Editorials

The Irish Times view on balloons in the headlines

The air may be going out of the row between the US and China over alleged spy balloons, though it does indicate how delicate relations are between the two

A fighter jet flies near a large balloon drifting above the Atlantic Ocean, just off the coast of South Carolina earlier this month.Minutes later, the balloon was struck by a missile from an F-22 fighter jet(Photo: Chad Fish via AP)
A fighter jet flies near a large balloon drifting above the Atlantic Ocean, just off the coast of South Carolina earlier this month.Minutes later, the balloon was struck by a missile from an F-22 fighter jet(Photo: Chad Fish via AP)
Fri Feb 17 2023 - 20:35

An American balloon expert observed this week – tongue in cheek – that “these are not safe times to be a weather balloon.” Until the panic over the Chinese spy balloon shot down off the coast of South Carolina, the skies of the US were peppered with thousands of these, to the point where military radar used algorithms to filter out their sightings. The algorithms have now been amended. These are now all potential targets.

Responses to the Chinese incursion, almost certainly an exercise in tracking military communications from a base in Hawaii that got blown off course, have varied between the hysterical and the amused. President Joe Biden has been accused of jeopardising the nation’s safety in failing to shoot the balloon down immediately, while others even conjured up potential alien invasions.

The Pentagon, which in recent years has acknowledged monitoring UFO sightings was quick to issue a categorical denial. (Some 510 UAP – unidentified anomalous phenomena – were observed in protected airspace as of August of last year, according to an intelligence report to Congress; 171 of them were unexplained).

The US has now downed four mysterious objects floating across America and Canada over the last two weeks and claims that Chinese uninvited balloons have flown over “more than 40 countries across five continents”. The Chinese claim to have detected 10 US balloons in its airspace since January 2022. And the Ukrainians have accused Russia of turning to balloon power with the intention of tricking Ukraine’s air defences into firing valuable surface-to-air missiles.

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But balloons which have been somewhat ineffectively used as weapons of war since Montgolfier – Japan launched 9,000 high-altitude balloon bombs at the US during the second World War, only 300 of which reached the US and one of which detonated lethally – are no strategic game changer. China is using balloons to complement its 262 spy satellites, and the latter are much more to be feared. This diplomatic tiff between Washington and Beijing is a storm in a China tea cup.