On Friday, United US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said he was canceling a high-level diplomatic visit to Beijing after spotting a large, high-altitude Chinese hot air balloon drifting over the United States this week. Ministry of Foreign Affairs of China speak in a statement Friday that the balloon was an unusual weather balloon and denied that it was a spy tool. A senior official of the US Department of Defense told reporters However, on Thursday, it was “clear that the purpose of this balloon is surveillance.”
Spy balloons are a historic technology and were widely used prior to the development of low-Earth and geosynthetic satellites, including widespread use by the United States in the 1950s in the United States. Cold War. But today, their use has largely fallen out of favor. The spy bubble has several advantages over satellites. They are cheap to deploy, fly relatively close to the target, and can continuously track a location for longer periods of time. But balloons have weight limitations, which also limit how powerful and versatile their onboard sensors can be. And unlike satellites, which are out of sight and out of reach of humans on Earth, the situation currently unfolding with Chinese hot air balloons represents the biggest limitation of surveillance balloons.
“You can see that this balloon caused a huge international incident and it made people look at China and ask the US government to do something. In terms of surveillance, this is the kind of attention you don’t want, says Brynn Tannehill, senior technical analyst at RAND Corporation and a former naval aviator. “My assessment is the benefits the hot air balloon brings compared to the level of unwanted attention it generates—I cannot answer why the Chinese would do this. It attracts malice.”
Balloons are equipped with sensors that are controllable on board but are transported by air currents. US officials said on Thursday that the spy balloon was hovering in commercial air traffic at about 60,000 feet and it posed no threat to people or operations on the ground. The senior Defense Department official noted that the balloon was large enough to create a potentially dangerous debris field if the United States shot the balloon down over an inhabited area. The official added that the military considered taking kinetic action Wednesday as the balloon was traveling over “sparsely populated areas of Montana,” but concluded that the risk was not low enough. RAND’s Tannehill points out that an additional risk of such an operation is that the rocket targeting the balloon will miss “and now you’ve created an even bigger problem,” she said.
Brigadier General Pat Ryder, the Pentagon’s press secretary, said on Thursday that “instances of activity of this type of airship have been previously observed over the past few years. Following its discovery balloon, the US government took immediate action to protect against the collection of sensitive information.”
More and more reports indicate that the vehicle is part of a broader Chinese spy balloon initiative, and a senior US Department of Defense official spoke about US spy balloon flights today. Thursday that “it’s happened a number of times over the past few years, including before this administration.” However, the current incident is clearly the one most visible to the American public.
