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

Newt Gingrich Former House Speaker; Chairman of Gingrich 360
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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.

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, etc, that the other side learns is 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 Fortune, 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 purely a 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. 

The other thing to notice is that supposedly, Biden was not told until Wednesday. So the balloon was already in the American zone, was already crossing American territory. Finally, they get around to tell the president, the president then says shoot it down. And apparently the military just ignored him. They said, No, we’re not going to shoot it down, not until it gets out of the U.S.  So apparently he’s not the Commander-in-Chief. He’s the Suggester-in-Chief, and his word had no weight. 

I think this is a very serious incident at every level, at the American command and control level, at our national defense level, at the question what the Chinese Communists are doing, and as a precedent that we could be faced with a lot bigger problems than we think. These aren’t just simple balloons. These are huge 20-story tall devices that are designed to carry all sorts of packages. And with water and artificial intelligence, they can actually sense where the winds are going and move the balloon up and down in order to ride the correct wind to get where they want to go. It’s a very different world than just some kid out here on a parade with a little helium balloon. And we didn’t handle it very well. And all of us should be worried.

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