China Tests Anti-Satellite Laser Weapon 552
schnippy writes "U.S. intelligence agencies believe that China has successfully tested an anti-satellite weapon by destroying one of their old weather satellites. The test, if confirmed, would be an order of magnitude more provocative than earlier reports of Chinese blinding lasers being. Arms Control Wonk has a good writeup on what this will mean for U.S. policy."
How is this provocative ? (Score:5, Insightful)
Or is it OK for the USA to have it but no one else ? I suppose it depends on who you consider the bad guys. I note that China has invaded fewer countries in the last 50 years than the USA has ... so what is the answer to the question ?
Re:"their" (Score:3, Insightful)
Secondly, it opens up an arms race in space, with money thrown into space weapons research, testing, and bigger and heavier weaponry.
I do disagree with some of the conclusions drawn in the article (the author was berating a Short sighted Chinese government for development of space weaponry). The US has quite active in the ASAT department for some time. The only reason the politicians didt create some treaty to ban or restrict research was that there was no space arms race. So, rather than sign up a treaty and lead saying We can do it, but we wont, if you wont, they went ahead, and now people are surprised that other sovereign nations are doing exactly the same thing.
Yes, another arms race is a bad thing, but it was all avoidable if the politicians on the US side had actually had the foresight to pull up a treaty in the first place, rather than going ahead believing they would remain the only show in town.
Re:short term (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:How is this provocative ? (Score:4, Insightful)
What this will mean for U.S. policy? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:This is just one more piece of bad news from Ch (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:This is just one more piece of bad news from Ch (Score:4, Insightful)
chill out (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:This is just one more piece of bad news from Ch (Score:3, Insightful)
Things like censorship, product safety, military issues, global warming contributions, and anything that seems enough of a problem to become a law in western countries should be forced upon the Chinese government.
Half of these things the US is guilty of:
Re:How is this provocative ? (Score:2, Insightful)
Where its only free speach as long as you spout US progaganda.
How is it trolling to quote what they teach in US schools (well not north korea, if it weren't for M.A.S.H. most in the US wouldn't even know the north korean war happened)
Just because the rest of the world finds the USA's rewriting of recent history a joke - not that our countries haven';t done it in the past - its just that it was a lot easier to a few centuaries ago.
Funny that we should view this as "provocative" (Score:5, Insightful)
I certainly won't claim that China wouldn't have pressed ahead with its anti-sattelite weapon if the US hadn't stated space hegemony as its policy objective, but in terms of being provocative it really seems to be a case of the pot calling the kettle black. The US space policy is confrontational if nothing else.
I'm fairly confident that the recently unveiled US space policy caused a massive "Oh yeah? We'll see about that!" response among China, Russia, India, and perhaps others too.
One Word; Taiwan (Score:3, Insightful)
It is a provocation in the same way any new weapon is a provocation, but the response won't be military or economic. The response will be that the US starts upgrading their own anti-satellite weapon if they have not already done so and building in more stealth features to their old satellites. This starts a potential arms race, but that is it. Even then, I doubt it is going to be much of a race. The US has had known anti-satellite weapons for decades. It probably has other still classified anti-satellite weapons waiting in the wings as well.
The real 'provocation' in this is what it means for Taiwan. The US has been quietly backing away from its promise to defend the democracy of Taiwan in case of a Chinese invasion. Even now, the prospect of fighting over Taiwan makes the US uneasy. The US could certainly win today, but it would be far more bloody and dramatically more costly then Iraq. Such a war would have both nations getting itchy nuclear weapon trigger fingers. Now, to top it all off, China has the capacity to knock down US satellites making the military game much more dangerous while at the same time offering up a way to put a real hurt on American economic interests.
It is a good old fashion Mexican standoff. A war between the US and China is a war that both sides could lose (read that as going nuclear). Even if both sides agreed to take nuclear weapons off the table, the economic damage done to the US would only be matched by the massive economic destruction wrought on China. The whole issue is messy and ugly, and it is coming to a head. China WILL make a move again Taiwan in the next 10 years.
Re:How is this provocative ? (Score:5, Insightful)
Sorry.. I normally try to refrain from commenting on these kind of issues, since I'm European, and will be considered someone not knowledgable enough by a lot of people. But... I can't resist this time.
The US is actually doing *exactly* that in Iraq: Do things our "democratic" way or we'll stay here and keep killing people. You'd see this if you'd actually look at things happening from a distance. The current not-yet-civil war is a direct result of the US removing the one authority figure in charge, and trying to democratize the country. I personally believe that Iraq isn't A> ready B> helped with democracy.
You can't force two peoples (in this case mainly divided along religious borders) to work together if they don't want to, and haven't in known history. This is simply an enormous mistake in thinking.
Democracy is what works for *us* (most of the time anyway), but forcing that on other people and countries should not be the way to propagate it, I think.
Feel free to disagree, but that's my (possibly biased) point of view.
Re:Just what the world needs... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:How is this provocative ? (Score:2, Insightful)
So is your argument that you desire China to have the military strength to counter the US? Or that perhaps you would prefer that China and the US switched places in relative military strength? I think that some people around here have gone so far as actually to desire that -- but it's a fool's wish.
I think it's fine and good to wish that the US used its military power responsibly, but it's another thing entirely to want China to be equally powerful militarily.
Re:not a laser (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, technically, photons have kinetic energy too (even though they have no mass): E=hf.
Re:How is this provocative ? (Score:2, Insightful)
> an instance or two.
Really? I'm surprised the news had time to cover it after all the sordid details of the US's chum Israel attempting to wipe Palestine off the map.
Re:How is this provocative ? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:IMHO (Score:5, Insightful)
It's as funny as nations conducting nuclear testing on their own soil!
Wait, that wasn't really funny at all. Maybe you had to be there.
