It hardly caused a ripple in Jamaica and elsewhere in the Caribbean last week when a US ship in the Pacific, west of Hawaii, fired a missile 153 miles into space to bring down an errant spy satellite. Insofar as we noticed, this was just another demonstration of awesome American technological prowess, executed to prevent the satellite's toxic fuel falling to earth, coming into contact with humans and causing death.

That was the essence of America's official explanation. Somehow, we doubt its veracity; at least, question that it is the whole truth. While there may have been some national security validity to America's shooting down the satellite - in part to prevent its technology from falling into foreign hands once it reached earth - we believe that this was more about muscle-flexing by Washington. The danger we see is the potential for an arms race in space that steers resources from global development, and the creation of cleavages with echoes of the Cold War.

There is a context to all this. Fourteen months ago, China, the emerging global economic power, also showed off its growing military/technological might when it used a missile to destroy an old, orbiting weather satellite 537 miles above the earth. The deployment by the Chinese of the medium-range missile to do the job caused consternation in several capitals, worried about a potential threat to security in space.

By knocking out its own satellite, Beijing had demonstrated that nobody else's was finitely secure - a message that would not have been lost on Washington, especially in the context of its wish to provide cover for Taiwan in the event that Beijing was to move militarily to bring back into the fold what it considers to be a renegade province.

Although this does not specifically involve space defence, there is America's spat with Russia over Washington's plan to station missiles in Poland and the Czech Republic. America says they are to be aimed at 'rogue' states in the Middle East. Russia feels that missiles in its backyard threaten it; so the Kremlin has warned that if America goes ahead with the deployment, it would be inclined to point missiles at the two east European states.

The last time there was so much activity about missile deployment was more than two decades ago, in the mid-1980s, when President Reagan proposed a space-based missile defence shield, the so-called Star Wars system. Then the United States and the Soviet Union tested missiles on targets in space. Happily, the Cold War ended, the Soviet Union collapsed and these ideas were mothballed.

The re-emergence of Russia and the growth of China are changing the global configuration in an environment where America is struggling to maintain its pre-eminence. Add to this the Bush administration's opaque vision of the world and its framing of the so-called War on Terror, and there is a mix for a potentially dangerous cocktail.

It is against this backdrop that we read more than the declared statements into America's reconfiguration of a ballistic interceptor missile to do the job and the order by Defence Secretary Robert Gates that it be fired to bring down the satellite. It has the hallmarks of a back-door test of space weaponry.

Space ought not be the new colonial frontier or the new battleground to be carved up or fought over by those with power. Insofar as we are the only species in the realm, it ought to be the common heritage of mankind - which includes the people in countries like our own. We support, therefore, a ban on space-based weapons and a charter on its heritage to mankind and its place for peaceful exploration. The resources that would go into an arms race in space would be put to better use fighting poverty and disease on Earth and cleaning up the mess we have made of the environment.