A top House lawmaker said the Chinese spy balloon transited over key U.S. missile and nuclear weapon sites before it was shot down off the coast of the Carolinas last weekend.
The Chinese spy balloon drifts to the ocean after being shot down off the coast in Surfside Beach, S.C., on Feb. 4, 2023.; and a U.S. Coast Guard helicopter flies over a debris field during recovery efforts on Feb. 4, 2023.
“If you take the path that this balloon did, and you put up an X every place where you have a missile defense site, actual nuclear weapons infrastructure, you’re going to follow this path,” House Intelligence Chairman Mike Turner (R-Ohio) said in a news conference with reporters on Tuesday, USA Today reported. “So I think the natural conclusion is, it is intelligence gathering with respect to try to affect in some way the command and control of our missile defense and nuclear weapons.”
During his briefing, Turner did not divulge other details about the investigation into the high-altitude balloon, which caused Secretary of State Antony Blinken to postpone a scheduled trip to Beijing this month. The balloon was first reported in the skies over Billings, Montana, last week, although it wasn’t shot down until several days later.
Notably, Malmstrom Air Force Base—the only military base in Montana—is located some 200 miles to the northwest of Billings. That base houses some Minutemen III intercontinental ballistic missiles, or ICBMs, capable of delivering nuclear warheads.
“The satellite had completed its mission. This should never have been allowed to enter the United States, and it never should have been allowed to complete its mission,” Turner told NBC News on Sunday. The Epoch Times contacted Turner’s office for comment.
But the White House said the Pentagon waited to take down the balloon because it may have posed a risk to people on the ground. Gen. Glen VanHerck, the commander of North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) and United States Northern Command, told reporters that he could not rule out the possibility that explosives were on the balloon, adding that the entire aircraft weighed several thousand pounds, according to a Pentagon transcript.
“The balloon assessment was up to 200 feet tall for the actual balloon,” the top general said. “The payload itself, I would categorize that as a jet airliner type of size, maybe a regional jet such as a ERJ or something like that. Probably weighed in excess of a couple thousand pounds. So I would … from a safety standpoint, picture yourself with large debris weighing hundreds if not thousands of pounds falling out of the sky. That’s really what we’re kind of talking about.”
VanHerck also said the “glass off of solar panels” and other “potentially hazardous material, such as material that is required for batteries to operate in such an environment as this and even the potential for explosives to detonate and destroy the balloon that … could have been present.”
Response
Meanwhile, balloons either suspected of or confirmed to be Chinese have been spotted over countries from Japan to Costa Rica. Taiwanese media have reported that mysterious white balloons had been spotted over the island at least three times in the past two years.
Japanese Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihiko Isozaki told reporters Monday that a flying object similar to the one shot down by the U.S. had been spotted at least twice over northern Japan since 2020. “We are continuing to analyze them in connection with the latest case in the United States,” he said.
Chinese Communist officials this week also confirmed that a balloon recently spotted over Latin American was Chinese, describing it as a civilian airship used for flight tests.
The size of the Chinese balloon in the United States, as well as the equipment attached to it, had drawn intense speculation as to its purpose. Along with Washington, most security experts dismissed Beijing’s assertions that the balloon was intended for meteorological rather than spying purposes.
At a news conference last week with his South Korean counterpart, Blinken said that “the presence of this surveillance balloon over the United States in our skies is a clear violation of our sovereignty, a clear violation of international law, and clearly unacceptable. And we’ve made that clear to China.”
“Any country that has its airspace violated in this way I think would respond similarly, and I can only imagine what the reaction would be in China if they were on the other end,” Blinken said.
