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Chapter 11. Death By Darth Liu: Look Ma, There’S A Death Star Pointing At Chicago
e are devoted to the peaceful use of space155 and are ready to extend out cooperation to other countries.
—President Hu Jintao
If anyone wanted to know what the Japanese were planning156 to do in the 1930s, all they had to do was read their plans and training documents. These plans were then being executed across the Asia-Pacific region. Many in America viewed claims about the increasing threat of the Japanese military as preposterous because they were committed to a peaceful rise. The Chinese are claiming a peaceful rise as well, coupled with a large increase in their armed forces and weapons. All that is needed now, as then, is to take a hard look at the policy and doctrine of the Peoples’ Liberation Army...with respect to [their] space capabilities and armed forces and what they plan to do, which is to counter our space superiority.
—Christopher Stone, Space Review
Just as with its Earthly adventures, China claims it seeks only a “peaceful rise” into the heavens. However, one of the biggest questions facing the Pentagon right now is whether China’s aggressive rise into space may turn out to be the ultimate weapon to bring America to its knees. This is a particularly important question in an era when the country that once sent a man to walk on the moon now has a space program that is at best on hold and at worst in shambles.
Make no mistake about it; China’s space exploration program is particularly impressive and aggressive. Over the next several decades, it plans to send missions to both the moon and Mars, while last year alone, China launched 15 orbital payloads. This ambitious launch schedule made it the first nation to achieve launch parity with the United States; and China is on a clear trajectory to surpass America in sheer launch volume at just about the same time the U.S. completes its final Space Shuttle mission and shuts the program down.
As to exactly what China is launching into space, payloads range from observation satellites and additions to its global positioning system to manned space missions and a second lunar orbiter. China is also expected to launch its first space station module for both scientific and military purposes by 2012, while three flights in the next two years are expected to dock with that station. Moreover, by leveraging its manufacturing prowess,157 China is moving away from custom-designed spacecraft to those produced on an assembly line; and this innovation will allow it to dramatically increase flight rates.
Even as China has soared, America’s NASA space program—upon which so much of our critical national technological edge rests—has spent an entire decade lost in space. The troubled American Space Shuttle program was scheduled to end in 2010, but with flight delays and one added mission, it will retire sometime this year. After that, there is no clear plan for U.S. manned spaceflight. This is because the Obama administration and Congress remain at odds over both what should be the right mission and what methods should fulfill that mission.
What this political gridlock means is that there will be no U.S. government-operated, manned flights for at least 5 years. For the foreseeable future, that means American astronauts must hitch rides to the International Space Station with the Russians—even as China makes its aggressive lunar and space station pushes.
In light of this Tale of Two Space Programs heading in quite opposite directions, we come back to this question: Will this be a peaceful Chinese rise into the Heavens or a race to seize the ultimate high ground while the American space program remains all but grounded?
The Three Musketeers of Space Exploration
In the 2,900 cubic kilometers158 of [the asteroid] Eros, there is more aluminum, gold, silver, zinc, and other base and precious metals than have ever been excavated in history or indeed, could ever be excavated from the upper layers of the Earth’s crust.
—BBC News
In support of the idea that China’s space exploration program is merely an extension of its peaceful rise, there are at least three factors motivating China’s aggressive program. The first is the development of the many and varied new technologies that invariably accompany space exploration. The second is the future extraction and transport of key energy sources and raw material resources from space to China’s factories. The third is to act as a Darwinian safety valve for an overpopulated and rapidly warming planet. Each of these factors constitutes important reasons for civilian space exploration. Together, they can be used to paint a pastoral picture of China’s space exploration efforts.
From GPS and Solar Power to CAT Scans
From this pastoral perspective, one of the most important reasons to engage in space exploration is a reason that America has totally lost sight of—the super boost that such exploration gives to the rate of technological innovation and economic growth in a country. What is remarkable here is how quickly America’s political leaders have forgotten the role that space exploration provided in stimulating our economy—and improving our quality of life!—over the past 50 years.
Consider that, without NASA and our space program, we would likely not have today the Internet as we know it, our GPS network, all manner of solar power technologies, medical applications ranging from CAT scans and MRIs to needle breast biopsy, miracle plastics and lubricants, and a weather tracking system for hurricanes and wildfires that has saved hundreds of thousands of lives and billions of dollars while significantly boosting crop outputs. Together, these innovations alone have provided our economy with trillions of dollars in benefits. And let’s not forget more mundane but no less useful inventions such as the “memory foam” for Tempur-Pedic mattresses.
