Chinese Anti-Satellite Blast Product of U.S. Star Wars Policy

David E. Sanger and Joseph Kahn report in Monday’s The New York Times that Bush Administration officials are concerned because they’ve gotten no diplomatic response from their inquiries of Beijing over China’s successful test of a kinetic anti-satellite weapon 11 days ago. They wrote:

In an interview late Friday, Stephen J. Hadley, President Bush’s national security adviser, raised the possibility that China’s leaders might not have fully known what their military was doing.

"The question on something like this is, at what level in the Chinese government are people witting, and have they approved?" Mr. Hadley asked. He suggested that the diplomatic protests were intended, in part, to force Mr. Hu to give some clue about China’s intentions.

"It will ensure that the issue will now get ventilated at the highest levels in China," he said, "and it will be interesting to see how it comes out."

The threat to United States interests is clear: the test demonstrated that China could destroy American spy satellites in low-earth orbit (the very satellites that picked up the destruction of the Chinese weather satellite).

Without delving into Mr. Hadley’s bona fides as a truth-teller, it’s pretty hilarious to hear this grumbling considering the Administration’s own designs on controlling space and its absolute refusal to put a permanent ban on live testing of space weapons, including satellite killers like the Chinese one.

The military portion of the U.S. Space Policy, announced in October last year, but which took its ultimate cue from the Rumsfeld Commission, published six years ago, is just another arms race operating under the name of freedom, which is how some people spell hegemony. The key line:

The policy calls upon the Secretary of Defense to "develop capabilities, plans, and options to ensure freedom of action in space, and, if directed, deny such freedom of action to adversaries."

Which is doubletalk for one of the deepest flaws of American exceptionalism, the rules-are-for-thee-not-me style of foreign policy. Why flawed? Because, when you’re the toughest you may be able to bully and bribe your way around most countries, but a few will wonder why they should put up with it. Which is a good question. Why should they? Nobody wants China to be knocking down satellites (it adds to the trash in orbit for one thing). However, if U.S. space policy is specifically designed with the intention to deny freedom of action to adversaries, then other countries are going to want the same. And if the U.S. isn't willing to sign treaties attempting to hinder aggressive use of space, then what cautious world leader would not conclude aggressive intent on the part of the U.S.?

You can, if you wish, call this human nature, the flint points to thermonuclear warhead aspect of our species’ development that we haven’t yet been able to fully curb but will wipe us as thoroughly as a wayward asteroid if we don’t wise up and soon. Personally, I think our collective frontal lobes can be applied – better be applied – to interrupt this short-circuit in our brains. There are 6.5 billion of us on the planet now and there are myriad ways there could be zero in the not-so-distant future. We don’t need another method of knocking ourselves off.

Our government’s Star Wars scheme is madness. Has been since the idea was publicly introduced a quarter century ago. Not because the hardware and software won’t work – although those are formidable obstacles still. But because this isn’t about technology, rather it’s about politics. International politics, in which arena Administration officials have been dazzlingly inept, thuggish, conniving and stubborn.

But failure hasn’t cowed them from their original intent the day they walked into office. As the waiting continues for China to declare the obvious, we learn from Monday’s Guardian that:

The Czech government has announced that it wants to host a large US military site for the Pentagon's much-criticised missile shield system, confirming for the first time that Washington had asked Prague for permission to build a radar site for the national missile defence programme.

Russia had warned earlier this month that any extension of the US missile project to eastern Europe would force it to review its military planning.

In one of his first acts as the new Czech [right-wing] prime minister, Mirek Topolanek said that building the facilities in the Czech Republic, the first extension of the "son of star wars" project beyond the US, would boost European security.

From the inception of Star Wars policy, which was built on a foundation of outrageous exaggerations about Soviet capability, critics said it was impossible to know whether the machines could be affordably built, programmed and launched into orbit or fired from land and sea, and whether, once in place, they would function as designed. But one thing the critics affirmed with 100% certainty was that embarking on such a policy would spark a reciprocation by other nations, in other words, a space-war race. When will we ever learn? When, when, when?