China's growing space capabilities raise fears of an uncontrolled arms race
US officials may have been surprised by the speed of China's development but they have long had warning: China acknowledged its first hypersonic weapon test in 2014.
Monday 18 October 2021 12:05, UK
Sometime in August, a Chinese Long March rocket blasted off into space and released a payload - a hypersonic glide vehicle, capable of carrying a nuclear warhead.
The weapon completed a lap of the planet then flew towards its target on the ground.
That's according to an account from the Financial Times, which also quoted an anonymous person familiar with the matter: "We have no idea how they did this."
China denied the report, saying that it was "a routine test of a space vehicle to verify technology of the spacecraft's reusability".
A lot of space technology is, of course, "dual-use" - the rocketry that took man to the moon is also used to launch intercontinental ballistic missiles.
And the test comes not long after satellite imagery revealed China was building more than 200 new nuclear missile silos, in the deserts of Xinjiang.
It's also introduced new nuclear capabilities for its air force and its navy over recent years.
The fear is that we're heading into an uncontrolled arms race, with Chinese breakthroughs changing the strategic game.
That's a legitimate concern, although there are caveats.
US officials may have been surprised by the speed of China's development but they have long had warning: China acknowledged its first hypersonic weapon test in 2014.
Combining hypersonic weapons with a space-based capability makes some things possible which threaten America.
The vehicles can fly over the South Pole, rather than North - where most of the US's detection systems are looking. And because they are manoeuvrable - unlike ballistic missiles which follow a fixed trajectory - they can be harder to track.
But space is unlikely to form a significant part of China's nuclear deterrent.
The Soviet Union developed a system for using nuclear warheads in space in the 1960s.
Even though new hypersonic weapons are more accurate than the missiles used then, other problems still remain, such as the expense of putting payloads into orbit. There was a reason the US discarded its own version of the system.
The example of the Soviet Union is instructive in another way. Its collapse is much studied in China - Xi Jinping highlighted it to the top leadership just a few months after taking charge.
An expensive arms race with the US is a mistake China is unlikely to repeat. Not least because the US is already winning it: its nuclear weapons upgrade plan will cost $1.5 trillion, as Drew Thompson, a former US Defense Department official points out.
China seems to recognise this. Following the FT's report, the Global Times, a state-run nationalist tabloid, published a response.
"China doesn't need to engage in an 'arms race' with the US - it is capable of weakening the US's overall advantages over China by developing military power at its own pace," it said. Nor would China try to match the US's nuclear force.
Instead, it said, China's focus would remain on Taiwan and the South China Sea.
A successful space-based hypersonic weapon test would give China another capability.
The aim of that, though, would not be a runaway arms race but to give the US something else to worry about - and perhaps a reason to pause from intervening - while China focuses on the immediate strategic priorities in its own backyard.
So it is a different type of arms race. But it is certainly dangerous enough.