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RUBY:

From Schwartz Media I’m Ruby Jones, this is 7am.

Once the United States military started looking for them, they couldn’t stop finding them. Unidentified balloons were everywhere.

The US military and President Joe Biden decided the best course of action was simple: shoot these unknown objects out of the sky.

But weeks later, we’re finally learning that only the first of these balloons to be shot down has anything to do with China – the others, likely belong to scientists and hobby clubs.

Today, former director of War Studies at the Australian Army Research Centre and Adjunct Professor at UNSW Canberra Albert Palazzo, on how balloons became a threat.

It’s Thursday, February 23.

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Archival tape -- Joe Biden:

“Good afternoon.”

RUBY:

Albert, a few days ago, the president of the United States, Joe Biden held this press conference where he admitted that the US military had shot down some balloons and that these balloons actually weren’t all owned by China.

Archival tape -- Joe Biden:

“Last week in the immediate aftermath of the incursion by China's high altitude balloon, our military through the North American Aerospace Defence Command…”

RUBY:

It was all pretty unusual wasn’t it. What did you think as you heard him speak?

Albert:

Well, at his press conference, President Biden admitted that the three balloons that were shot down - the two that were shot down over US territory by the Americans, and one that were shot down over Canadian territory - were most likely or almost certainly balloons belonging to hobbyists or to perhaps scientific researchers.

Archival tape -- Joe Biden:

“We know that a range of entities including countries, companies and research organisations operate objects of altitudes for purposes that are not nefarious including legitimate scientific research”

Albert:

These kinds of balloons are going to be fairly common. Both universities, weather organisations, research organisations will be launching balloons to do atmospheric testing to collect data, wind changes. Plus, there are a lot of enthusiasts out there who also like to put things in the atmosphere and see how they perform or collect data for their own personal interests or for the interests of their clubs.

Archival tape -- Joe Biden:

“I’ve directed my team to come back to me with sharper rules for how we will deal with these unidentified objects moving forward, distinguishing between those that are likely to pose safety and security risks that necessitate action and those that do not.”

Albert:

But there's also something very serious happening here.

Archival tape -- Joe Biden:

“If any object presents a threat to the safety and security of American people, I will take it down.”

Albert:

We have to sort of put aside the chortles of the joke and look at the more serious side of this is that the US, in response to a real national security threat, picked up things that they didn't pick up in the past and the response was to shoot them down.

RUBY:

Right - because that first balloon that appeared in US airspace at the end of last month, the one that started all of this - it was potentially a real security threat wasn’t it. It belonged to China, not to hobby clubs. So, what do we know about it?

Albert:

Yes. So when the Chinese balloon entered US airspace at the end of January, entered US airspace over Alaska, drifted southwards over Canada, and then meandered its way across the US until the US shot it down off the coast of North Carolina. This just wasn't an ordinary, you know, party balloon. This was a massive structure as these kind of balloons are, you know, 20 or 30 metres tall and dangling below. It was a surveillance pod the size of several school buses. The kind of thing that doesn't just accidentally float across your sky. It had to be deliberately released. And also, it was an illegal act. You don't want it coming down on somebody's house. So they waited until it got to the Atlantic. They engaged, took it down, landed in the ocean, and now they're in the process of recovering it. But let's not forget here that this was a violation of sovereignty and the United States had every right to shoot it down.

And when you're going to violate somebody's sovereignty to collect intelligence, which everyone does, everyone you know the US collects stuff on the Chinese, the Chinese satellites are doing the same to the US The key thing to always remember is don't get caught. And if you get caught, have a lot of deniability. So the Chinese have violated, you know, two fundamental rules of intelligence. One, they got caught. And two, they were caught violating some of the country's sovereignty. And it also represents an escalation. And that's where it's really uncomfortable.

RUBY:

Right and of course we know all of this now Albert, but in the early days there was a lot of speculation about what these objects that were being targeted actually were. The US military initially didn’t reveal much about what was going on and so the space got filled by saying that these things might be UFOs or that China might have had this secret battalion of spy balloons. What are some of the theories that you heard?

Albert:

Well, those are the main ones.

Archival tape -- News Reporter:

“They say the balloon is part of a worldwide fleet that have been used to collect intelligence in over 40 countries across five continents.”

Albert:

And that the Chinese have this, you know, super ability to insert balloons anywhere they want.

Archival tape -- News Reporter:

“The kind of technology that gave the Chinese not just the ability to listen to US communications and to pinpoint exactly where they were coming from, who they were coming from. All of this especially alarming as the balloon passed over sensitive military sites before the US Air Force shot…”

Albert:

People will respond to these things is, there's a lot of conspiracies out there or they're very easy to generate conspiracies and they spread like wildfire.

Archival tape -- Conspiracy theorist 1:

“Crazy stuff. Something other than us. A higher being is monitoring our skies regularly and it's actually pretty mind blowing.”

Archival tape -- Conspiracy theorist 2:

“This could be a dry run for balloons that were being called “top delivery platforms” for nuclear EMP attacks, right?”

Archival tape -- Conspiracy theorist 3:

“We think it's a spy balloon and we just shoot it down. Or does China want us to shoot these things down? For something that is much more evil than we can see in this moment of time.”

Albert:

And within a matter of a few days, we got through that whole process.

RUBY:

Right. But why is that all of a sudden the US military was detecting a whole series of balloons? Because it seems like we went from a situation where no one had even heard of balloons being a threat to having all of these balloons pop up in a row.

