US President Joe Biden says he ordered officials to shoot down the suspected Chinese spy balloon earlier this week and national security leaders decided the best time for the operation was when it got over water.
“They successfully took it down and I want to complement our aviators who did it,” Biden said after getting off Air Force One en route to Camp David.
Fighter jets shot down the giant white balloon off the Carolina coast after it traversed sensitive military sites across North America and became the latest flashpoint in tensions between Washington and Beijing.
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said in a statement that Biden approved the operation on Wednesday, saying it should be done “as soon as the mission could be accomplished without undue risk to American lives under the balloon’s path.”
Austin said that due to the size and altitude of the balloon , which was moving at about 60,000 feet in the air, the military had determined that taking it down over land would pose an undue risk to people on the ground.
The balloon was spotted Saturday morning over the Carolinas as it approached the coast.
In preparation for the shootdown, the airspace over the Carolina coastline was temporarily closed, including the airports in Charleston and Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, and Wilmington, North Carolina. Aviation authorities rerouted air traffic from the area and warned of delays as a result of the flight restrictions.
The Coast Guard advised mariners to immediately leave the area because of US military operations “that present a significant hazard.”
Television footage showed a small explosion, followed by the balloon descending toward the water.
An operation is underway in US territorial waters in the Atlantic Ocean to recover debris from the balloon, which had been flying at about 60,000 feet and was estimated to be about the size of three school buses.
Officials are aiming to recover as much of the debris as possible before it sinks into the ocean. The Pentagon had previously estimated that any debris field would be substantial.
Biden had been inclined to down the balloon over land when he was first briefed on it on Tuesday, but Pentagon officials advised against it, warning that the potential risk to people on the ground outweighed the assessment of potential Chinese intelligence gains.
The public disclosure of the balloon this week prompted the cancellation of a visit by US Secretary of State Antony Blinken to Beijing for talks aimed at reducing US-China tensions.
The Chinese government on Saturday sought to play down the cancellation.
“In actuality, the US and China have never announced any visit, the US making any such announcement is their own business, and we respect that,” China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement Saturday morning.
China has continued to claim that the balloon was merely a weather research “airship” that had been blown off course. The Pentagon rejected that out of hand — as well as China’s contention that it was not being used for surveillance and had only limited navigational ability.
The balloon was spotted over Montana, which is home to one of America’s three nuclear missile silo fields at Malmstrom Air Force Base.
The Pentagon also acknowledged reports of a second balloon flying over Latin America. “We now assess it is another Chinese surveillance balloon,” Brigadier General Pat Ryder, Pentagon press secretary, said in a statement.
Uncensored reactions on the Chinese internet mirrored the official government stance that the US was hyping the situation. Some used it as a chance to poke fun at US defences, saying it couldn’t even defend against a balloon, and nationalist influencers leapt to use the news to mock the US.
