EURASIAN TIMES - Tanmay Kadam - FEB 10, 2023
The Chinese spy balloon, recently shot down by the US military, has captured the headlines in recent weeks, with other countries like India, Japan, and Taiwan currently looking into the possibility that similar Chinese balloons may have also violated their airspace in the past.
Even more concerning is that China could also use such balloons to deploy hypersonic weapons.
In 2018, Chinese state-owned television CCTV broadcast footage of a high-altitude balloon, not dissimilar from the one that traversed over the US and Canada last week, dropping what appeared to be hypersonic weapons.
The video showed a high-altitude balloon carrying three wedge-shaped payloads, which looked like hypersonic glide vehicles (HGVs), up to a certain height and then dropping them as part of a weapons test.
The Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post (SCMP) reported that the balloon-dropped HGVs were part of an effort to develop precision warheads for hypersonic weapons, which would give the Chinese military an “unstoppable nuclear-capable weapon.”