 Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it's a Chinese weather balloon and it could be carrying nuclear weapons, EMP devices, and more over to US territory. Unless you've been hiding under a rock for the past few weeks, you've heard about the China spy balloon incident, where on February 4th, 2023, the Department of Defense had to shoot down a Chinese weather balloon carrying a huge signal intelligence array. What's the big deal about a weather balloon, you ask? For one, spying on the US is just one and, by far, the least terrifying way it can be utilized for military purposes. And secondly, it's not just a weather balloon, it's a Chinese weather balloon and, as we know, China and the US haven't exactly been getting along lately. But how can weather balloon technology be weaponized? Could Chinese balloons be transporting things like nuclear bombs to US territory? Let's find out. Balloons are at an all-time high between the US and China. The Great Balloon Emergency highlighted the growing importance of balloon surveillance technology to China. The People's Liberation Army, PLA, operates a vast aerial surveillance program out of Hainan province on China's southern coast, complimenting its growing military satellite program. They have methodically utilized balloons, airships, and other aerial objects to spy on its regional and global rivals well above the ceiling of traditional airliners. Here's the scary part, though. The scale of China's balloon fleet remains unknown, but Chinese-owned airships have now been seen over five continents and there are many ways in which balloon technology can be adapted beyond its original reconnaissance role, ways in which it could be used to deploy lethal 21st century weapon systems. Let's begin with the most devastating option, balloon-delivered nuclear bombs. For decades now, traditional nuclear weapons, whether tactical or strategic, have been designed to be delivered using a series of platforms, including airplanes, submarines, or as warheads on ballistic, cruise, or hypersonic missiles. Each of these delivery systems is high-tech and expensive. Complex aerial underwater or underground platforms rely on extensive infrastructure to keep them prepared for any scenario. Wouldn't it be far simpler to build a high-altitude balloon akin to the one the US Air Force recently downed, swap out its surveillance array for a small-yield nuclear payload and detonate it over a densely populated city or military installation? The US has actually already toyed around with this idea. During the Cold War, the US Air Force launched a secret project codenamed Flying Cloud or Weapon System 124A, one that experimented with the idea of dropping a weapon of mass destruction on enemy targets using high-altitude balloons. Tests began in late 1954 to gauge the feasibility of striking the Soviet Union, America's peer rival at the time, with a hydrogen balloon in a limited conflict or in a broken-back scenario following a massive nuclear exchange. The tests weren't particularly promising. The balloons flew for three days at an altitude of 38,600 feet using the jet stream and could be launched in winds of up to 35 miles per hour. The tests saw 41 balloons launched, 25 of which were fully operational. Of those, only six reached their intended destination, far fewer than the program deemed necessary to justify its existence. Within a year, the program was shuttered. The Air Force concluded that the weather forecasts were simply not accurate enough for the system to be operationally feasible, and the advent of thermonuclear weapons had made the broken-back war scenario the balloons were designed for appear an impossibility. This logic still stands. Among powerful nations states whose robust nuclear arsenals all but ensure any nuclear exchange will result in mutually assured destruction, balloon-delivered nukes would probably be considered far too unpredictable and escalatory for military use. It's hard to forecast, but we can safely assume China wouldn't run the risk of its own existential destruction by floating a flotilla of nuclear-armed balloons over the US any time soon. But the delivery system is so simple. You don't need much to launch, monitor or regulate a balloon in flight. Almost anybody can design, create and launch a deadly balloon suspended payload within a span of a few months. While China and the US probably wouldn't resort to using it for nuclear weapons, it's not out of the realm of possibility that a terrorist group or aggressive third-rate power, like North Korea, could secure and mount hundreds of pounds of nuclear material and release it at altitude. So assuming a conventional nuclear attack is off the table, what other ways can balloons be weaponized? There are two frightening possibilities that approach a nuclear bomb's footprint in terms of geographic impact and potential for incurring mass casualties. The first is a dirty bomb. Dirty bombs are non-nuclear conventional explosives laced with radiological material. This might take the form of radioactive dust or pellets integrated into a traditional bomb fuselage. When a dirty bomb explodes, you get the blended effect of a nuclear explosive