Won't Return 'Spy' Balloon Debris To China, Says US After Shooting it Down

Washington: The United States on Monday ruled out returning to China the debris of the surveillance balloon which was shot down in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of South Carolina on Saturday. The US military has intensified its efforts to collect the remnants of the high-altitude surveillance balloon from China that floated over the United States over several days last week from Montana to South Carolina.

Initial information gathered from the balloon, the White House said on Monday with confidence, that it is a surveillance balloon. It violated international law and its sovereignty, officials said.

“I know of no such intention or plans to return it," said National Security Council spokesman John Kirby, adding that the US military has recovered some remnants off the surface of the sea and they are still in the process of collecting them from under waters. Before it was being shot down by a fighter jet on Saturday, Kirby said they had gathered enough vital information about the balloon.

“We're still analysing the information that we were able to collect off of the balloon before we shot it out of the sky and now we're going to recover it and I suspect we may learn even more," he said. The balloon, he told reporters, was not merely drifting but had propellers and steering to give a measure of control, even as it was swept along in high-altitude jet stream winds.

"It is true that this balloon had the ability to maneuver itself -- to speed up, to slow down and to turn. So it had propellers, it had a rudder, if you will, to allow it to change direction," Kirby said.

According to General Glen VanHerck, Commander of Northern Command, the balloon was up to 200 feet in height. It carried a payload weighing several thousand pounds, roughly the size of a regional jet aircraft, he said.

“China's, we believe, irresponsible action was visible for the American and the world to see. Not only that at the same time, a second PRC surveillance balloon was seen traversing Latin America,” White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters at her daily news conference.

As the balloon floated over continental America, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken postponed his trip to China. According to Jean-Pierre, President Joe Biden directed the military, the intelligence community to collect against the balloon so that they would learn more about China's capabilities and tradecraft.

Shooting the balloon down over water wasn't just the safest option, it maximised the chance of recovering the payload, giving the US a better chance to get information from the Chinese surveillance balloon payload. “But I think the bottom line here and this is something that we want to make very clear, is that look, what China did was unacceptable,” Jean-Pierre said.

State Department Spokesperson Ned Price told reporters that China knows precisely what it was. “Ultimately, the course of action was one that was put forward and executed by the Department of Defence. When it comes to what we've heard from the PRC, I'm just not going to give that too much oxygen. Let me see if I can state it as clearly as I can, the PRC knows precisely what this was,” he said.

The US, he asserted, has taken practical steps since the time this high-altitude surveillance balloon was detected to mitigate its ability to collect intelligence against sensitive sites, to mitigate any threat it could pose to the American people.

“More than that in a way we flipped the script because we've trained quite a bit of capability of our own at this high altitude surveillance balloon while it was violating our airspace,” he said.