Originally published at: U.S. tracked chinese spy balloon from takeoff | Boing Boing
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NRO Spokes Person, “How could we miss it; that thing was the size a school bus, or 20,000 Cavendish Bananas in the metric system.”
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As I understand it, you want nuclear powers to see, to a degree, the cards you are holding. Like in Dr Strangelove, a doomsday device only works if the other side knows about it. You want the other side to understand how badly they will lose if they decide to attack. And you can manipulate what information they gather.
This used to be even more common place until we left the Open Skies Treaty. Though I don’t think China was ever part of that.
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ETA
The problem is, this strange gentleman’s agreement only works until a trigger-happy fellow comes along.
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Tracking aerial TikTok servers is a thing.
True, but China is not trigger happy.
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possible that the balloon was blown off course by weather
A number of articles have suggested, as this one does here, that China flew a balloon over the U.S. somehow inadvertently. This makes no sense to me. Maybe you can’t steer a balloon, and you can’t always make it climb, but you can always make it descend.
Heading someplace you don’t want it to? Put it down in the ocean. Simple as that.
It’s odd that the coverage suggests so often that the balloon went where China didn’t want it and never mentions that they could obviously have had it stop flying.
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Fortunately, the possibility of a madman controlling nuclear bombs was only restricted to fiction. It’s always fun to see action movies and spy books with a nutcase leader with the doomsday button at his fingertips.
I’ve felt, since that theory has been bopped around for a while, that they were giving the Chinese government an out, at least publicly, so they didn’t lose face. The bureaucrats can have the behind the curtain discussions and shout at each other and what not but publicly it becomes an “ooops!” instead of an escalation.
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