Hans Blix isn't needed in space - yet

[T_i_B]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1063788,00.html

China yesterday became the third state on the planet - after the former Soviet Union and the US - to launch a manned spacecraft. Such a successful introduction of advanced technology by a developing country might be thought a cause for international celebration - but that is not how the militarists in Washington will see it. There, it is likely that the launch will be used as further evidence of a "China threat", while China's own proposal - for a treaty banning weapons from space - will be rejected.

The danger is that President Bush will repeat the US reaction to the Soviet space programme. In the 1950s, when Moscow launched Sputnik, the first satellite, it triggered a massive military build-up by Washington. It is now US national strategy to prevent any power from rivalling the US in the way that the Soviet Union once did. US strategists see China's huge population and growing economy as providing the state with the potential to challenge America.

The now infamous Project for the New American Century (Pnac) states that for the US the "focus of strategic competition" has shifted from Europe to east Asia. In a discussion of potential strategic competitors to the US, President Bush's national security strategy explains some of the political rational for fearing China: "... a quarter century after beginning the process of shedding the worst features of the Communist legacy, China's leaders have not yet made the next series of fundamental choices about the character of their state. In pursuing advanced military capabilities that can threaten its neighbours in the Asia-Pacific region, China is following an outdated path."

Today, the US has thousands of nuclear weapons and other missiles able to attack China, while Beijing has little to fire back with. Washington is determined to keep it that way. One of the Pnac members explained that: "The US has never accepted a deterrent relationship with China, the way we did with Russia." To the US military, any space programme it does not control is a challenge to its formal policy of dominating space militarily. The likely reply from the Pentagon to the Chinese space programme is an intensification of the "son of star wars" project.