While America has forgotten the importance of space exploration as an economic catalyst, China totally gets it. In fact, the head of China’s lunar program, Ouyang Ziyuan, has explicitly stated that the Apollo moon effort drove the U.S. tech boom; and he frequently uses that as rationale for China going to the moon. It’s not just more rapid innovation, however, that China will receive from its space program.
A Mining Cornucopia
What China also seeks in space is the valuable array of precious metals and raw materials that reside in the crusts of both the moon and numerous near-Earth asteroids. This bounty ranges from gold and platinum to extremely rare metals critical to high-tech manufacturing.
In fact, successful mining operations in space would do much to alleviate growing raw material shortages and the pollution associated with resource extraction. Consider, for example, Asteroid 433, otherwise known as Eros. Scientists writing in the journal Nature have predicted159 that in a fortunately distant future, this giant, 34-kiloton chunk of rock is likely to hit our planet and cause a disaster bigger than the impact that wiped out the dinosaurs some 65 million years back. The good news, however, is that Eros is jam-packed with all manner of mineral wealth just waiting for some enterprising space station to extract. Moreover, with its light gravity and a total lack of environmental constraints, extracting raw materials from Eros with freely available solar energy would be relatively simple once the transportation is in place. Nor is this completely sci-fi, as a NASA space probe visited Eros in the year 2000 and landed on it in 2001.
And here’s a radical idea that has been proposed by private space entrepreneur Jim Benson for both avoiding the calamity of a collision with Earth and getting Eros’s mineral bounty back to our planet: Attach rockets to the asteroid160 to gently adjust its orbit. In this way, it would eventually be possible to bring Eros into a steady position within our Earth-moon system and thereby eliminate any threat of a collision. Of course, this scenario begs the question as to who will get there first and plant their flag—and steering rockets—on resources like Eros.
Nor is it just raw materials like aluminum, gold, and zinc that China may seek in space. From the Chinese perspective, the even bigger lunar prize in the shorter term may well be realizing the enormous potential of nuclear fusion energy. Unlike the current problematic nuclear fission power plants, fusion energy would be both clean and safe and truly be “too cheap to meter.” And here’s the lunar connection: An ingredient that many physicists believe could bring fusion within reach is Helium 3—an extremely rare isotope thought to be abundant on the moon.
As China’s moon czar has framed the potential of Helium 3: “Each year, three space shuttle missions161 could bring enough fuel for all human beings across the world.” Mr. Ouyang might well have added that the successful development of fusion energy from moon-based materials would be a death blow to the OPEC oil cartel and a magic bullet against global warming.
Chinese visionaries like Ouyang also see the moon162 as offering a free and virtually nightless environment in which to generate solar power up to eight times more efficiently and then beam it back to Earth. Science fiction, you say? Yes, indeed. Just like walking on the moon or talking to anyone anywhere on Earth from a handheld device.
And speaking of walking on the moon, it is perfectly understandable why the Chinese space program is aggressively targeting the moon with two successful orbital probes and planned robotic and manned landings for peaceful purposes. What is disconcerting, however, to American private enterprise space entrepreneurs like billionaire Robert Bigelow, is that while China is busy preparing to plant flags on the moon, America spins its wheels. As Bigelow warns:
By the time the Chinese began to systematically do this163 around the key locations on the moon, it is probably too late for other countries to put together expeditions to head off complete ownership of the water, ice, and all the valuable areas.
A Darwinian Escape
Besides serving as a catalyst for technological innovation and a fecund source of energy and natural resource extraction, space exploration also provides a potentially important safety valve in an era of overpopulation and climate change. If you think this, too, is science fiction, think again. As NASA Administrator Michael Griffin has observed:
[T]he goal isn’t just scientific exploration...it’s164 also about extending the range of human habitat out from Earth into the solar system as we go forward in time...In the long run a single-planet species will not survive. We have ample evidence of that.
This is a sentiment shared by physicist Stephen Hawking as well when he tapped out the following on his computer: “Our only chance of long-term survival165 is not to remain inward looking on planet Earth but to spread out into space.”
