Monitoring Desk
WASHINGTON: The White House has said the United States’ (US) decision to shoot down three objects flying over North American this weekend was “out of an abundance of caution”.
Spokesman White House John Kirby said the objects were posing a threat to commercial flights and were downed in the “best interests” of the American people. The US is scrutinising its airspace more carefully since the recent incursion of a suspected spy balloon from China, reported BBC News.
Meanwhile, Beijing has alleged that Washington is flying its own balloons over China. Foreign ministry of China said on Monday that the US has flown balloons into its airspace more than 10 times in 2022. “It’s common as well for the United States to illegally enter the airspace of other countries,” spokesman Wang Wenbin told the reporters.
Mr Kirby, speaking from the White House, denied the allegations: “We are not flying surveillance balloons over China. I’m not aware of any other craft we’re flying into Chinese airspace.”
The US officials
On February 4, a balloon was downed off the coast of South Carolina after moving for days over the continental United States. The US officials said it originated in China and had been used to monitor sensitive military sites, but China denied the object was used for spying adding it was, rather, a weather monitoring device that had blown astray.
Since that first incident, the American fighter jets have shot down three further high-altitude objects in as many days – over Canada’s Yukon territory, Alaska and Michigan – and the US administration has been under pressure to explain what the objects actually were.
Mr Kirby leads communications for the president’s National Security Council. He said the alleged Chinese spy balloon and the three objects downed over the weekend were different.
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He noted that the latter did not pose “any direct threat to the people on the ground” but were taken down “to protect our interests, our security and flight safety”.
Efforts were under way to collect debris of the objects, but Mr Kirby noted the objects in Canada and Alaska were in remote terrain and it will be difficult to find them in winter weather conditions. He said, however, the object in Michigan lies in the deep waters of Lake Huron.
He claimed that China is operating a “balloon programme for intelligence gathering” that is linked to the Chinese military. He said the balloon programme was not detected during the Trump administration. “We detected it, tracked it, and we have been carefully studying it to learn as much as we can,” he said.
