Desmond Butler
London Guardian
Monday, January 22, 2007 

Jospeh Biden, the chairman of the Senate's foreign relations committee, warned against fostering an arms race in space yesterday after China was reported to have conducted an anti-satellite weapons test earlier this month.
Mr Biden, a Democrat, called the test provocative, but said the US had ways of combatting the threat posed by the Chinese test. "I don't think we should be overly worried about this at this point," he told Fox News."We have ways to deal with that ability. "The US said China conducted the test earlier this month in which an old Chinese weather satellite was destroyed by a missile.

Mr Biden, who is running for president, said George Bush's policy on weapons in space needed to be reviewed.
"One of the things we have to talk about is whether or not the, sort of, ideological base notion about how we deal with space and weapons in space and the use of weapons from space is something that is a path we should continue to follow," he said. In October, Mr Bush signed an order asserting America's right to deny adversaries access to space for hostile purposes. As part of the first revision of US space policy in nearly 10 years, the policy also said Washington would oppose the development of treaties that sought to prohibit or limit US access to or use of space.

"This is not the direction we want to go, in escalating competition in space. And we should be talking about it," Mr Biden said.

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