Page 2 of 2 Satellite killer really aimed at
Taiwan By Wu Zhong, China
Editor
modernization. "China is a huge
country, and we need equivalent military muscle.
[Late Chinese leader] Deng Xiaoping said,
'Backwardness means waiting to be beaten up.'
China can no longer sit idle waiting to be beaten
up."
China is still two to three decades
behind the US in military modernization. Because
of the US involvement in the Taiwan issue,
therefore the mainland military needs to develop
its own
weapons or measures to offset
its disadvantages in case a cross-strait war
erupts with US intervention, he said.
International concern The US
administration publicly demanded that China
explain why it had conducted a test of its growing
anti-satellite capability. "We know the Chinese
have conducted this test," said Tom Casey, a US
State Department spokesman. "We certainly want to
hear from them in a more detailed way exactly what
their intentions are. We don't want to see a
situation where there is any militarization of
space."
State Department officials met
with officials from the Chinese Embassy last
Tuesday, and diplomats in Beijing met with Chinese
officials on Wednesday. Casey said one question
the test raised was whether this was a one-off
event or part of a broader initiative. Britain,
Japan and Australia joined the United States in
voicing concern.
The New York Times quoted
Chong-Pin Lin, a Taiwanese expert on China's
military, as saying, "This is the other face of
China, the hard power side that they usually keep
well hidden. They talk more about peace and
diplomacy, but the push to develop lethal,
high-tech capabilities has not slowed down at
all."
US intelligence agencies believe
that China launched the "killer" rocket from its
Xichang spaceport and guided it into a high-speed
head-on collision.
The New York Times
recalled that at an international air show in
Zhuhai in November, the Guangzhou-based newspaper
Information Times and other state-run media
carried a short interview with an unidentified
military official boasting that China had already
completely ensured that it has second-strike
capability. China could protect is retaliatory
forces because it could destroy satellites in
space.
Having a weapon that can disable or
destroy satellites is considered a component of
China's unofficial doctrine of asymmetrical
warfare, the New York Times said, noting that
China's army strategists have written that the
military intends to use relatively inexpensive but
highly disruptive technologies to impede the
better-equipped and better-trained US forces in
the event of an showdown over Taiwan.
But
not everyone concedes that China has destroyed an
orbiting satellite. Russian Defense Minister
Sergei Ivanov said that talk about a Chinese
ballistic missile having hit a satellite is made
up of "highly exaggerated rumors. I have heard
reports to that effect, and they are quite
abstract. I'm afraid they don't have such an
anti-satellite capability. The rumors are highly
exaggerated," Ivanov told reporters in Moscow.
Retired colonel-general Leonid Ivashov,
the former head of the Russian Defense Ministry's
International Military Cooperation Department, was
quoted as saying that the Chinese weapon was
modeled on the Soviet IS-1 missile designed to
destroy satellites that was developed in the
1970s.
But a spokesman for China's Foreign
Ministry, Liu Jianchao, declined to confirm or
deny that China had downed a satellite. "So far, I
have not been informed about it by relevant
authorities. China has always stood for the
peaceful uses of outer space and against
introducing weapons into outer space,'' he said.
Some experts in the US played down the
significance of the test, saying China apparently
used simple technology. "It's pretty low-tech.
It's essentially like throwing a rock at someone,"
said space-security analyst Laura Grego, of the
Union of Concerned Scientists in Cambridge,
Massachusetts.
Grego said the technology
required for such a test is not very sophisticated
and is practically in the reach of other countries
as well. "Essentially any country that can put a
satellite in orbit could launch a weapon to
destroy one."
She said the launch vehicle
was probably just an ordinary medium-range
ballistic missile, but the real challenge was to
get the weapon to hit the 1.5-meter-wide target.
"Information about satellite positions
from ground-based tracking alone is not precise
enough to allow a missile to hit a satellite, so
the missile would have needed a built-in homing
device to zero in on the satellite," she said.
"This could be done with a video camera that
records the satellite's position, while thrusters
adjust the missile's course to guide it into a
collision."
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