China details space plans

BBC News ^ | 10.6.03

[Noachian]

The United States should work on joint space projects with China, which is preparing to send its first person into space, the China chief of U.S. aerospace company Boeing said.

I'm of two minds on this subject. Either we have pie-in-the-sky liberals running our space program without any regard for national security, or we've people in the Pentagon who want to get close to Chinese technology. Or, perhaps we have both.

In either case the Chinese come out ahead because they will have space flight and the ability to put warheads in space in short order. Our military may get to know some of their technology, but that won't stop the Chinese, and nothing will stop the dreamers who will only wake up when the Chinese start making ultimatums. By then, of course, it'll be too late.

[Cincinatus' Wife]

Bush's battle to dominate in space***As of now, the 1967 Outer Space Treaty governs the military uses of space, but China argues that strategic plans openly discussed in the Pentagon, including the Missile Defense Program, involve deployments that will violate that treaty. In the words of John Steinbruner and Jeffrey Lewis, writing in Daedalus, "The Chinese were particularly alarmed by a 1998 long-range planning document released by the then United States Space Command. That document outlined a concept called global engagement -- a combination of global surveillance, missile defense, and space-based strike capabilities that would enable the United States to undertake effective preemption anywhere in the world and would deny similar capability to any other country."

If the Chinese were alarmed in 1998 by such "full-spectrum dominance," as US planners call it, imagine how much more threatened they feel now that Pentagon fantasies of preemption and permanent global supremacy have become official Bush policies. For decades, "deterrence" and "balance" were the main notes of Pentagon planning, but now "prevention" and "dominance" define the US posture. Such assertions can be made in Washington with only good intentions, but they fall on foreign ears as expressions of aggression.

When it comes to space, the Chinese have good reason for thinking of themselves as the main object of such planning, which is why they are desperate for a set of rules governing military uses of space. (At the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a study of such rules is underway codirected by Steinbruner and the academy's Martin Malin).***