Albert:

Yes. Well, the United States borders are protected by a satellite and ground based radar network, a legacy of the Cold War. When they built the NORAD's system to protect the United States from a nuclear missile attack. And it's designed to spot the launch of very fast moving, very large things. And so the radar network is tuned to find that threat because that's the prime danger. So after the Chinese balloon was shot down or perhaps even before that, the United States military ordered the tweaking of these radars so that they could look at other areas of the electromagnetic space spectrum. They took our system has optimised to find fast moving missiles and had it look for things that are slower and perhaps have a lot less metal in them.

So the systems are able to find that too. It turns out. Suddenly the sky had more things in it of interest than it had previously because they hadn't looked for it.

RUBY:

And it is fascinating isn't it that the first response when these things of interest are detected in the sky - things which we should note ultimately, mostly turn out to not be threats - is for the US president - and the Canadian prime minister - to send in fighter jets armed with missiles to chase them down!

Albert:

Yes. But you know also we have to accept that President Biden was responding not only to national security concerns, but was also under considerable pressure from political rivals or the opposition in Congress and within the states that were affected to be seen to be doing something. Here's that opportunity for misadventure to come because, you know, the president came under pressure in the political space, in the American domestic space. Fortunately, in this case, it was, you know, nothing of serious consequence. And the next time, we might not be so lucky.

RUBY:

We’ll be back after this.

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RUBY:

Albert, China has denied, of course, that that first balloon that was shot down is or was a spy balloon. And it's accusing the US of being hysterical in its response. The US, meanwhile, is saying that there is evidence that it was a spy balloon and it's also refusing to apologise for shooting it down. Australia is saying that the US behaved in a measured way. So what do you make of the public statements that we’re seeing about this, on both sides?

Albert:

Well, I would say the US responded in a legal way, whether it was a weather balloon, whether it was a spy balloon, or whether it was some other kind of social entertainment balloon. None of that really matters because they launched a balloon that drifted over another country, sovereign territory, and they didn't tell the country they were doing it. But the point here is that from the start they did something that was illegal under international law and then have tried to justify it by saying it's harmless. And whether it's harmless or not is irrelevant. The problem is with the Chinese is that they got caught and now they're trying to come up with a rational excuse for it and it doesn't hold in any water because it doesn't go to the fundamental violation of international law.

The Communist Party has to send a message to the Chinese people that we're outraged at what these perfidious Americans have done. And that's fine. But I would hope that behind the scenes, through back channels, there's a other message being delivered quietly to the Americans, saying, all right, you know, we did something that perhaps we shouldn't have and oops, sorry, because you don't want this episode to, you know, sour relations between the two countries. They need to start creating really strong channels of communication and understanding so that when something like this happens, it doesn't escalate into very dangerous decision making. The Chinese need to get to the bottom of this, of how did their organisation allow this to happen and jeopardise Chinese-American relations at this time when the two countries actually need to start working together more closely? And the senior leadership in Beijing knows that they need to work more closely. And yet another part of the organisation seems to have cut their legs out on that. And now trips have now been cancelled, engagements have now been cancelled. And just like in the Cold War, a bit of, you know, making up now has to occur and hopefully that will occur rapidly.

RUBY:

Yeah. I mean, it's clear that the channels of communication and understanding aren't very open right now between the US and China. And there has long been this fear, hasn't there, that as the militaries of both countries come into closer and closer contact, that there could be some sort of miscalculation that leads to retaliation and becomes bigger than it needed to be. And so if you look at the way that this situation has escalated and, you know, balloons that aren't spy balloons being shot out of the sky, do you think that this can teach us any lessons about how the kind of underlying fear that exists can lead to miscalculations?

Albert:

Yeah. In the sort of national security space, political leaders, Biden and Xi Jinping, they're put into positions where they have to make decisions that have consequences under a great deal of pressure. They need opportunities where they can either escalate if necessary and de-escalate where it's appropriate. And since at the moment, we don't have good channels to de-escalate, for Biden to get in touch with the Chinese and say, okay, what exactly happened here, the opportunity to make a bad decision is there. And then those bad decisions have a tendency to snowball. The big takeaway is that these two very powerful countries need to institutionalise mechanisms to manage these problems and eliminate misadventure or miscalculation.

RUBY:

Right and so if those lessons are not learnt, Albert, what does this situation tell us about what could happen if the stakes were higher than balloons; if there is a miscalculation that could actually cost lives?

Albert:

Yeah. One of the great fears we have is like. There have been a couple of occasions now, such as in 2001, a US spy plane was flying over international waters and the Chinese sent up two interceptors and there was a collision. The Chinese plane and pilot were lost and the American plane managed to land on Chinese territory.

You know, for the Chinese, that was a great coup, because then they now had the opportunity to take apart an American spy plane. And last year, there were a couple of occasions where US warships and Chinese ships came very close to each other.

And if there was ever a collision at sea and an American warship, you know, got sliced in half and there was a loss of 200 American sailors, well, you could see that quickly escalating into a very serious reaction. And then you find yourself in a very serious war, and it could happen very quickly.

RUBY:

Albert, thank you so much for your time.

Albert:

Absolute pleasure. Bye.

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RUBY:

Also in the news today,

This week marks one year since President Vladimir Putin ordered Russian troops to invade Ukraine.

According to the UN, at least 8000 civilians have been killed since the invasion began, with a further 13,300 injured, and nearly eight million displaced.

The conflict continues, with US President Joe Biden visiting Kyiv this week to meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

AND

A court in Queensland has denied an application by the media to name a high-profile man charged with rape. The application by News Corp, Nine, Network 10 and the ABC sought to identify the person charged with raping a woman in Toowoomba in 2021.

Queensland law prohibits the identification of people accused of serious sex offences until the matter reaches a committal hearing.

I’m Ruby Jones, this is 7am. See you tomorrow.

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