The Pentagon said Thursday it had 'very high confidence' that the high-altitude surveillance balloon came from China and is being used to collect information from sensitive sites.
and just before Blinken was set to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing as part of an effort to diffuse those tensions.
The practice became more widespread during World War I and then during the Cold War, when the U.S. launched hundreds of balloons to gather intelligence on China and the Soviet Union,Surveillance balloons have been overshadowed by satellites and unmanned drones in recent decades, though they still offer certain advantages .What do we know about this particular balloon?
Flaten says at these altitudes, objects tend to move horizontally around the world from West to East and stick to a fixed latitude, so it could be that the Chinese government launched this balloon from its own territory.But at the same time, he says he doubts that the Chinese government would have much control over its exact path.
U.S. officials said Thursday that the U.S. had been tracking the balloon since it entered U.S. airspace a few days ago. They didn't specify its exact timeline or path other than to confirm it floated over Montana at one point .Montana is home to one of America's three nuclear missile silo fields at Malmstrom Air Force Base, which could be of interest, NPR national security correspondent Greg Myre told"The U.S.
But, he said, the U.S. is using some of those fighter jets to"take a peek" at the balloon in its efforts to keep monitoring it."If you had a hundred or 200 pounds of stuff and that came tumbling down from a high altitude, that wouldn't be very good for whatever it landed on.""We shouldn't let this thing be floating above our ICBM fields, or really over the U.S.
Shooting the balloon down or taking it down through other means could accomplish two things: It would immediately demonstrate the U.S. displeasure, and the payload could yield important information.
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