Re: Chinese ASAT strike was third try; had mobile element



http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/23/washington/23satellite.html?hp

April 23, 2007
U.S. Knew of China Missile Test in Advance
By MICHAEL R. GORDON and DAVID S. CLOUD

WASHINGTON, April 22 - After a Chinese interceptor smashed into a
target satellite in January, Bush administration officials criticized
the test as a destabilizing development.

It was the first successful demonstration of an antisatellite missile
by any country in more than 20 years. Pentagon officials warned that
the test had increased the threat to American satellites. Space
experts fretted that it had spawned a cloud of orbiting debris.
American diplomats complained to their counterparts in Beijing.

What administration officials did not say is that as the Chinese were
preparing to launch their antisatellite weapon, American intelligence
agencies had issued reports about the preparations being made at the
Songlin [Xichang] test facility. In high-level discussions, senior
Bush administration officials debated how to respond and even began to
draft a protest, but ultimately decided to say nothing to Beijing
until after the test.

Three months after the Chinese launching, a new debate has developed
as to whether the administration properly handled the episode or
missed an opportunity to discourage the Chinese from crossing a new
military threshold.

The events show that the administration felt constrained in its
dealings with China because of its view that it had little leverage to
stop an important Chinese military program, and because it did not
want to let Beijing know how much the United States knew about its
space launching activities.

"We did get warning that the test was being prepared," said a senior
administration official, who described the administration's thinking
in deciding not to ask the Chinese to cancel the test.

"I think it is fair to say that nobody knows whether the Chinese would
have deferred or canceled the test," the administration official
added. "The principals' best judgment, including the leadership of the
intelligence community, was that they were committed to testing the
antisatellite weapon."

But some experts outside government say that American officials might
have been able to discourage the Chinese from launching the missile,
had the officials been willing to enter into a broader discussion of
ways to regulate the military competition in space. China had long
advocated an agreement to ban weapons in space, an approach the Bush
administration has rejected in order to maintain maximum flexibility
for developing antimissile defenses.

"Had the United States been willing to discuss the military use of
space with the Chinese in Geneva, that might have been enough to
dissuade them from going through with it," said Jeffrey G. Lewis, an
arms control expert at the New America Foundation.

Dubbed the SC-19 by American intelligence, the Chinese antisatellite
weapon consists of a solid-fuel medium-range missile carrying an
interceptor that is designed to crash into enemy satellites. The
weapon is fired from a mobile launcher.

The United States had already detected two previous tests of the
system - on July 7, 2005, and Feb. 6, 2006. Neither struck a target.
In the second trial, the missile passed near a satellite, leaving
American officials unsure whether the goal had been to hit it, or
simply to pass nearby. In neither case did the Bush administration
complain to the Chinese, a senior official said.

In December 2006 and early January of this year, American intelligence
agencies picked up signs that preparations for a third Chinese
antisatellite test appeared to be under way. The mobile missile
launcher for the SC-19 was repeatedly detected on the Songlin pad,
according to American officials familiar with the classified reports.

In early January, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which
collects and analyzes reconnaissance information, also warned that an
SC-19 test was possible that month, American officials said.

The presumed target for the test was an old Chinese weather satellite
known as the Feng-Yun-1C. The United States Air Force was carefully
tracking the satellite on the day of the test, checking its location
six times that day instead of the normal two, according to Geoff
Forden, a research associate at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology.

As the test preparations were under way, the Bush administration
pondered how to respond.

"There were discussions about different options of how to deal with a
potential test that was coming up, whether you démarche them early on,
whether you wait to see if they are successful, if they're not," said
Lt. Gen. Walter L. Sharp, the director of the staff under Gen. Peter
Pace, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

General Sharp declined to provide details, but other officials said
the idea of asking China to forgo the test had been broached by some
Pentagon officials. The suggestion, they said, was rejected for
several reasons.