in miniature, a normal blast radius, but one inundated with radiological after-effects that can kill people over a longer period of time. Taken together, a dirty bomb kills on and after-impact, contaminating the battlefield in such a way as to render entire areas out of bounds. Even though you wouldn't get the same earth-shattering destruction as you would in a nuclear attack, a dirty bomb still harnesses a fraction of the energy released by a nuclear explosion, 10% of which includes fallout radiation. This is the horrifying appeal of a dirty bomb. The higher the explosion's altitude, the broader its effects. Unlike a conventional bomb's circular damage pattern whose effects decrease with distance from an area of impact, radiation fallout scatters in an irregular elliptical pattern in the direction the wind blows. In a conventional nuclear attack, fallout carrying lethal radiation can be easily deposited miles away from the point of detonation. In a worst-case scenario, it can travel hundreds of miles even though it decreases in lethality the farther away it goes. Fallouts living in the fallout path of a dirty bomb can experience adverse health effects depending on the amount of radiation absorbed by the body, the type of radiation, and length of exposure. In the short term, beta radiation can cause burns and localized injuries. Exposure higher than 125 rads can be fatal. Half of those exposed to 3-400 rads will die without supportive treatment. If people are exposed to 1,000 rads or more, you can die in a matter of hours or days. In the long term, this means that an area affected by even low doses of radiation 50-100 rads can develop leukemia and severe optical impairment. A high-altitude balloon-launched dirty bomb probably wouldn't kill many people since the most dangerous part, the explosion, would not be nuclear. Since dirty bombs rely on dynamite or other explosives to scatter their radioactive material, a high-altitude detonation would mean that the damage would come from difficult-to-detect long-term health defects. The far scarier outcome of a nuclear balloon attack would be the use of an EMP, or Electronic Magnetic Pulse Device, capable of disabling a large portion of a country's critical electronic infrastructure. The American nuclear umbrella is a system of systems, meaning it depends on overlapping enablers, an electric power grid, GPS, and other factors, for example, to function efficiently. This is also how modern societies function writ large. Outages of any scale are often powerful reminders to the extent on which we depend on power and electricity to survive. Knock out our lights, our cell towers, our refrigeration, our sanitation, our hospital equipment, our traffic lights, our computers, and our internet for a prolonged period and imagine the chaos that would ensue. EMP attacks are asymmetrical, a relatively small package that can cause potentially disastrous and wide-reaching damage. To see how destructive they can be, let's look at some similarly-scaled outages in the US. In 1965, a rush-hour power outage in New York State spread until it had plunged parts of neighboring states and Canada into total darkness. The outage delayed millions of commuters, trapped 800,000 people in New York subways, and left countless more stranded in office buildings, trains, and elevators. It was caused by the tripping of a single 230-kilovolt transmission line, one that quickly overloaded adjacent lines until they failed too. 30 million people in eight US states, Ontario and Quebec, went without power, which was gradually restored overnight. A similar event happened in 2003, when a tree branch fell onto a power line in the Northeastern US, causing a cascade of failures that spread until it had blacked out 50 million Americans. These were not cataclysmic failures, but caused serious discomfort to those who experienced them. An EMP device triggered by a thermonuclear explosion high in the skies above a country would almost certainly be worse, since the higher the explosion, the wider an EMP's effects. According to the National Technical Information Service, for an explosion of high yield at sufficient altitude, the area covered by the high-frequency EMP extends in all directions on the ground as far as the line of sight. Above the centre of the United States, almost the whole country, as well as parts of Canada and Mexico, could be affected by the EMP. Balloon technology is well suited for a covert detonation of a thermonuclear EMP triggering warhead. Yes, you could technically do it at 45,000 feet with a commercial or experimental aircraft. You could even try to do it at 10,000 feet with a drone, but those options can easily be intercepted and shot down. Balloons can fly anywhere between 5,000 and 200,000 feet, 40 miles above the earth. This high could easily have an impact radius of 500 miles, with knock-on effects stretching in a concentric ring outwards for hundreds, even thousands of miles more. Surely detonated far higher than the Chinese spy balloon was flying when it had been visible to the naked eye, a thermonuclear EMP attack damages and destroys electronic systems at the speed of light. According to former CIA analyst