GOP Senator: Confront China Weapons Test

WASHINGTON -- A Republican senator criticized the Bush administration Monday for failing to aggressively confront China over its test of a satellite-killing weapon, which he called a provocative militarization of space.

"Key policy makers seem oblivious to the nature and the urgency of the threat," Sen. Jon Kyl, Ariz., told an audience at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. "It's time to start speaking out about this."

The Jan. 11 test destroyed a defunct Chinese weather satellite by hitting it with a warhead launched from a ballistic missile.

A week later, National Security Council spokesman Gordon Johndroe said: "The United States believes China's development and testing of such weapons is inconsistent with the spirit of cooperation that both countries aspire to in the civil space area. We and other countries have expressed our concern to the Chinese."

Kyl said the "muted response" in the United States has been due in part to the fierce congressional debate about the war in Iraq, which has drawn attention away from other foreign policy issues.

Kyl also linked the administration's silence to a "complicated relationship with China, which is difficult to manage under the best of circumstances. There is so much we want to engage with China."

He mentioned U.S.-Chinese trade interests, and the need to secure Chinese help in the United Nations to confront alleged illicit nuclear programs in Iran and North Korea. This, Kyl said, "inhibits our government from being as forthright as I think we should be in criticizing the Chinese when they do something as provocative as this."

The danger, he said, is that "China believes that it must develop space weapons for its own security, specifically for preparation for possible conflict with the United States over Taiwan."

Kyl called for congressional hearings to ensure that the Chinese program is not based on U.S. technology, "either shared or stolen."

Also Monday, the deputy director of the U.S. Missile Defense Agency said in a discussion of the missile program's capabilities that his agency had not been given the mandate to counteract the kind of technology that China demonstrated in its recent test. But he added that current technologies could be easily adapted to defend against an attack on U.S. satellites.

"That work would be straightforward if we were given that guidance or mandate," said Brig. Gen. Patrick O'Reilly.

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Associated Press writer Desmond Butler contributed to this report.