Officials concluded that China was unlikely to cancel the test and
that there were few good options to punish China if they ignored an
American warning to hold off. American intelligence agencies were
loath to let the Chinese know they were aware of the state of their
preparations.

Meeting Chinese demands for a negotiation on space-based weapons was
not considered an option for the administration. The United States
last tested an antisatellite weapon - a missile that was fired into
space from an F-15 warplane - in 1985, and has no current program to
develop a new antisatellite system.

With an eye on missile defense, however, the administration has sought
to maintain maximum flexibility for American military operations in
space. So the administration's decision was to monitor China's
preparations and draft a protest that could be delivered after the
test.

Early on Jan. 11, the SC-19 was launched and rammed into the target
satellite, which was orbiting 475 miles overhead. About 1,600 pieces
of debris, the remnants of the destroyed satellite, have since been
tracked orbiting the earth, increasing the danger of collisions with
other spacecraft.

An international meeting of government experts on space debris had
been scheduled to open in Beijing this week, but was postponed by
China, which apparently feared criticism of the January launching.

But for the Pentagon, the national security implications are even more
worrisome. As a result of the test, some American intelligence
analysts concluded that the Chinese might have an operational
antisatellite weapon that could threaten low-orbit American imaging
satellites as early as next year.

"There was a shock that the Russians had put a satellite in orbit
before us," Gen. T. Michael Moseley, the Air Force chief of staff,
said at a recent conference, "and there's a similar shock that the
Chinese successfully shot down that satellite. It makes space
astronomically more dangerous than it was before."

Several Pentagon officials said they believed that the purpose of the
test was to give the Chinese military the ability to blind American
imaging satellites and hamper American military operations if there
were to be a confrontation over Taiwan.

American officials said the United States could respond to the new
threat by developing the ability to quickly launch new satellites and
improving the network of space sensors to tell if a system has been
disabled by a technical failure or by an enemy attack.

Gen. James E. Cartwright, the head of the Strategic Command, said in
recent Congressional testimony that another means of defending
American satellites is to attack enemy launching pads with Trident
submarine-launched missiles armed with non-nuclear warheads.

While the Pentagon wants to field such a weapon, many lawmakers are
wary, fearing that a potential adversary might mistake a non-nuclear
Trident missile for the nuclear variant, triggering an inadvertent
nuclear war.

There is a vigorous debate among experts about whether the test might
have been averted.

"This was absolutely preventable," said Joseph Cirincione of the
Center for American Progress, a research group. "The Chinese have been
proposing a treaty to ban weapons in space for years. We have refused
in order to pursue this fantasy of space-based antimissile weapons."

Peter W. Rodman, who recently left his post as a senior Defense
Department official, challenged that argument. "It is a bit of arms-
control mythology that there is always a deal to be made," Mr. Rodman
said. "For years, the Chinese military has been writing about how to
cripple a superpower that relies on high-tech capabilities like
satellites. They have been patiently developing this capability. I
don't see why they would trade it away."

Mr. Lewis of the New America Foundation said that the United States
might have persuaded the Chinese to defer the test, short of meeting
their demand for a ban on space weapons.

"The Bush administration watched them conduct two earlier tests and
did not say a word," he said. "Then they issued a National Space
Policy that talked about freedom of action and denying adversaries
access to space. The Chinese probably concluded that we were in no
position to complain about their test."

John E. Pike, the director of Global Security.org, a military
information Web site, has a less charitable view of the Chinese
motivations. "It makes a mockery of China's space weapons diplomacy,"
he said. "Their proposals were always aimed at American space-based
systems and always excluded a ground-based, pop-up antisatellite
weapon such as theirs. I don't think we could have talked them out of
testing against a target."

The Bush administration is hoping that the diplomatic protests that it
and other nations lodged after the SC-19 test will dissuade the
Chinese from conducting additional tests. General Pace, however, had
little luck in discussing China's antisatellite program during a visit
to China last month. "There were certain things that they were very
open about, but they were not open about that," he said.


.

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