The F-22 fighters left from Langley Air Force Base in Virginia and shot down the Chinese spy balloon off the coast of South Carolina at 2.39 in the afternoon local time. This was reported by Pentagon sources quoted by CNN who add that only one missile was used, an AIM-9X, a short-range air-to-air missile.
The US was able to gather intelligence on the Chinese spy balloon as it flew over the US. This was stated by an official of the US Department of Defense.
The Chinese spy balloon that flew over US territory for days last week was therefore shot down. Thus ended, only momentarily but spectacularly, a crisis that rekindled diplomatic tensions between the two major world powers. It was the US president himself, Joe Biden, who gave the order to shoot down the spy balloon: he did so on Wednesday, but the men of the Pentagon advised him to wait for “the safest place to do it”, given its enormous size ( like three buses) of the hot air balloon.
The spy balloon was shot down when it was already over the Atlantic Ocean, where its remains fell, off Myrtle Beach. The collection of the remains – which could give valuable indications of the nature of the aircraft – began immediately. The shootdown took place at 2:38 p.m. Atlantic time. Shortly before, the Federal Aviation Administration had suspended departures and arrivals at the airports of Wilmington, NC, and in Myrtle Beach and Charleston in South Carolina. After all, Biden had made it clear that something was moving. “We’ll take care of it,” he said in the middle of the day to accompanying reporters, as soon as he disembarked from Air Force One in Syracuse, New York State.
The Pentagon announced Thursday that it was following the movements of a Chinese spy balloon that had flown over the state of Montana, where one of the three warehouse sites that store US nuclear missiles is located on US territory. But the leaders of the Pentagon immediately said they did not want to take any action for security reasons, as the debris could fall on the population. As soon as the aircraft entered the Atlantic Ocean it was decided to shoot it down and a fighter completed the operation.
The presence of what, for the US, is a spy balloon has triggered a diplomatic crisis between Washington and Beijing which has 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 minister of the Biden government to China and in which Blinken would have perhaps also met President Xi Jinping himself. China actually denies that it is a spying aircraft, has called for calm and expressed “regret” for what happened: the balloon would have been nothing more than an airship used for meteorological research, with limited autonomous driving capabilities and carried into that area by westerly winds.
Even today, in a new note, Beijing reiterated that it was an incident due to “force majeure” and indeed accused some US politicians of wanting to “throw mud on China”. But the US is adamant: for Washington it was an “unacceptable” violation of sovereignty.