Of course, colonizing the moon, Mars, and beyond will take many decades. However, one of the advantages that China has over America is its ability to focus on the long term and think in terms of generations rather than individuals. Because of this long-term view, at this point in time, China has a much higher probability of successfully colonizing the best real estate in space than any other country. The question we come back to is whether China’s seizure of the ultimate high ground will be used strictly for peaceful purposes or, instead, to also help subdue rivals. It is a question to which we now turn as we look first at China’s growing arsenal of defensive weapons and then its plans for offensive weapon capabilities.
China’s Space Warfare Epiphany—The Best Defense Is a Good Defense
Outer space is going to be weaponized166 in our lifetime.
—Senior Colonel Yao Yunzhu, PLA Academy of Military Sciences
Perhaps the best evidence of China’s intentions to militarize and weaponize space may be found in the surprising abundance of open source literature on space warfare published by various Chinese military officers and strategists. From “plasma attacks against low-orbit satellites”167 and “kinetic kill vehicles” to “beam weapons” and “orbital ballistic missiles,” the common thread of this literature—much of which has been well analyzed by the U.S.–China Commission—is the destruction or subjugation of American military forces through the exploitation of the commanding heights of space.
Here, for example, is the decidedly unpacifist vision of Colonel Li Daguang from his book Space Warfare. Besides advocating the integration of civilian and military uses for China’s space programs for economic reasons, Li sees the optimal military strategy as one that will do the following:
Destroy or temporarily incapacitate all enemy satellites168 above our territory, [deploy] land based and space based anti-satellite weapons, counter US missile defense systems, maintain our good international image [by covert deployment and keep] space strike weapons concealed and launched only in time of crisis.
The very existence of published writings such as these in a tightly censored Communist world is curious. Not only do they openly contradict the official position of China’s civilian leadership, but they very much confound the ability of Pentagon analysts to figure out just exactly what is going on behind the bamboo curtain—and what America’s response should be.
One possibility is that this wealth of literature describing all manner of ways to bring Uncle Sam to its knees is simply a ruse to prod America into an expensive space arms race. The other possibility is that the threats made by the likes of Colonel Li are very real; and, absent an adequate response, America is leaving itself vulnerable to either a Pearl Harbor-style space attack or a fait accompli surrender.
Either way, one thing is clear: The United States unquestionably still holds the strategic high ground of space today. What is very much in question, however, is who will hold that strategic high ground in the many tomorrows that will follow.
From that high ground, both the U.S. economy and the military depend heavily on a complex network of more than 400 orbiting satellites that provide everything from reconnaissance and navigation to communication and telemetry. It is precisely this impressive network that gives America’s fighting forces nearly preternatural power in the eyes of their adversaries.
Using the vantage point of space and its numerous advantages in high-tech weaponry, the U.S. has been able to fight a number of wars with decidedly asymmetrical casualties. While 150 Americans died in combat during the first Gulf War169 in 1991, anywhere from 30,000 to 56,000 Iraqi soldiers were killed. The same kind of asymmetric casualty rates were likewise in evidence in the American-coordinated NATO attack in 1999 during the Kosovo War as well as in the initial invasion campaign for the 2003 Iraq War.
Whatever your own views of these military actions by the United States, the “game changing” domination of space by the Americans has not gone unnoticed by China. In fact, the 1991 Gulf War is generally regarded in Pentagon circles as Beijing’s wake-up call about how even the world’s largest army, that of China, might be subdued by a numerically far smaller enemy.
To Kill or Blind, That Is the Chinese Question
As long as China’s space program is in the hands of its generals,170 it will largely reflect the People’s Liberation Army’s strategic requirements. This was the case for the former Soviet Union, where the military also controlled the Soviet space program. As seen by its development of multiple anti-satellite weapons systems, its willingness to make military use of manned space programs, and its outright deceptions, China is increasingly following the Soviet example of seeking military dominance of outer space.
—Richard Fisher, StrategyCenter.net
From the Chinese perspective, there are at least two defensive measures that can be taken to counter the U.S. space advantage. One is to destroy part or all of our satellite constellations. The other—which achieves the same result without the explosions—is to simply blind our surveillance birds. That China is developing capabilities in both areas should be evident to anyone who bothers to look.
In the area of satellite destruction, China has already tested several ways to blow up—or literally kidnap—American satellites. This testing began with a big and messy bang in January 2007 when the Chinese military shot one of its own aging satellites out of the sky.
