Just this past week, the prestigious British publication Jane's Defense Weekly announced that Taiwan had already tested three prototype cruise missiles with a range of 600 miles -- capable of reaching Shanghai to the north and Hong Kong to the south -- and that it had ambitious plans to eventually manufacture and deploy 500 of them against the southern Chinese mainland.

Anticipating this threat China, which has already deployed no less than 700 ballistic missiles against Taiwan and to command the Taiwan Strait, years ago bought Tor-M1 missile batteries that still represent its best chance of shooting down ground-hugging, contour-following cruise missiles. And it can always buy a lot more.

This ever more expensive, ever more complex high-tech missile stand-off, however, is only one example of the ways the ever-escalating race between ballistic missile offense and defense has already drawn deep and potentially dangerous new divisions between the nations of Asia and the Pacific Rim.

On one side are Australia, Japan, India and Taiwan -- all backed by the United States: Over the past year, every one of these nations has made bold, extremely costly commitments into developing or extending their ballistic missile defense capabilities.

Japan, Australia and Taiwan are all led by nationalist, free market, conservative governments fearful of North Korea and/or China. All of them are extremely wealthy, high-technology nations.

India is a huge nation that, despite its healthy and even dramatic economic growth and huge middle class, still has enormous problems with both rural and urban poverty. Its government is secular-centrist tending to the mild populist left and it has been working energetically to defuse old problems with China and dramatically advance relations with it.

India's great worry, ironically, is a traditional old U.S. ally, its historic rival and neighbor Pakistan, who future stability and direction appears to the Indians increasingly questionable. But the end result is the same: With huge population densities in its northern states and main cities, India's need for effective ballistic missile defense is also acute.

The needs of these major Asian and Pacific-Rim nations to develop effective BMD systems has been an enormous boon for the Bush administration and the main high-tech American military technology corporations like Lockheed Martin, Boeing and Raytheon. The driving determination of Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi to develop a BMD shield for his densely populated nationof 120 million is particularly significant.

Agreements made over the past year between Japan and the United States and monitored in BMD Focus and BMD Watch will be worth many billions of dollars to the U.S. military high-tech sector. And they also offer Japan the prospect of giving an enormous high-tech boost to its own advanced industrial capabilities.

Geopolitically, these developments have had profound and lasting consequences. They appear to have buried for the foreseeable future, perhaps for generations, any prospect that Japan will abandon the United States to go neutral or try to carve out for itself some special relationship with China instead.

Similarly, the ever-growing ties between Taiwan and the United States in BMD cooperation and the readiness of little Taiwan with a population of only 25 million to embark upon a ballistic and cruise missile arms race with gigantic nearby China with its population of 1.3 billion looks set to keep China and the United States, the two towering giants of the Pacific Rim at loggerheads for many years to come, despite their enormous web of mutual economic inter-dependence.

The State Bank of China currently holds 30 percent of all U.S. Treasury Bonds and the stability of the dollar and the U.S. economy are therefore dependent upon continued Chinese cooperation and goodwill. Similarly, China's economic stability and health remains to a very great degree dependent on continued free market access to the ever ravenous demands of the domestic U.S. economy -- much of it sold across the shelves of Wal-Mart. Any disruption of that relationship would cause enormous harm to both huge nations, but their BMD arms race via Taiwan makes such a clash ever more likely.

China is far from isolated either. North Korea remains ever more dependent upon it. And even though China takes pains not to be identified too dramatically as Pyongyang's protector on the global scene, having the Hermit Kingdom as a social as well as strategic buffer between it and the dynamic democratic and free market societies of pro-American South Korea and Japan has benefits for it too.

China's relations with Pakistan remain quietly good too, despite its warming relations with India. And as last year's full-scale military exercises between Russia and China showed, their strategic cooperation continues to grow.

Asia is not totally polarized between the United States and its BMD partners on one side and China and its dependent client nations on the other. The nations of the economically vibrant and vast Association of Southeast Asian Nations, with a combined population of half a billion people, are forging ever closer strategic as well as economic ties to China, but they remain on warm terms generally with the United States too, especially such traditional U.S. allies as Thailand and Indonesia. In all, the ASEAN nations have so far stayed out of the BMD arms race, and they all want to keep it that way.

But most of the major nations of Asia are moving fast down a very different road: They are glaring at each other over ever-thickening picket fences of giant ballistic missiles and ABM interceptors. And those fences are not making good neighbors.

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