[AR] Re: India shoots down satellite, declares itself a space power .

  • From: Henry Vanderbilt <hvanderbilt@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: arocket@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Thu, 28 Mar 2019 14:12:35 -0700

On 3/28/2019 12:57 PM, Henry Spencer wrote:

On Thu, 28 Mar 2019, Ben Brockert wrote: After China and the US demonstrated ASAT recently, it's irresponsible for any spacefaring country to not demonstrate this ability.

Perhaps you could elaborate?


I wouldn't go so far as to say any spacefaring country, but I would agree with Ben that this is on the whole a responsible move for India.

The reason?  Deterrence.  Wars far too often start when when a habitually aggressive party thinks they're positioned for an easy win.  A significant perceived asymmetry in counter-space capability (we can shoot down your sats, you can't shoot down ours, therefore you'd shortly be fighting blind and we would win easily) could plausibly help lead to such thinking on the part of a certain large pushy neighbor of India's.  Eliminating that perception is thus a responsible thing to do, in that it reduces the chances of such neighbors mistakenly starting a perceived-"easy" war.

Such "small", "easy", "easily contained", "quick", "limited" wars far too often have been anything but and have occasionally spiraled disastrously out of control.  World Wars One and Two both having been kicked off under some mix of those premises, I don't think I'll bother with further examples...

Henry


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