|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
Edited by: Fern Sidman
High-altitude balloons, such as the one China had floated over sensitive military sites across North America are considered a key “delivery platform” for secret nuclear strikes on America’s electric grid, according to intelligence officials, as was reported by the Washington Examiner.
On Saturday, the United States downed a Chinese spy balloon off the Carolina coast and its appearance has become the latest flashpoint in tensions between Washington and Beijing, the AP reported.
The balloon was spotted over the Carolinas as it approached the coast. The AP also reported that in preparation for the operation, the FAA Administration temporarily closed airspace over the Carolina coastline, including the airports in Charleston and Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, and Wilmington, North Carolina. The FAA rerouted air traffic from the area and warned of delays as a result of the flight restrictions.
An operation was underway in U.S. territorial waters in the Atlantic Ocean to recover debris from the balloon, which had been flying at about 60,000 feet and was estimated to be about the size of three school buses. The AP reported that the Federal Aviation Administration and Coast Guard worked to clear the airspace and water below the balloon as it reached the ocean.
Television footage showed a small explosion, followed by the balloon descending toward the water. U.S. military jets were seen flying in the vicinity and ships were deployed in the water to mount the recovery operation, the AP reported.
The Financial Times reported that the Pentagon has said it has observed a second balloon over Central and South America, without elaborating, and stressed that China had been operating a number of surveillance balloons in recent years.
They “are all part of a Chinese fleet of balloons developed to conduct surveillance operations, which have also violated the sovereignty of other countries”, a US defense official said, according to the Financial Times report. “These kinds of activities are often undertaken at the direction of the People’s Liberation Army. Over the past several years, Chinese balloons have previously been spotted over countries across five continents, including in Asia, South Asia and Europe.”
On Saturday, Cheng Ming-dean, the head of Taiwan’s Central Weather Bureau wrote on Facebook: “This balloon has been appearing for a long time!” The Financial Times also reported that he pointed to a picture of the same kind of balloon taken by an agency employee in September 2021.
The Financial Times also reported that in February of last year, four groups of high-altitude balloons were detected over northern Taiwan, home to most of the country’s population and some of its most important air defense sites. The same month, the US Air Force scrambled fighters to intercept an unmanned balloon off Kauai, a Hawaiian island that has a key missile-testing range.
Spy balloons, used by Japan to drop bombs during World War II, are now far more sophisticated, can fly at up to 200,000 feet, evade detection, and can carry a small nuclear bomb that, and if exploded in the atmosphere, would shut down the electrical grid and wipe out electronics in a wide area encompassing many states, the Washington Examiner reported.
The threat of balloon-launched electromagnetic pulse attacks was warned about by a congressional EMP commission and inside the military several years ago, the report indicated.
EMPs are bursts of electromagnetic energy that disrupt communications and damage electronic equipment. An EMP can be created by nuclear missiles, radiofrequency weapons, and natural phenomena such as geomagnetic storms, as was reported by The Epoch Times.
While any nuclear weapon can create an EMP, specialized EMP weapons such as so-called super-EMP bombs generate particularly strong gamma radiation that multiplies the effect of the pulse, extending the destruction over a greater range.
Depending upon the source, the origin of an EMP can be natural or artificial, and can occur as an electromagnetic field, as an electric field, as a magnetic field, or as a conducted electric current, according to a Wikipedia report. EMP weapons deliver high-energy EMP designed to disrupt unprotected infrastructure, according to information provided by Wikipedia. In wartime, the most likely use would be to put the electrical network of the target country out of commission.
The Epoch Times also reported that it has long been believed that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which rules China as a single-party state, is developing such weapons for a potential conflict with the United States.
The Washington Examiner also reported that in a 2015 report for the American Leadership & Policy Foundation, Air Force Maj. David Stuckenberg, one of the nation’s leading EMP experts, wrote extensively about the threat balloons carrying bombs pose to national security.
“Using a balloon as a WMD/WME platform could provide adversaries with a pallet of altitudes and payload options with which to maximize offensive effects against the U.S.,” he wrote in the report, according to the Washington Examiner.
“A high altitude balloon could be designed, created, and launched in a matter of months. There is nothing to prevent several hundred pounds of weapons material from being delivered to altitude,” he added. “China’s recent balloon flyover of the United States is clearly a provocative and aggressive act. It was most likely a type of dry run meant to send a strategic message to the USA. We must not take this for granted,” he continued according to the Washington Examiner report.
EMP experts have warned that China, North Korea, Russia, and Iran have programs to hit the U.S. grid with electromagnetic pulse weapons that would cut the cord for a year or longer, the Examiner reported. A congressional report has warned that a blackout that long could result in millions of deaths.
The Washington Examiner also reported that in the report he penned, Stuckenberg cited the research of the late Peter Pry, who headed a congressional commission on EMP and reported on the potential of a balloon-launched attack. He wrote in the report, “Peter Pry, a former CIA analyst and member of the Congressional Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from EMP Attack, stated, ‘Imagine the consequences of a balloon EMP attack that damages and destroys electronic systems at the speed of light within an EMP field with a radius of hundreds of kilometers. The Eastern Grid generates 75% of U.S. electricity and supports most of the population.” Pry also notes, “Virtually any nuke detonated anywhere over the Eastern Grid will collapse the entire Eastern Grid, not just the area within the EMP field, because of cascading failures that will ripple outward.”