This apparently “ready for retirement” weather satellite had faithfully circled the globe several times a day for more than a decade; but it was easy prey for a modified DF-21 intercontinental ballistic missile that lifted off from the Xichang launch facility in Sichuan province. The missile threw out a kinetic kill vehicle that took on a collision course with the innocent target; and upon impact, the nuts, bolts, panels, and wires of the satellite together with thousands of fragments and pieces of the kinetic kill vehicle created our galaxy’s largest mass of space junk.
Today, that field of Chinese space junk still remains a huge navigational hazard; China is apparently just as willing to pollute outer space as its own rivers and air basins. At risk from disastrous collisions with China’s space junk are more than two-thirds of the nearly 3,000 satellites and craft in orbit. In fact, the list of potential victims includes the International Space Station and its crew, which has had to adjust its orbit at least once to avoid a dense part of the Chinese space hazard.
This is hardly the only sign that China is developing antisatellite or “ASAT” weapons capabilities to knock America’s GPS out of the sky. In January 2010, Chinese space gunners171 shot down a suborbital target at an altitude of about 150 miles with a mobile launched, solid fuel missile and a new kinetic kill vehicle called the KT2. And note that the KT2 is a double threat technology—good for either ballistic missile defense or destroying orbital space systems.
Besides these weapons that could cause American satellites to go boom in the night, there is China’s innovative new “Space Kidnapper.” This weapon was tested in August of 2010 when two Chinese satellites had a secret rendezvous in space. The goal of the test was to see if one satellite could perform what is blandly called a “noncooperative robotic rendezvous” with the other. The world is still waiting to hear from China as to whether the test was a success—although ground observations clearly suggest it was. And if this technology truly works, just imagine a fleet of these kidnappers being dispensed to capture members of the U.S. satellite family.
Blinded by the Light—The Future’s So Bright Our Satellites Need Shades
They let us see their lasers.172 It is as if they are trying to intimidate us.
—Gary Payton, Deputy Undersecretary of the U.S. Air Force for Space Programs
Of course, you don’t have to obliterate or kidnap an American satellite to render it harmless. One other way that is both more elegant and possibly less provocative is to either temporarily “dazzle” or simply blind the satellite. In this arena, China likewise is developing deadly capabilities.
In fact, China’s provocative demonstration of this kind of capability began more than five years ago in the fall of 2006. As reported in the highly respected Jane’s Defence Weekly, during this time, U.S. spy satellites experienced a “sudden decline in effectiveness”173 as they “passed over China.” At the same time, telescopes at the Reagan Test Site174 on Kwajelein Atoll, in the South Pacific, were able to detect the reflected laser light to confirm the cause and Chinese origin.
More broadly, The Economist magazine reports, “The Chinese routinely turn powerful lasers skywards,175 demonstrating their potential to dazzle or permanently blind spy satellites.” The U.S. response has, however, been muted—in large part because of the budget constraints now facing an American military preoccupied with wars in other theaters.
Of course, for China’s neighbors like Japan and Taiwan, the potential loss of the space infrastructure supporting the U.S. Navy’s unfettered access to the Western Pacific is simply terrifying.
From Buck Rogers to Beijing’s Orbital Nukes
China looks set to pull ahead in the Asian space race176 to the moon, putting a spacecraft into lunar orbit Oct. 6 in a preparatory mission for an unmanned moon landing in two or three years...The mission, called Chang’e 2 after a heroine from Chinese folklore who goes to the moon with a rabbit, highlights China’s rapidly growing technological prowess...China’s moonshot, like all space programs, has valuable potential military offshoots. China’s space program is controlled by the People’s Liberation Army, which is steadily gaining experience in remote communication and measurement, missile technology, and antisatellite warfare through missions like Chang’e 2.
—The Christian Science Monitor
While using outer space as an observation point to track U.S. military movements and disabling the American satellite systems are important defensive goals of the Chinese space program, the real prize may be using space as an offensive weapons platform. Options run the gamut from boulders hurled off the moon with enough energy to destroy a metropolis on Earth, EMP pulse bombs designed to disable our electronic infrastructure, and directed energy weapons fired from space to orbiting H-bombs and space planes capable of raining nuclear death on any city in the world.
