiations on a weapons ban.
“This is the first real escalation in the weaponisation of space that we have seen in 20 years,” said Jonathan McDowell, a Harvard astronomer who tracks rocket launchings and space activity. “It ends a long period of restraint.”
White House officials said the US and other nations, which they did not identify, had “expressed our concern regarding this action to the Chinese”. Despite its protest, the Bush administration has long resisted a global treaty banning such tests because it says it needs freedom of action in space. Jianhua Li, a spokesman at the Chinese Embassy in Washington, said that he had heard about the anti-satellite story but that he had no statement or information.
At a time when China is modernising its nuclear weapons, expanding the reach of its navy and sending astronauts into orbit for the first time, the test appears to mark a new sphere of technical and military competition.
In late August, President Bush authorised a new national space policy that ignored calls for a global prohibition on such tests. The policy said the US would “preserve its rights, capabilities, and freedom of action in space” and “dissuade or deter others from either impeding those rights or developing capabilities intended to do so”.
It declared the US would “deny, if necessary, adversaries the use of space capabilities hostile to US national interests”. The Chinese test “could be a shot across the bow,” said Theresa Hitchens, director of the Centre for Defence Information, a private group in Washington that tracks military programs. “For several years, the Russians and Chinese have been trying to push a treaty to ban space weapons. The concept of exhibiting a hard-power capability to bring somebody to the negotiating table is a classic cold war technique.”
‘China didn’t destroy satellite’
MOSCOW: Russia on Friday denied Western media reports as unfounded that China shot down an ageing weather satellite by a ballistic missile on January 11. “Reports to the effect that a Chinese ballistic missile has hit a satellite are highly exaggerated rumours,” Russian Defence Minister Sergei Ivanov told journalists, while commenting on the reported Chinese satellite destruction test. “I am afraid they do not have such an anti-satellite basis,” Ivanov stressed. —Dadan Upadhyay
