China’s Aims in Space; Debating Nanoethics
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On January 11, 2007, a missile was launched from Chinese territory. It arced upwards into space to an altitude of about 537 miles, where it slammed directly into its target, an obsolete Chinese weather satellite. The target was destroyed, reportedly producing some 900 trackable pieces of space debris in orbits from 125 miles to about 2,300 miles and resulting in an increase of 10 percent in the total amount of manmade debris in orbit.
This demonstration of an anti-satellite weapon (ASAT) was just the latest in a series of tests of China’s space weapons program, and was a warning sign the United States should take very seriously. In the decades after the Soviet Union and the United States first designed and deployed so-called space weapons, some observers came to hope it would be possible to turn back history’s pages and preserve space as a sanctuary, a pristine place of peace and international cooperation, where terrestrial disputes could be left behind. If these hopes were ever given credence, they have surely been dispelled by China’s recent actions in space: vivid demonstrations that the country could threaten essential satellites both directly, by physically destroying them, and indirectly, employing lasers and other jamming techniques to make them unusable. China is now a military space power and space is once again an undeniably contested arena.
There are several policy courses the United States could take in responding to this new reality. It could assume that China is not a significant threat to American space assets and determine that inaction is preferable to overreaction. But such a do-nothing approach would expose the United States to the dangers of what has been called a “space Pearl Harbor,” a surprise attack on U.S. space capabilities with immediate consequences for the American military and for American interests the world over.
Alternatively, American policymakers could conclude that negotiation and diplomacy offer the best path forward. Following this approach, the U.S. would embrace efforts to ban the introduction of weapons into space and negotiate codes of conduct to regulate the behavior of nation-states. But while some good could undoubtedly come from the emergence of international norms and rules, it is unlikely they would be sufficient to preserve security.
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