Description
US decision makers have become accustomed to constant access to near-perfect information on the disposition of China’s nuclear arsenal – enabled through space-based sensors. As China’s People’s Liberation Army continue to develop a range of anti-satellite (ASAT) methods, US elites increasingly conjure visions of these technologies leading to future crises escalating beyond control. Routine space-based surveillance is a family of practices that provide self-reassurance in US national security politics. By imperilling the technical means that enable these practices, China not only threatens future physical harm in the form of nuclear-warfighting, but also imposes a chronic insecurity derived from interfering with American elites’ sense of identity as a secure nation. By unpacking socio-technical links in US national security practice, this paper traces how and what China’s ASATs threaten. Tied up in these claims are subtextual articulations of the meaning of China, the US, and their space technologies that limit the possible political responses that might address the insecurity. While the relevant US identities and practices are ontologically contingent, in practice they have become so reified through technical inscriptions that alternative routines for US nuclear security in space are unthinkable. The ramifications of the US-China space relationship are therefore thermonuclear in scope.
