Washington: The United States on Monday refused to return to China the wreckage of a surveillance balloon that was shot down in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of South Carolina on Saturday. The US military has stepped up its efforts to collect from China the remains of a high-altitude surveillance balloon that floated over the United States for several days last week from Montana to South Carolina.
Initial information gathered from the balloon The White House said with confidence on Monday that it is a surveillance balloon. Officials said it violated international law and its sovereignty.
National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said, “I don’t know of any intention or plan to return it.” Kirby said he had gathered enough vital information about the balloon before it was shot down by a fighter jet on Saturday.
He added, “We are still analyzing the information that we were able to collect before the balloon was shot out of the sky and now we are going to recover it and I suspect we may learn even more.” ” The plane, he told reporters, was not only drifting but also had propellers and steering to give it a measure of control, even as it drifted in high-altitude jet stream winds.
Kirby said, “It is true that this balloon had the ability to accelerate, slow down and turn itself. So it had propellers, it had a rudder, allowing it to change direction if you wanted to.” ,
According to Northern Command Commander General Glenn Vanherk, the height of the balloon was up to 200 feet. He said it carried a payload weighing several thousand pounds, roughly the size of a regional jet aircraft.
“We believe that China’s irresponsible actions were visible for US and the world to see. What’s more, at the same time, a second PRC surveillance balloon was seen passing over Latin America,” the White House press release said. Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters at her daily news conference.
As the balloon floated over the continental US, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken postponed his visit to China. According to Jean-Pierre, President Joe Biden directed the military, intelligence community to assemble against the balloons so that they could learn more about China’s capabilities and business acumen.
Dropping the balloon over water was not only the safest option, it maximized the opportunity to recover the payload, giving the US a better chance of gaining information from Chinese surveillance balloon payloads. “But I think the bottom line here and this is something we want to make very clear, is that what China did was unacceptable,” Jean-Pierre said.
State Department spokesman Ned Price told reporters that China knew exactly what it was. “Ultimately, the course of action was the one that was put forward and executed by the Department of Defense. When we talk about what we’ve heard from the PRC, I’m just not going to give that much oxygen. Let me see May I state it clearly, the PRC knows exactly what it was,” he said.
He stressed that since the detection of this high-altitude surveillance balloon, the US has taken practical steps to reduce its intelligence-gathering capability against sensitive sites, in order to avoid any threat to the American people. can be reduced.
“More than that we kind of flipped the script because we did a little bit of our own capability training on this high-altitude surveillance balloon while it was violating our airspace,” he said.