The Chinese balloon that crossed the United States from Alaska to South Carolina for a week early this year — before being shot down offshore by the U.S. military — stirred a blizzard of fears. NBC News reported on April 3 that the balloon had been collecting electronic signals from U.S. military sites and sending them in real time back to China. President Biden said in May that it “was carrying two freight cars’ worth of spying equipment.”
Now, the Pentagon’s press secretary, Brig. Gen. Patrick Ryder, has announced the balloon was not doing surveillance across the continent. “We were aware that it had intelligence collection capabilities,” he said at a briefing last week, but the United States believes “that it did not collect while it was transiting the United States or overflying the United States.” He said U.S. measures to mitigate any intelligence collection might have thwarted it.
We don’t know exactly what the Chinese were up to — they insist it was not spying — but the episode illustrates the enduring threat of misperception and miscalculation, a legacy of the Cold War arms race that remains real and concerning today as the rivalry with China intensifies. The balloon was slow-moving, giving the president time to decide what to do, but there are plenty of scenarios for a crisis that would not be as forgiving.
The Cold War was haunted by the threat of a nuclear-armed missile crossing the oceans in 30 minutes or less, which required leaders to be ready to make decisions about the fate of the earth in a flash, and possibly based on limited information. Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev kept a sculpture of a goose in his Moscow office as a reminder that a flock of geese was once briefly mistaken for incoming missiles by the early-warning radars. There were frightening nuclear false alarms.
Skip to end of carousel
End of carousel- D.C. Council reverses itself on school resource officers. Good.
- Virginia makes a mistake by pulling out of an election fraud detection group.
- Vietnam sentences another democracy activist.
- Biden has a new border plan.
The D.C. Council voted on Tuesday to stop pulling police officers out of schools, a big win for student safety. Parents and principals overwhelmingly support keeping school resource officers around because they help de-escalate violent situations. D.C. joins a growing number of jurisdictions, from Montgomery County, Md., to Denver, in reversing course after withdrawing officers from school grounds following George Floyd’s murder. Read our recent editorial on why D.C. needs SROs.
Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) just withdrew Virginia from a data-sharing consortium, ERIC, that made the commonwealth’s elections more secure, following Republicans in seven other states in falling prey to disinformation peddled by election deniers. Former GOP governor Robert F. McDonnell made Virginia a founding member of ERIC in 2012, and until recently conservatives touted the group as a tool to combat voter fraud. D.C. and Maryland plan to remain. Read our recent editorial on ERIC.
In Vietnam, a one-party state, democracy activist Tran Van Bang was sentenced on Friday to eight years in prison and three years probation for writing 39 Facebook posts. The court claimed he had defamed the state in his writings, according to Radio Free Asia. In the past six years, at least 60 bloggers and activists have been sentenced to between 4 and 15 years in prison under the law, Human Rights Watch found. Read more of the Editorial Board’s coverage on autocracy and Vietnam.
The Department of Homeland Security has provided details of a plan to prevent a migrant surge along the southern border. The administration would presumptively deny asylum to migrants who failed to seek it in a third country en route — unless they face “an extreme and imminent threat” of rape, kidnapping, torture or murder. Critics allege that this is akin to an illegal Trump-era policy. In fact, President Biden is acting lawfully in response to what was fast becoming an unmanageable flow at the border. Read our most recent editorial on the U.S. asylum system.
1/5
China is steadily expanding its strategic nuclear forces, from a relatively small number to a level that might match the United States and Russia, but it has refused to join any discussions about arms control. The Pentagon reports that China keeps most of its nuclear weapons on peacetime status with the warheads, launchers and missiles stored separately, requiring time to assemble them. But China is conducting exercises involving “high alert duty” rotations in which a missile battalion is ready to launch. China is also expanding its force of solid-fueled intercontinental ballistic missiles as well as liquid-fueled, and, according to the Pentagon assessment, this suggests it intends to increase the peacetime readiness of land-based missile forces by moving to a launch-on-warning posture, in which miscalculation and misperception become enormous risks. China is also emphasizing hypersonic-glide-vehicle technology, in which weapons move through the atmosphere toward a ground-based target at least five times the speed of sound, or about 3,800 miles per hour.
There are other points of friction with China that could risk miscalculation, including tensions over Taiwan and competition in the South China Sea.
Regrettably, China is unwilling to take up a U.S. proposal for a military crisis communications line between Washington and Beijing, Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced on June 19, shortly after seeing Chinese leader Xi Jinping. Such a hotline would be in the interests of both countries — the next crisis might not be as laconic as a floating balloon.