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10/23/2003
Technological Proliferation
The following is reprinted with the permission of Defense News;
personally, my favorite publication. Special thanks to Elisha G.
at Army Times Publishing Company.
This editorial was written days before China’s historic space
mission last week and approaches the story from a slightly
different angle than I have been expounding on in recent “Week
in Review” columns.
BT
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China’s Space Program
The scheduled launch of China’s first astronaut into space later
this month aboard Shenzhou 5 should prompt Western nations to
question the foundations of the global export control system.
For decades, nations with advanced technologies have sought to
keep them from less advanced countries seen as potential
adversaries. In some cases, it has worked.
Will this approach continue to work? It’s unlikely in China’s
case.
Since the launch of its first satellite in 1970, China has worked to
put a man in space – an effort that furnished yet another
opportunity for superpower rivalry. Russia helped train Chinese
astronauts and furnished technology for its manned program,
while the United States and its allies worked to control Beijing’s
access to space technologies.
But the United States may have been unable even to prevent its
own firms from slipping valuable technologies to China. In
1998, allegations swirled that China gained key technologies
from American firms, technologies that could improve Beijing’s
ballistic missiles and manned spacecraft alike.
And little attention was paid to a more important source of
knowledge gain: the thousands of specialists who have been
trained at the world’s leading scientific centers, earning advanced
degrees and intimate insights into critical technologies.
Is it any surprise that these Chinese students, after studying at the
knees of Nobel laureates, would succeed in developing what
others have tried to deny them?
There are military implications to space flight. Yuri Gagarin’s
April 1961 flight, mankind’s first journey into orbit, transmitted
a clear and ominous message to Washington: If Moscow could
put an 11,000-pound spacecraft into orbit, it could lob a nuclear
device onto U.S. soil.
Whereas the U.S.-Soviet space race was one of so many Cold
War battlegrounds, the Chinese venture is different.
Shenzhou 5 shows the ambition and exploratory zeal of a proud
and ancient nation that wants to demonstrate its coming of age in
a high-tech world. China wants to become the third nation to loft
a person into space, but also the second to land a man on the
moon and the first to colonize it.
In the process, China helps disprove the notion that, in this world
of instant communications and ready access to powerful
technologies, leading nations can stop less developed ones from
achieving ambitious technological goals – like putting man in
space.
As the United States and other countries have sought to restrict
the flow of technologies with military applications, from
supercomputers to hydraulic tubing to superfast electronic
switches, they have been giving Chinese students the intellectual
tools to fend for themselves.
Moreover, if the world community has been unable to deter Iraq,
Iran and North Korea – all relatively poor and small nations –
from acquiring deadly technologies, how can it stop a determined
nation of 1.2 billion that is growing richer by the day?
It can’t. In fact, it can be argued that such restrictive practices,
particularly in the case of the United States, have done more to
hurt American industry than Chinese aims. And intelligence
officials maintain that the best way to keep tabs on what Beijing
is really up to in space is through cooperation, without which
gauging the progress of China’s secret programs is, to put it
charitably, difficult.
So policy-makers must reconsider their approach to proliferation,
and figure out how to engage developing nations that possess the
economic and scientific capacity that can serve either the loftiest
of peaceful, or the darkest of military, aims.
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Hott Spotts will return October 30 more on China.
Brian Trumbore
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