In fact, if China were to drop a nuclear bomb from space, it would be infinitely more effective than lobbing that same warhead from a rocket out of the Gobi Desert. This is because earth-launched rockets have distinctive heat signatures that allow early detection and long trajectories that allow for tracking and interception. On the other hand, an orbital nuclear bomb needs only an undetectable jet of compressed air to drop from the silence of space. It then uses gravity to rapidly cover the short 200 miles or so to the Earth’s surface while such an attack route is virtually undetectable—until it is too late.
To support the offensive capabilities of its space exploration program, China is building a massive infrastructure of space assets. These include a growing fleet of huge space tracking ships;177 new spaceports and ground stations; dozens of new communications, relay, and surveillance satellites; and last, but hardly least, an extremely expensive Global Positioning System of its own.
China’s GPS is known as Beidou, and it is named after the Big Dipper Constellation, whose tail has long given mariners an arrow to the North. The fact that China is launching its own GPS to rival that of the United States is strongly suggestive of China’s militaristic intentions. After all, the United States offers its GPS free to the world, and there is no reason for any other country to undertake the tremendous expense of developing its own system—unless it intends to destroy the American GPS system or otherwise engage the United States in military conflict.
It’s not like we haven’t been warned about China’s offensive weapons space threat. In January 2001, a space security commission178 appointed by the House and Senate Armed Services Committees concluded that America is at serious risk of a “Space Pearl Harbor” and that strategic planning to counter developing offensive capabilities in China (and Russia) is urgently required. As with so many other warnings, the recommendations of this report were inadequately addressed in the wake of 9/11, as America’s military and intelligence operations refocused toward tactical threats from primitive enemies.
The Taiwan End Game: Anti-Access/Area Denial
“[The] goal of a space shock and awe strike179 is [to] deter the enemy, not to provoke the enemy into combat. For this reason, the objectives selected for a strike must be few and precise... This will shake the structure of the opponent’s operational system of organization and will create huge psychological impact on the opponent’s policymakers.”
—Colonel Yuan Zelu, People’s Liberation Army
Colonel Yuan has truculently described China’s vision of a Space Pearl Harbor for us. He and many of China’s more hawkish leaders dangerously view their antisatellite weapons, GPS-blinding lasers, and orbiting nuclear bombs along with their antiship ballistic missiles, extensive submarine fleet, cyber weaponry, and forms of economic warfare as active chess pieces in a game designed to achieve a surprise political checkmate over America while avoiding any retaliation from the qualitatively superior U.S. forces and weaponry.
Taken in their totality, China’s growing five-dimensional array of air-, land-, sea-, cyber-, and space-based weaponry supports a strategy referred to in Pentagon circles as anti-access/area denial, or A2/AD. Its goal is to deny the U.S. Navy and Marines access to the coastal waters of China so that China can project its power into the region.
Of course, if China’s five-dimensional war machine can drive U.S. naval forces out past the so-called “second island chain,” which is an imaginary line running from Japan through Guam down to Indonesia, China’s civilian government can pretty much tell Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and Vietnam how things are going to run and how resources are going to be divided up. This is a chilling development, particularly for Taiwan, because once China’s A2/AD strategy is fully operational, the little island of free Chinese has little hope of remaining independent from the mainland.
Why? Because current U.S. strategy is all about preventing Chinese military forces from taking Taiwan by using our aircraft carrier groups as a deterrent. If America’s Pacific Fleet is, in fact, driven back past the second island chain, Chinese military forces will be able to easily overwhelm Taiwan’s defenses with their thousands of missiles and massive troop strength. After that, the United States has no real plan or conceivable option to retake the island from Chinese forces dug in among the civilians. It’s the sort of situation that Captain James T. Kirk once famously described with gallows’ humor as: “We’ve got them just where they want us!”
These kinds of observations bring us back to the question: Is China’s rise into space really going to be a peaceful one? A more detailed look at what China is actually sending up into space provides even more fuel for the militaristic fire.
Lock the Doors on the Space Station! The Chinese Are Coming
On September 27th, a Chinese Shenzhou space capsule180 came within 45 kilometers of the International Space Station, and two of the three crewmen made the first Chinese space walk (going outside the spacecraft in their space suits). Later, a small, 88-pound microsatellite (the BX-1) was released from the Shenzhou. This was supposed to be a science experiment, but the fact that the Shenzhou came so close to the International Space Station, and then released a smaller, maneuverable (via small gas jets) BX-1, indicated another satellite destruction drill. The BX-1 could easily have been directed at the nearby space station, and destroyed it.
