Two weeks ago, high above eastern Asia, a Chinese missile unerringly hunted down and struck its target. The precision was impressive--and frightening in its strategic cunning.
No, the target wasn't the derelict weather satellite that happened to get blown to smithereens by the missile's impact. More important, the space shot hit home in the editorial offices of the New York Times. Responding exactly as could have been expected, the Times editors first accused the Bush administration of having "bellicose attitudes" of its own, then urged the administration to sign on to "an arms control treaty for space," which would ban what China had just done.
Not that the Times fully comprehended what China had done. The editorial claimed it had destroyed a retired "communications satellite." But the explosion in space destroyed something else, too. An international treaty "banning" space weapons, as the Times advocates, would depend crucially on the expectation that, absent effective verification procedures, the parties would be able to trust each other because of a track record of openness and candor. In the aftermath of the secretive Chinese test and official obfuscation at all levels of the Beijing regime, any such hope is as shattered as the ill-fated Fengyun weather satellite.
Russia, too, stepped in to demonstrate bluntly the vanity of hopes that transparency and honesty could provide a firm basis for a credible anti-space weapons treaty. Vladimir Putin, visiting India, sniped that China "is not the first country which has conducted such trials. . . . As far as I know, the first such tests were carried out back in the 1980s" by the United States. The Russian defense minister, Sergei Ivanov, declared his doubts that the "alleged test" even occurred. If the Russian president and his top officials cannot speak the truth about decades-old Soviet space weapons or the current Chinese test, how trustworthy have they shown themselves to be about less-verifiable space plans in the future?
In its January 20 editorial, the Times adopted a tone of sweet reason: "Surely it would make military and diplomatic sense," the editors urged, "to seek to ban all tests and any use of antisatellite weapons. . . . The way to counter China or any other potentially belligerent space power is through an arms control treaty." Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) agreed: "It is urgent that President Bush move to guarantee protection [of American satellites] by initiating an international agreement to ban the development, testing, and deployment of space weapons and antisatellite systems." Gary Samore of the Council on Foreign Relations told the Times, "It puts pressure on the U.S. to negotiate agreements not to weaponize space." And the Boston Globe celebrated the Chinese strike because "it could lead to something positive" since it might persuade the Bush administration to talk about a treaty.
Indeed, China and Russia, along with other nations, have for years been pushing for what they call a "treaty to prevent the deployment of weapons in space." But just as with Abraham Lincoln's famous five-legged dog ("If I call a tail a leg, does a dog have five legs?"), this so-called treaty has no prospect of delivering on its grandiose title.
First of all, there is no accepted definition of what is to be banned. The warhead flown on January 12 had no explosives, and its guidance package probably shared many--if not all--of its components with the rendezvous control hardware being developed for Shenzhou manned spaceships, which clearly would not be banned. A dozen projects around the world are developing robots to fly to targets in space to inspect and manipulate them (for repair and resupply). Would adding a pair of wire cutters be all that is needed to transform them into "space weapons"? Such a robot could destroy a satellite every bit as effectively as an explosive would.
In a May 22, 2006, working paper at the Conference on Disarmament, Russia and China observed that "no consensus has been reached so far on the definition of 'space weapon'" or even of "outer space." The paper advanced various views, including one that "suggests that there is no need for definitions, on the ground that formulating them is both very difficult and unnecessary. . . . Lengthy discussions on the definition issue might impede reaching a political consensus on the prevention of the weaponization of and an arms race in outer space."
