Dateline: New Delhi. Vladimir Putin makes funny. Russia, under slightly different management, was one of two early entries into orbital militarization many years ago. It maintains what is called "space forces," promulgated in 2001, and yet Moscow's current autocrat stood with Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh today to reprobate the turning of space into another of man's battlefields.
Journalists, some of whom covered the executive meeting, have something worth laughs — which they themselves might not be in on — about an "arms race." The gag is that the race is immemorial, and it has never stopped; and at this point, unless the leading democracies have reason to limit national competition to benign field events without imperiling themselves, it won't end.
Combat high, high above the earth might progress as did combat a little ways below, with the insinuation of aircraft into war. First it was novel to fly an airplane over the front, then to shoot at the airplane flying contrary, then to interrupt a machine gun so as to fire through a propeller arc and along a line-of-sight, then to fly faster and farther and more agilely. Said ace Oswald Boelcke, who fatally collided in midair in 1916, "Well, it is quite simple. I fly close to my man, aim well, and then of course he falls down."
A week ago, totalitarian China completed a simple exercise in obliterating a satellite. This week, the Indian government passed an important test in maintaining a modern space program. The rational equation for a country's intentions is derived from the relationship of the corresponding government and people. India is a maturing democracy, Beijing has placed in excess of one billion of the living under merciless indenture. The People's Republic has a number of sites in several manners of crosshairs and — well! — a few Indian assets are among them. "Our fundamental position," announced Putin, Manmohan Singh beside him, "is that our space should be absolutely weapons-free." Who's "we"? Singh, for his sake, should have been snickering, too.