Dr. Peter Pry, the eastern grid generates 75% of U.S. electricity and supports most of the population. Virtually any nuke detonated anywhere over the eastern grid knocked just the area within the EMP field because of cascading failures will ripple outward. In a worst case scenario and unlikely one, mind you, a massive swath of America's non-hardened critical infrastructure would be knocked out, including food, power, water and sanitation. All electronic and solid state devices are instantly fried. Without these systems, the American economy log jams. People cannot use transportation without endemic disorder. The elderly and the sick who rely on ventilators and other powered devices to keep them alive all die. Food spoils. People cannot use their toilets, nor can they call emergency services for assistance. Nuclear power station calling systems begin to fail. Multiple nuclear power stations melting down simultaneously could lead to an American Chernobyl on a massive scale. The outages caused blackouts that last weeks, even months. In any scenario, an EMP attack would create fog and chaos that would make immediate attribution and retaliation difficult. In a congressional hearing, one participant argued that the consequences of such electromagnetic pulses could be devastating for many millions of people who would be left without access to potable water, food, bank accounts, medications, communications, transportation and many other important electronically-based activities. Dr. William Graham, the chairman of the EMP Threat Commission, warned that if the power goes out and stays out for even one year's time, as many as nine out of ten of us would perish. Prolonged blackouts might result in millions of deaths. US planners usually chalk off the threat, claiming that an EMP strike would be tantamount to a conventional nuclear exchange. One America's enemies would not be likely to initiate. If the entirety of the American electrical grid were to be somehow knocked out by a high-altitude balloon-delivered EMP, one wonders just how America's enemies would capitalize on the attack, as well as how the United States would be able to respond. If these didn't scare you enough, imagine the prospect of a fleet of high-altitude balloons deployed over a country like the United States, each one equipped with its own squadron of suicide drones. With the push of a button, the balloon releases its menacing horde, which swarms a target like killer bees. Some are configured as sensor platforms to gather intelligence, monitor the ongoing attack, and designate targets. The rest, configured as loitering munitions, peppering their targets with waves of explosions one after another. If you think this is mere fantasy, maybe you should ask the US Army what it thinks. Back in 2020, it was reported that the US Army's Program Executive Office for Intelligence, Electronic Warfare and Sensors had posted a briefing at an Industry Day event depicting the very scene described above. Apparently, the balloon-launched systems are one part of a broader, layered, multi-domain sensing system concept that the Army is in the early stages of developing. The concept might not be as impossible as it seems, since their combat debut, remotely piloted attack drones have been adapted to fulfill many battlefield roles. The war in Ukraine has featured the use of loitering munitions and suicide drones by both sides to destroy entrenched positions, infrastructure, armor, and artillery. In the Army's multi-domain sensing system, balloons would serve a variety of purposes, primarily as key capability enablers. According to Brent Fraser, head of the Concept Development Division at Space and Missile Defense Center of Excellence, balloons would be able to provide some beyond-line-of-site capability, to provide the ability to enable sensing of targets deep in the adversary's areas, to be able to reinforce and complement existing sensing systems other than the aerial layer as well as the space layer. High-altitude balloons carrying electronic and communications intelligence systems, very similar to the ones beneath the Chinese balloon, as well as radars with synthetic aperture imaging, moving target indicators, cyber warfare systems, and electronic warfare jammers, could do just about anything the Army needed them to. This would all be done out of visual range and beyond the striking distance of most ground-based surface-to-air missiles. The Army briefing also revealed certain balloons equipped as drone mother ships. It is already in the process of developing air-launched drones deployed from manned or unmanned aircraft. As part of its air-launched effects program, balloons seem like a plausible extension of what the Army is already testing. Could a military also equip a balloon to serve as a hypersonic missile launcher? The Army has a program for that too, nicknamed Vintage Racer. The idea here is that balloons moving very slowly over a battlefield give a multi-domain force persistent capabilities that would be very difficult to detect by the enemy on the ground. Balloons have tiny radar signatures and even sometimes have to be equipped with radar reflectors to avoid collisions and make