The Chinese spy balloon was shot down by a missile. Analyze the remains

The US shot down the Chinese spy balloon that sent tensions between Washington and Beijing soaring. And from the remains of the aircraft it will be possible to understand the exact nature of the device: meteorological instrument, technology for collecting sensitive data or more. And so, in the end, the balloon that flew over US mainland for days last week was shot down. Thus ended, momentarily but spectacularly, a crisis that reignited diplomatic tensions between the two great world powers. It was the President of the United States himself, Joe Biden, who gave the order to shoot down the spy balloon: he did so on Wednesday, but Pentagon men advised him to wait for “the safest place to do so”, considering the huge size (like three buses) of the hot air balloon.

In the moment that #ChineseSpyBalloon was hit by a single missile from an F-22 #raptor#ChinaSpyBalloon #spyballoon #balloon #balloongate pic.twitter.com/GyvTtp2EWf

— Muhammad Arooj (@muhammadarooj) February 4, 2023

The spy balloon was thus shot down over the Atlantic Ocean, where its remains fell off Myrtle Beach. The collection of the remains – which could give valuable indications about the nature of the aircraft – began immediately. The shooting took place at 2:38 pm Atlantic time. Shortly before, the Federal Aviation Administration had suspended departures and arrivals at airports in Wilmington, North Carolina, and in Myrtle Beach and Charleston, South Carolina. After all, Biden had made it clear that something was up.

“We’ll take care of it,” he told reporters with him midday as he disembarked from Air Force One in Syracuse, New York. The Pentagon announced Thursday that it was following the movements of a Chinese spy balloon that flew over the state of Montana, where one of the three warehouses that store North American nuclear missiles is located in US territory. But Pentagon leaders immediately said they didn’t want to take any action for safety reasons, as debris could fall on people. However, as soon as the aircraft entered the Atlantic Ocean, it was decided to shoot it down and it was a fighter to complete the operation: the fighter was also filmed from the ground, aiming at the balloon before firing a missile.

The presence of what, for the US, is a spy balloon triggered a diplomatic crisis between Washington and Beijing that led to the cancellation of the trip that the Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, had planned to make to China. A visit that would have been the first by a Biden government minister to China and in which Blinken perhaps also met President Xi Jinping himself. China, in fact, denies that it is a spy plane, asked for calm and expressed “regret” for what happened: the
the balloon would have been nothing more than a blimp used for meteorological research, with limited self-driving capability and dragged to that area by westerly winds. Even today, in a new note, Beijing reiterated that it was an incident due to “force majeure” and even accused some US politicians of wanting to “throw mud at China”. But the US is adamant: for Washington, it was an “unacceptable” violation of sovereignty.