Stuckenberg concluded in his paper, “In the case of EMP, the consequences of a failure to anticipate ALL delivery modes within the reach of an imaginative enemy could be immediate and widespread. As guardians of our nation’s future, planners must leave no stone unturned in the effort to deprive America’s enemies of low cost, lowtech, high-consequence military options,” as was reported by the Washington Examiner.
China has continued to claim that the balloon that appeared on Saturday was merely a weather research “airship” that had been blown off course, the AP reported. The Pentagon rejected that out of hand — as well as China’s contention that it was not being used for surveillance and had only limited navigational ability.
The AP also reported that uncensored reactions on the Chinese internet mirrored the official government stance that the U.S. was hyping the situation. Some used it as a chance to poke fun at U.S. defenses, saying it couldn’t even defend against a balloon, and nationalist influencers leapt to use the news to mock the U.S.
China has denied any claims of spying and said it is a civilian-use balloon intended for meteorology research. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs emphasized that the balloon’s journey was out of its control and urged the U.S. not to “smear” it based on the balloon, the AP reported.
Paul Crespo, president of the Center for American Defense Studies, and someone who previously served as a Marine officer with the Defense Intelligence Agency, said that the balloon’s trajectory could “absolutely” suggest that communist China was conducting a dry run for an attack using balloon-mounted weapons, according to the report in The Epoch Times.
Particularly, Crespo warned that the regime could use high-altitude balloons to conduct electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attacks on vital U.S. bases and infrastructure.
“While China has tested hypersonic missiles launched from balloons in the past, that isn’t a likely use for these airships,” Crespo told The Epoch Times in an email. “The biggest threat is sending one or more of these high altitude balloons over the U.S. with a small nuclear EMP device, “ he continued.
“Detonated at extremely high altitude, EMPs could knock out power and communications across the U.S., wreaking widespread havoc for a year or more without firing a shot on the ground,” Crespo said, as was reported by The Epoch Times.
In most scenarios, such a detonation would need to occur at a higher elevation than the Chinese spy balloon was at in order to cause destruction across a vast swath of territory.
If the EMP’s purpose were to knock out a smaller target, however, such as a nuclear command and control facility, a balloon like the one shot down over the weekend would be a near-perfect delivery device, The Epoch Times report indicated.
The sites that the balloon traversed over included Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana, which oversees 150 nuclear-capable intercontinental ballistic missile silos; Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska, which is home to U.S. Strategic Command; and Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri, which operates the Air Force’s B-2 bomber.
In the most stunning evidence of China’s military use of stratospheric balloons, Chinese media including the military channel of state broadcaster CCTV reported in September 2018 that a high-altitude balloon tested hypersonic missiles, as was reported by the Financial Times.
Video footage carried by CCTV and reposted on social media app Douyin at the time, but now deleted, showed a balloon visually identical to the one over the US last week, carrying what looked like three different kinds of warheads.
The Financial Times also reported that according to Chinese media reports and a related Chinese Academy of Sciences research paper, they were models for “wide speed range” hypersonic vehicles, which can fly both below and above the speed of sound.
Except for the 2018 missile test, Beijing has kept silent about stratospheric balloon flights such as the one over the US, according to the Financial Times report. Military analysts believe the most likely reason is their focus on military applications.
Sheu Jyh-shyang, an assistant research fellow at the Institute for National Defense and Security Research, a think-tank backed by Taiwan’s defense ministry, told the Financial Times that, “These balloons can and will almost certainly collect a lot of data needed for scientific research, but that is of course useful for the PLA (People’s Liberation Army). The data is useful for the Rocket Force, and the balloon is also likely to be used for ISR.” He used the acronym for military intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance.
The Biden administration initially decided not to disclose the existence of the spy balloon to the American public, fearing that knowledge of the violation of U.S. sovereignty would derail Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s then-planned trip to Beijing, the Epoch Times reported.
The administration’s plans to conceal the incident were thwarted, however, when images of the balloon taken by Montana photographers Larry Mayer and Chase Doak and published in the Billings Gazette burst the story wide open for the whole world to see.
“This is exactly what journalism is designed for,” Doak said in a tweet, as was reported by The Epoch Times. “Americans had a right to know that a foreign government was spying on them. Glad I could be a part of bringing it to light.”
The PLA’s balloons have been doing much more than spy on whatever country they are flying over. The Financial Times reported that according to a military official from another Asian country, one focus area in the Chinese military’s balloon flights in recent years is to collect data that can enhance the accuracy of over-the-horizon and other radar systems used for targeting in wartime.
Military analysts said data points such as atmospheric density would help the PLA develop software tools known as advanced refractive effects prediction systems, which are critical for advanced radars that aid missile, air and naval operations, the Financial Times reported.
Newsweek reported that Mike Pompeo, the former Secretary of State and CIA director in the Trump administration criticized the handling of the situation by President Biden.
Speaking to Trey Gowdy on Fox News on Sunday, Pompeo described it as a “spy balloon that was truly a trial balloon to figure out how the United States would respond.” In his view, it was a test that the Biden administration failed, as was reported by Newsweek.
“I’m glad that they shot it down; it was probably a handful of days too late,” Pompeo said. “They [the Chinese] probably got all the collection they needed for those first few days and now they understand that they can penetrate U.S. airspace, hang out with a balloon the size of a couple buses for a few days and the Biden administration won’t do a darn thing about it.”
Former President Donald Trump declared Biden’s handling of the situation a “disgrace.” (Sources: WashingtonExaminer.com, AP.com, FT.com, TheEpochTimes.com, NYT.com, nymag.com)
