When US President Joe Biden learned that a suspected Chinese spy balloon was drifting in the stratosphere 60,000 feet above Montana, his first urge was to bring it down.
By then, however, it was both too early and too late. After flying over sparsely populated stretches of land, it was now projected to continue to drift over American cities and towns. Debris from the balloon could endanger lives on the ground, his senior military brass told him.
The massive white orb, carrying a payload the size of three coaches into the air, had already been floating in and out of US airspace for three days by the time Biden was briefed by his top general, according to two American officials.
Its arrival had gone unnoticed by the public as it floated east over Alaska – where it was first detected by the North American Aerospace Defense Command on January 28 – to Canada. NORAD continued to track and assess the balloon’s trajectory and activities, but military officials paid little heed to the intrusion into US airspace, having often seen Chinese spy balloons gliding overhead. over the United States. At the time, the ball was not assessed as an intelligence risk or a physical threat, officials said.
This time, however, the balloon continued on its way: high over Alaska, Canada and back to the United States, attracting little attention from anyone watching from the ground.
“We’ve seen them and watched them, let Congress know what capabilities they can bring to the table,” another US official told CNN. “But we’ve never seen anything as cheeky as this.”
It would take seven days from the time the balloon first entered US airspace before an F-22 fighter jet fired a homing missile at the balloon halfway across the country. , sending his equipment and machinery crashing into the Atlantic Ocean.
The balloon’s weeklong U.S. journey from the remote Aleutian Islands to the Carolina coast left a wake of broken diplomacy, furious retaliation from Biden’s political rivals and a glimpse of a new era of growing military tension between the two largest economies in the world.
It also raised questions about why he wasn’t shot sooner and what information, if any, he gathered on his way.
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