them more visible to airplanes. Launching a fully autonomous swarm of suicide drones or hypersonic missiles from a balloon seems like an idea straight out of a science fiction novel. Could it be on its way to becoming a reality? One of the many fears surrounding the recent Chinese balloon was that it allegedly contained bioweapons from Wuhan. In a Fox News interview, House Oversight Chairman James Coma invoked the lab leak theory, touted by many Republicans in his argument that the balloon was probably a vehicle for transmitting a new strain of a deadly virus akin to COVID-19. Most rightly dismissed his claim as partisan fear mongering, an attempt to criticize the current administration's seemingly lax response to the balloon's overflight. While the balloon payload was almost certainly free of bioweapons, the possibility of dropping contagious airborne droplets, while speculative, is still not outside the realm of possibility. Could viral droplets released by a balloon over America's heartland cause another crippling pandemic? Back in June of 2022, North Korea blamed South Korean defectors for deploying COVID-laden balloons that caused several outbreaks throughout the country in an apparent attempt to shift the blame onto its neighbor. The country claimed it had gone two years without a single case, but after the balloon attack it reported several thousand new cases of fever-like symptoms, bringing a total caseload to 4.74 million. Even though defectors often used balloons to send anti-regime leaflets and humanitarian aid over the border, health authorities rejected the claim. The lack of cases was probably due to the lack of testing kits and cross-border travel more than any balloon attack. Paid at 60,000 feet, the most likely outcome of a bioweapon balloon attack would be for the droplets to dissipate before reaching Earth. There's one more possibility that has us wondering about the weaponized prospects of high-altitude balloons, and that is the prospect of using them to modify the very weather over an enemy country. Geoengineering is nothing new, though modern advances have made it even more feasible on a massive scale. Cloud seeding has been around for decades, a method of injecting trace quantities of silver iodide into high-moisture clouds which condenses around new particles that in turn grow heavier and fall back to Earth as rain. Because cloud seeding can boost snowfall across a wide area if the atmospheric conditions are favorable, the process has been touted as a viable means of combating climate change. China has invested heavily in geoengineering for over a decade, over $1.34 billion between 2012 and 2017 alone. It sees experimental weather modification as key to its own agricultural sustainment, a comprehensive prevention against risks incurred by drought, fires, climate change and other disasters. Using cloud seeding techniques, it reduced smog in and around Beijing ahead of the 2008 Summer Olympics and generated snowfall for its more recent Winter Olympics. One 2019 Harvard White Paper envisioned a sinister DIY geoengineering scheme where belligerent global actors launched a fleet of high-altitude balloons with weather-altering payloads high into the atmosphere. When the balloons burst, they scatter the contents, changing the weather in a particular location. It isn't the most feasible scenario since millions of balloons would be required to cause drastic change, but like anything, geoengineering could be weaponized by a power like China. Its own investment has been caused for alarm among its neighbours, chiefly India, who fears that Chinese geoengineering schemes could be used to impede movement in the contested Himalaya border region or trigger, even disrupt, India's annual monsoons. Balloon-delivered agricultural sabotage could be another possibility. Back during the Cold War in the heyday of American military experimentation, scientists developed the E77 balloon bomb based off the old Japanese Fugo model from World War II. Rather than drop a conventional munition, however, the E77 dropped an anti-crop biological agent like wheat stem rust from a hydrogen-filled balloon platform. Plants to infect large areas of plants with serial rust spores went relatively well, but like so many other balloon projects, the E77 never saw action. It's hard to imagine the scale of weather or agricultural modification that would be required to gain a notable advantage over a peer adversary. But if balloons could anonymously and covertly achieve these types of outcomes, what's stopping someone from trying? All the recent hullabaloo could very well be chalked up as an errant balloon shot down by an American military on the edge. The situation is certainly worth watching as it develops. Defense officials are being pressed by American politicians to release more information as it becomes available. Maybe the humble balloon once relegated to the scrap heap of military history is experiencing a modern military resurgence. Maybe it isn't. But what do you think? Should the US be concerned about the latest China balloon incident? Let us know in the comments and don't forget to subscribe for more military analysis from Military Experts.