The always informative James Oberg covers the story in detail.

...a careful reconstruction of the analyses and reviews that led to the shootdown decision shows that the official explanation was in fact the real explanation and that compelling considerations of health and safety required that the satellite be taken out.

Lt. Gen. Henry Obering, head of the U.S. missile defense effort, announced the quantitative reasons for the likelihood of human casualty from the satellite's reentry in a television interview on 20 July: “It varied depending on which experts we talked to, but [we got] anywhere between [a] 1 in 45 and 1 in 25 chance,” he said.

When it came to making the final decision, Chilton and Johnson refer to what they call the “regret factor”—the issue of what might follow from a decision to simply do nothing. “At the end of the day,” asks Chilton, “how could we look somebody in the eye who had relatives killed or injured?”

Chilton attended the White House briefings where President George W. Bush was given the options and the odds, and he remembers Bush's specific directive that if something could be done to mitigate the risk to human life, it had to be done. But what about the risk of people saying it's really an antisatellite test, Chilton recalls asking the president. He says Bush responded, “I don't care what people will say. We're doing it for the right reason, and it's transparent.”

If amateur experts were quick to express skepticism, real experts knew better. Anatoly Perminov, a former Russian general once in charge of his country's military space program and now the head of the civilian Russian Federal Space Agency‚ told Russian reporters on 16 February: “In the given situation—if the satellite is indeed out of control—destroying it is the inevitable and right thing to do, I think.”

Despite such statements from people not always trusting of U.S. motives, the U.S. press to a great extent echoed those portraying the USA 193 shootdown as aggressive and militaristic, an excuse to threaten China, or a backdoor gimmick to test space weapons. As a result, a well-defined and thoroughly researched technological hazard assessment—of a kind that someday, for better or worse, will be needed again—has wound up buried in obscurity and obfuscation. This is not an encouraging starting point for the next time such analyses might be invoked.