United for Peace of Pierce County, WA - We nonviolently oppose the reliance on unilateral military actions rather than cooperative diplomacy.

"It is hard not to regard this week's show of missile prowess by the U.S. as directed towards China," the London Independent said Friday.[1] -- "Beijing, for one, was in no doubt that this was so. Until now, U.S. apprehension about China has tended to express itself in nonsensical panic about North Korea. This week's operation in the Pacific suggests that the proxy war is ending. Can it then be long before the U.S. and China square up openly to compete for control of outer space?" -- The Independent's news article on the event saw the shoot-down as another step toward the militarization of space.[2] ...

There are two distinct versions of the operation mounted by the U.S. Navy to shoot down a crippled military satellite over the Pacific. The official version, expounded in mind-numbing detail by Pentagon officials yesterday, is that the U.S. had no choice but to launch a missile to bring down the satellite. It had been out of control since its launch 13 months ago. If not brought down, it risked crashing unpredictably to Earth, where its tank of toxic fuel would have made it a major environmental hazard.

A supplementary argument, not broached by the Pentagon, was that the military technology loaded on to the satellite was not anything that America wanted another country to find on its territory. Be that as it may, it made complete sense for the U.S. to destroy the errant satellite before it crashed. The highly precision operation, with a window of only 10 seconds for the missile-launch, appears to have gone according to plan.

The other interpretation of the mission is not incompatible with the first but far more worrying. While acknowledging that the satellite was in trouble and a missile strike was one way of dealing with it, this version has it that the operation was in fact a covert test of a space weapon. Such tests were outlawed by the U.S.-Soviet Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty of 1972. By abrogating the treaty in one of his first acts as President, George Bush opened the way for tests of the "son" of Reagan's "Star Wars."

Since then, the U.S. has conducted a series of experiments in which missiles have been launched to intercept other missiles, with varying degrees of success. That the latest target was a satellite rather than another missile has led some to argue that it was merely a repetition of a test the U.S. conducted in the 1980s, rather than anything new or more threatening. There are, however, several key differences. The satellite was out of control, and the missile used was the very latest, super-sophisticated SM-3. The biggest difference of all, however, is the existence of a potential challenger to the U.S. in its efforts to dominate space.

A year ago, China surprised America when it shot down a satellite at a very high altitude. It was the most glaring demonstration yet of China's steady rise as a military power. It is hard not to regard this week's show of missile prowess by the U.S. as directed towards China. Beijing, for one, was in no doubt that this was so.

Until now, U.S. apprehension about China has tended to express itself in nonsensical panic about North Korea. This week's operation in the Pacific suggests that the proxy war is ending. Can it then be long before the U.S. and China square up openly to compete for control of outer space?

The Pentagon has claimed a bullseye hit on an out-of-control U.S. spy satellite over the Pacific Ocean -- a mission officially aimed at preventing the satellite's dangerous fuel falling on a populous area but which critics say was a deliberate test of the U.S. missile defense system that would only accelerate an arms race in space.

The spectacular collision took place early yesterday, London time, 153 miles above the Earth's surface, between the rogue satellite orbiting at 17,000 mph and an SM-3 missile travelling at 5,000 mph, just three minutes after the latter's launch from a U.S. Navy cruiser.

A Pentagon spokesman insisted the missile had achieved a "pretty solid" hit. But despite video seeming to show a fire ball and vapor cloud, further investigation will be needed to make sure that the satellite's fuel tank, containing deadly hydrazine, had been fully destroyed. Debris falling over the Atlantic and Pacific would be monitored over the next two days, he added, "but thus far we've seen nothing larger than a football."

But few -- and least of all China and Russia -- take at face value the explanation that the satellite was brought down simply because it was a health hazard. As far as Moscow and Beijing are concerned, the real purpose was to test a key component of the Bush administration's missile defense system, bitterly contested by Russia -- and whose implementation, China and several other countries have warned, would increase the risk of an arms race in space.

For U.S. officials however, such concerns are vastly overblown. Having shot down a satellite for the first time in 1985, the Pentagon has had the ability to do it for more than two decades, they note. In January last year, China successfully destroyed a weather satellite at a reported altitude of 600 miles, four times farther from Earth than the space craft just brought down.

A separate theory is that the satellite, known as US-193 and costing hundreds of millions of dollars, was blown up because it carried super-advanced U.S. military technology. According to reports, it had been commissioned by the ultra-secret National Reconnaissance and carried the most modern radar imaging systems, that might have fallen into hostile hands.

Whatever the truth, the episode is bound to heighten fears that an arms race in space, targeting the communications and spy satellites now so vital for military operations, is unofficially under way.

Last year, Washington strongly objected to the Chinese satellite shoot down, and some speculate that this U.S. operation was intended to send a message to Beijing and Moscow.

Both have submitted a draft treaty at the United Nations aimed at banning the deployment of weapons in space and the use or threat of force against satellites or other craft. But the U.S. has rejected any such agreement, having stated in 2006 that it would "oppose the development of new legal regimes or other restrictions" that sought to prohibit or limit U.S. access to, or use of, space.

The destruction of the spy satellite may well heighten that dispute. "The potential political cost of this shooting down is high," said Laura Grego, an astrophysicist with the Union of Concerned Scientists. Whatever the motivation, she argued, "demonstrating an anti-satellite weapon is counter-productive to U.S. long-term interests, given that the U.S. has the most to gain from an international space weapons ban."

It would now be very difficult to convince other countries not to develop a similar capability, she said.