Time.news – The Chinese spy balloon that flew over US territory for days last week was shot down. It ended like this, only momentarily but in a spectacular way, a crisis that has rekindled diplomatic tensions between the two great world powers.
It was the US president himself, Joe Biden, to give the order to shoot down the spy balloon: he did so on Wednesday, but the Pentagon men advised him to wait to wait for “the safest place to do it”, considering the enormous size (like three buses) of the airship. The spy balloon was thus shot down when it was already over the Atlantic Ocean, where its remains fell, off Myrtle Beach. The collection of the remains – which could give valuable indications of the nature of the aircraft – began immediately.
The shootdown took place at 2:38 p.m. Atlantic time. Just before the Federal Aviation Administration he had suspended departures and arrivals at the airports of Wilmington, NC, and in Myrtle Beach and Charleston in South Carolina. After all, Biden had made it clear that something was moving. “We’ll take care of it,” he told accompanying reporters in the middle of the day, as he disembarked from Air Force One in Syracuse, New York.
US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin he said he was convinced that the balloon was used by the Chinese government “to guard strategic sites in the United States”. The head of the Pentagon reiterated this in a statement released after the operation, in which he recalled that Biden gave the military authorization for the operation “as soon as the mission can be completed without undue risk to the lives of Americans under the ball”.
The Pentagon had announced Thursday that it was following the movements of a Chinese spy balloon that had flown over the state of Montana, where there is one of the three warehouse sites that guard, in US territory, the US nuclear missiles. But the leaders of the Pentagon immediately said they did not want to take any action for security reasons, as the debris could fall on the population.
However, as soon as the aircraft entered the Atlantic Ocean it was decided to shoot it down it was a fighter that carried out the operationAlso filmed from the ground was the fighter jet aiming at the balloon before firing a missile.
Blinken’s trip to China has been cancelled
The presence of what, for the US, is a spy balloon has triggered a diplomatic crisis between Washington and Beijing which has led to the cancellation of the trip that the Secretary of State, Antony Blink, he planned to perform in China. A visit that would have been the first by a minister of the Biden government to China and in which Blinken would have perhaps also met the president himself Xi Jinping.
The Beijing version
China actually denies that it is a spying aircraft, has called for calm and expressed “regret” for what happened: the balloon would have been nothing more than an airship used for meteorological research, with limited autonomous driving capabilities and carried into that area by westerly winds.
Even today, in a new note, Beijing reiterated that it was an incident due to “force majeure” and indeed accused some US politicians of wanting to “throw mud on China”. But the US is adamant: for Washington it was an “unacceptable” violation of sovereignty.