—James Dunnigan, StrategyPage.com
Each time China launches one of its manned181 Shenzhou space capsules, it also puts up a large, cylindrical, autonomously operating orbital module. Each module is about eight by nine feet; and because of an utter lack of transparency in the Chinese space program, the rest of the world has absolutely no idea what these modules contain. Is it nuclear bombs? Spying equipment? Or maybe it’s just some more purple space potatoes or an innocuous ginseng plant experiment. Who knows?
Here’s what we do know, at least about one of those Shenzhou missions. This incident once again illustrates the kind of in-your-face tactics of a country that would have run over Gandhi with a tank—twice to make its point.
China’s Shenzhou 7 mission not only sent up three of its astronauts, or taikonauts; it also carried a “microsatellite” named the BX-1. As part of the mission, the Shenzhou 7—where Shenzou translates as “divine vessel”—pulled a carefully planned but dangerously unannounced stunt typical of the China’s war hawks. It was a “drive-by” buzz of the International Space Station by the orbiting space capsule.
Even more outrageous, China’s taikonauts also released the BX-1 microsatellite just before that drive-by, presumably so it could do its own little spy run—or perhaps, as analyst James Dunnigan has suggested, conduct a simulated antisatellite weapons test. In the process, China violated the so-called “conjunction box” range182 where NASA mission controllers would have considered moving the station—if they had known it was coming.
To understand the consternation this caused at NASA,183 you have to understand that China’s astronauts passed just 25 miles below the space station, and the mysterious little BX-1 may have come as close as 15 miles. When you are in an orbit more than 26,000 miles long in a vast 3-dimensional space and traveling at 18,000 miles per hour, that’s infinitesimally close—and extremely dangerous.
To put an exclamation point on the possible dangers, China’s state TV even announced during the flight that the 40 kilogram nanosatellite “had started drifting away from its intended trajectory.”184 That was hardly comforting for the European and American astronauts sitting in a $100 billion aluminum can watching a Chinese spy satellite and a gaggle of snooping taikonauts get up close and personal.
Going Asymmetric on America’s Military Might
A strong enemy with absolute superiority185 is certainly not without weakness...[Our] military preparations need to be more directly aimed at finding tactics to exploit the weaknesses of a strong enemy.
—People’s Liberation Army Daily
Before leaving China’s emerging threat from space, it’s useful to put its growing defensive and offensive space weapons capabilities in a broader strategic context. In fact, the crown jewel of China’s carefully laid-out military planning is its focus on so-called “asymmetric warfare.”
Asymmetric warfare techniques typically play the weaker but more clever David role to a more physically or technologically superior Goliath. In China’s case, faced with a significant technological disadvantage—and despite a huge troop advantage—Chinese strategists are constantly looking for surprising and inexpensive ways to disable, destroy, or otherwise defeat America’s greatest technological strengths.
We saw, for example, one typical asymmetric warfare weapon in Chapter 8, “Death by Blue Water Navy.” This was a relatively inexpensive antiship ballistic missile capable of sinking an American aircraft carrier—or at least scaring it back past the second island chain. Another example from this chapter is that of antisatellite weapons capable of taking down the American GPS and satellite communications grid. As the great Prussian military strategist Clausewitz once suggested, “If you entrench yourself behind strong fortifications, you compel the enemy to seek a solution elsewhere.”
To get an idea how China’s cheap weapons could, in the future, take out America’s much more expensive technology, consider this gambit offered up in a Chinese military white paper entitled “Methods for Defeating GPS”:
An ordinary inexpensive weather-monitoring186 rocket may carry a bomb containing a large amount of small lead shots into a designated orbit. Once exploded, the small lead shots will fly out with a relative velocity of 6.4 kilometers per second and destroy any satellite they encounter. When a few kilograms of gravel are thrown into orbit, they will attack the satellites like meteor showers and incapacitate the expensive GPS constellation.
It is precisely these kinds of weapons and scenarios that China is developing that expose the lie to its claims of a peaceful rise. All of us outside of China must keep in mind that the very rhetoric of “peaceful rise” is purposely designed as a mask to hide China’s true militaristic intentions. Colonel Jia Junming made this abundantly clear when he wrote this:
Our future space weapons program should be low profile187 and ‘intense internally’ but relaxed in external appearance to maintain our good international image and position.
As the 2001 U.S. Space Commission warned: “We are on notice—but we have not noticed.”188
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