Re:short term (Score:3, Insightful)
Throwing your weight around is not always the best way to get what you want, a lessone we've had to relearn here in the US these past few years.
Re:Funny that we should view this as "provocative" (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:How is this provocative ? (Score:5, Insightful)
How dare a nation annex land belonging to foreign invaders -- who, to this day, continue to proclaim the obliteration of that nation -- as a means of protecting itself from future attacks!
Re:Just what the world needs... (Score:3, Insightful)
In light of the stated goal of the US to dominate space militarily, this is not something the can bitch about. China can legitimatelly argue, as the US would, that they are merely improving their ability to defend themselves.
Re:This is just one more piece of bad news from Ch (Score:2, Insightful)
Violent games are not political speech in any meaninful way.
> trying to prevent flag burning,
When has the US ever tried to prevent flag burning. That would be very dangerous ground -- flag burning, although repugnant, is inherently an essential form of protected political speech, and MUST be permitted -- but I must have missed that news item, because I was not aware of its having happened. Can you cite an example?
> monitoring citizens/bloggers etc
Okay, monitoring is a privacy issue. Granted. Although comparing it with China's vigorous political censorship program is a bit... over the top. Nonetheless, it *is* an issue.
> Product safety - Right...
Agreed, the OP was being stupid on that one.
> Military issues - Whose government is an international joke for the wars it starts?
Germany, but I don't see how that's relevant here.
> Global warming
A stupid complaint also, yes.
> Forcing their government what to do - They are a soverign nation, not the 51st State of the USA
Agreed. We can't force anything. All we can do, at most, is break off relations. Which even at that could be construed as a little extreme.
We *should* be a little less timid about publically saying what we think about some of their more inane policies, however. The One China policy springs immediately to mind.
Re:short term (Score:2, Insightful)
T,FTFY.
Re:"their" (Score:3, Insightful)
Why do people keep thinking this is new? It's not. The only new thing is that it's China doing it.
The USA successfully tested an anti-satellite missile [astronautix.com] over twenty years ago. And when I mean "successfully tested," I mean we did just what the Chinese did here: destroyed an actual satellite in actual orbit around the actual earth. And it wasn't something like NMD, where we had to test it a dozen times to get a single kill. There was one test, and it just worked.
The Soviets had a working anti-satellite program [russianspaceweb.com] even earlier than that, basically big fragmentation warheads that they'd launch into a matching orbit and then maneuver into kill range of the target satellite. Seven interceptions. Hell, the Soviets even launched (unsuccessfully) an armed orbital battle station [astronautix.com].
All of this was decades ago. So why the fears of opening up an arms race?
Re:short term (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:How is this provocative ? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:short term (Score:3, Insightful)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_an
Re:How is this provocative ? (Score:3, Insightful)
Nowadays, Tibet is used as a toxic waste dump, and the Han Chinese population outnumbers the Tibetan population. RIP Tibet, after sustaining some of the worst atrocities of the 20th century.
Re:How is this provocative ? (Score:1, Insightful)
No it didn't. Bosnia is de facto split in three entities which, for the most part, don't want to have anything to do with the other two. All three entities (Bosniak, Croatian, and Serbian) have been pretty much ethnically cleansed. Once that happened, there was no reason for fighting anymore. Everybody won their little ghetto for themselves. Well, Serbs and Croats got a little bigger piece of pie, but the point is fighting would have ceased with or without NATO intervention.
The country is kept together by NATO and UN using force. Croatian part wants to join Croatia, Serbian part wants to join Serbia, which leaves predominantly muslim Bosniak side on its own. These people simply don't want to leave with each other. Instead of admitting the reality and withdrawing, NATO is just prolonging the misery and the inevitable. Sounds familar? Look at Iraq.
Re:How is this provocative ? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:How is this provocative ? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:How is this provocative ? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:How is this provocative ? (Score:3, Insightful)
A bunch of powerful nations, pass around some money and rights to the spoils, and then they "Agree" that killing people is OK now? What is the difference between White Phospherous, Napalm or Serin Gas? Cost and Efficiency.
Our Cluster Bombs, Depleted Uranium and Smart Bombs kill lots of people -- apparently the piles of dead all had a trial and jury to prove that they were terrorists, rather than just bystanders. These are legitimate weapons, because they cost the military industry a lot of money and were made in industrialized nations. If you create a counter-weapon, with what you have available, and use goods that cost less, that is asymmetric warefare and bad. Targeting civilians is a terrorist activity -- but accidentally destroying Lebanese hospitals because you say you were trying to get bad guys; That's civilized.
And Abu Ghraib was a few bad apples. Same with Gitmo. And all those people who were put in oil drums in Afghanistan. And pay no attention to Negroponte -- death squads following the same techniques and dressed like police in Iraq, just like they did in Chile, have nothing to do with him. Don't pay attention to James Baker's career "oops, why'd I tell Saddam he could invade Kuwait?"
And the Constitution is more than 60 years old -- I suppose that has nothing important in it as well. Why is it that you think people were so much more primitive 60 years ago? How are we different now? Why do people keep repeating that "history repeats?"
60 years or 600 years -- war is a scam to create desperation and profits. We did economically to the USSR what we tried to do to China in Vietnam -- which was more successful?
Al Qaeda is a manufactured enemy, because a direct conflict with China would cause lots of Media and WalMart to turn against BushCo. Go check out his ties to Saudis and the Shah of Iran. Same old scam, different "nouns." They just need some convenient enemy, because in chaos they can steel. And Bush supporting companies have made billions.
Re:How is this provocative ? (Score:1, Insightful)
See how that works?
By the way, one does not have to be a jew to become an Israeli citizen - it simply makes it much easier. Compare and contrast with religious freedom and citizenship laws in, say, Saudi Arabia.