Now that the cold war between US and Soviet Union is over we have a new cold war between two Asian giants, India and China. Let’s see who wins this war?
The New Cold War
India and China are picking up where the US and Soviet Union left off.
By Bruce Sterling
The catastrophic failure of the Columbia rocked America’s commitment to manned space flight, but it galvanized that of another nation: India. Kalpana Chawla, who died in the disaster, wasn’t the first Indian-born astronaut in space, but she was a small-town girl who transcended every third-world limit to storm the cosmos. Her lesson hasn’t been lost on a billion Indians.
Nobody in the Western press takes much notice of India’s space aspirations, because by Yankee standards it doesn’t make sense for India to have any. Yet India launched its first missile in 1963 and its first cosmonaut in 1984. Nobody in the West thought the country would ever go nuclear, either. That was a blunder in judgment.
Nuclear bombs pack a staggering strategic punch when paired with big missiles. Big missiles provide passage to outer space. To loft big payloads into orbit is to have planetary first-strike capability. India’s hefty new Agni III nuclear missiles have a 1,860-mile range, and other homegrown rockets are placing small weather and spy sats in orbit. India’s space agency, ISRO, plans a $50 million lunar flyby in 2008.
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Why is Gandhi’s homeland trying to reach the moon when people sleep on the streets in Calcutta and AIDS gnaws the country’s flesh? For the same reason the US sloughed off poverty programs to fund Apollo in the 1960s: global prestige.
India doesn’t need long-range missiles to nuke neighbor and archrival Pakistan. For a war that intimate, bullock carts would do. The Agni III is aimed straight at world public opinion. The India-Pakistan PR skirmish is already almost over, and India is clearly winning. Every great power sweats bullets over Pakistan’s bomb, but India’s somehow makes that country worthy of consideration for a permanent seat on the UN Security Council.
Although the Pakistanis have a bomb, they have to scrounge North Korean Scud missiles to deliver it - and therein lies a lesson the ruthless “realists” of India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party well understand. Pakistan can’t compete in a space race with India. Pakistan lacks the big money and the aerospace chops, and if it keeps trying to match India’s grand achievements, as it always has, it will end up broke and humiliated.
Pakistan has no counterpart to the Agni III, but China does. China’s Long March 2 rocket can launch a satellite and, in its weaponized Don Feng 5 version, drop a 4-megaton warhead practically anywhere on the planet - India most definitely included.
India and China are comers with a lot to prove to the world, and especially to each other. Their rivalry has roots. In a 1962 shooting war, China grabbed some real estate in the Kashmir region and sent India’s army reeling. India never forgot the affront, and the dispute still smolders today.
Since India demonstrated its bomb in 1998, the Chinese have been increasingly uneasy. China reacted to the detonation with angry demands that the international community keep India contained. When that got nowhere, China helped Pakistan go nuclear. In retrospect, that was a scary, destabilizing misstep. But now India and China are poised to continue their rivalry on safer high ground - beyond Earth’s atmosphere.
Nuclear India versus nuclear China is Kennedy versus Kruschev, and Reagan versus Gorbachev, all over again. Now, as then, a space race is a sexy alternative to nuclear annihilation.
China has openly declared its desire to colonize the moon. The world’s most populous nation is unlikely to build lunar settlements, but that’s not the point. China’s motive lies not in constructing a lunar Hong Kong, but rather in luring India into a loud public competition. Later this year, if all goes as planned, China will become the third country to send a citizen into space. An orbiting taikonaut will be even more impressive if American shuttles are stuck in their hangars while the misnamed International Space Station limps along with a skeleton crew.
As Russia once did, China has a strong technical advantage. It already owns a chunk of the commercial space-launch business. But India has a decent shot at victory as well. It doesn’t have China’s manufacturing know-how, but it’s rapidly becoming the world’s software back office.
Who will become top dog in South Asia? That’s an open question, and there aren’t many good ways to answer short of a useless massacre. A space race offers a good solution. It’s a symbolic tournament that tests competing political and economic systems to their limit.
A decade after the end of the Cold War, good old-fashioned space programs still matter. Not for exploration’s sake, but to settle new cold wars. If you doubt it, imagine this scenario: It’s 2029, and a lunar mission lands at Tranquillity Base. A crew of heroic young Indians - or Chinese - quietly folds and puts away America’s 60-year-old flag. If the world saw that on television, wouldn’t the gesture be worth tens of billions of rupees or yuan? Of course it would.
Email Bruce Sterling at [email protected].