Was China’s spy balloon a test run for something else?


Now that the U.S. has shot down China’s spy balloon with an air-launched missile off the coast of South Carolina, the question remains: what was it all for? The Chinese claim the balloon was a civilian meteorological device released accidentally, but the Pentagon isn’t buying it.

For starters, why did the balloon spend so much time hovering over an air base in Montana that houses more than 100 intercontinental ballistic missiles? Straight Arrow News contributor Newt Gingrich wonders if the balloon’s flight path was a test run for something more sinister because, according to intelligence experts, high-altitude balloons can carry small nuclear bombs capable of shutting down an electric grid.

Americans should take the Chinese Communist balloon that went all the way across the country very, very seriously. 

The reason is, there’s every belief that the Chinese doctrine is to actually fight a nuclear war and that they keep trying to find ways to deliver weapons that the Americans won’t notice. They realize that if you do it by traditional methods–ballistic missiles, et cetera–that the other side learns it’s happening and they can attack simultaneously. 

The Chinese goal is to find a delivery system that’s so quiet, so easy to ignore that, in fact, they can deliver probably an electromagnetic pulse weapon. An electromagnetic pulse weapon is one which sends out a huge burst of electrons, which burns out your electric system. That really matters because of your car, because of electric generating, and when big generators are burned out, it takes years to replace them. This is not an overnight problem. In fact, a friend of mine, Bill Forstchen, wrote an astonishing book I recommend highly, called “One Second After” where he took you through a small town in North Carolina and showed you what would happen if, in fact, there was an electromagnetic pulse attack. 

So I think it’s very important to realize letting a balloon go across the United States, when you do not know what’s in it, is extraordinarily dangerous. In addition, if it was simply a spy satellite, look what the Biden administration did. They let it come from Alaska, down across Canada, across one of our major, one of our three major intercontinental ballistic missile fields, all the way down to South Carolina. 

And then, as the Babylon Bee put it, now that the spy satellite, or the spy balloon, had finished its job, they shot it down. Well, that’s crazy. We have no idea what the Chinese were gathering. But more importantly, if they’re setting us up to get used to the idea that Chinese balloons could just float across the country, that has extraordinary historic implications.