The White Sphere Over Myrtle Beach

Published October 4, 2026

On February 4, 2023, at 2:39 in the afternoon, an F-22 Raptor at 58,000 feet fired one AIM-9X Sidewinder at a white sphere drifting between 60,000 and 65,000 feet over the Atlantic, six nautical miles off Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. The missile hit. The sphere was about 200 feet tall and roughly 130 feet across. It started down toward forty-seven feet of water. Under the envelope hung a payload the size of two or three school buses, estimated at 1,000 to 2,000 pounds: solar panels able to generate up to 10,000 watts, antenna arrays, a large central dish, and four propeller hubs with propellers still attached.

The Navy sent the amphibious ship USS Carter Hall, the destroyer USS Oscar Austin, the cruiser USS Philippine Sea, and Coast Guard cutters after whatever sank. By February 13, divers had brought up sensors, electronics, and structural pieces measuring about thirty feet in all.

The eight days before the shot are the part that does not line up cleanly in any of the official stories.

The balloon had been tracked near Hainan Island as early as January 15. It entered U.S. airspace over the Aleutian Islands on January 28, crossed into Canada on January 30, passed the Yukon and the Northwest Territories, and came back into the continental United States over northern Idaho on January 31. On February 1 it was over Montana. It drifted over Malmstrom Air Force Base, one of three American complexes of nuclear intercontinental ballistic missiles. Then Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming. Then Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri, where B-2 stealth bombers are based. Fighters tracked it. Cable news filmed it. People on the ground watched a Chinese platform cross the middle of the country in daylight.

China said it was a civilian weather balloon pushed off course by the winds. The United States said it was a spy platform. The House of Representatives voted 419 to 0 to condemn it. Secretary of State Antony Blinken cancelled what would have been the first visit by an American secretary of state to China since 2018. The question left for people who study Chinese decisions was whether this was a provocation, a blunder, or something that does not fit either label.

A weather balloon, as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration flies them, is about six feet wide at launch, expands to roughly twenty feet up high, carries half a pound to one pound, drifts up to 125 miles, and stays up about two hours. The object over Montana carried a payload of buses, antennas the State Department assessed as likely capable of collecting and geolocating communications, propellers and rudders that could steer it, and enough solar power to run serious electronic gear. The weather explanation was never technically credible.

It also was not a single balloon. The State Department documented similar Chinese balloons over more than forty countries on five continents, linked to the Chinese military. Earlier sightings included Japan in 2020 and 2021, India's Andaman and Nicobar Islands in January 2022, and airspace near Taiwan in February 2022.

Almost everything else is disputed.

The Pentagon first called the balloon an active intelligence collector and said it had very high confidence in that assessment. In June 2023 the same Pentagon said the balloon had not collected data while crossing or overflying the United States, and had not sent information back to China. Brigadier General Pat Ryder said it was their assessment that the balloon did not collect while it was transiting or overflying the United States. He also said the United States had taken steps to limit what it might collect. That leaves two possibilities the Pentagon did not choose between: American countermeasures had shut the platform down, or the collection gear was never switched on.

The recovered payload held what Biden administration officials described as surveillance equipment consistent with espionage. President Biden at the same time said the incident was not a major breach, and that he believed Chinese leaders did not know the balloon was in American airspace. That sentence, from the senior American official in the chapter's account, opens a third reading: the balloon was built to collect, the trip across North America was not intended, and the top of the Chinese system did not know it was happening.

Michael Chase, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, wrote soon after that the timing, on the eve of Blinken's visit, was coincidence rather than a plan. The visit was part of a series of exchanges that Xi Jinping and the Biden administration had worked hard to arrange. For the civilian foreign-affairs bureaucracy it was one of the most important events of the year. The People's Liberation Army had little direct part in it, partly because Beijing was not interested in thicker military channels, and most senior officers were probably only vaguely aware of the preparations. Chase argued the balloon's path may have been set before the visit's date was confirmed and passed to the PLA. Even if the date was shared, planners who launch on weather patterns may not have tied that launch to a diplomatic calendar run by another ministry.

The Foreign Ministry, the chapter says, was not told in advance. Multiple sources indicate it learned of the balloon when American diplomats asked about it. The ministry that handles the most important bilateral relationship found out from the other side.

Chase named a structural cause. Xi's Central National Security Commission was built to make civilian and military security policy move together. Chase argued that Xi's very wide definition of national security, taking in social, ideological, and cultural questions along with military, diplomatic, and economic ones, may pull that commission off the job of coordinating the external pieces. He also pointed to a pattern of badly timed PLA actions driven by what he called the extraordinarily rapid growth in the scope and scale of its operations. Unlike the U.S. military, PLA leaders and staff were often working for the first time in new parts of the world, with new machines, in new domains, some of which carried political costs nobody had priced.

The PLA also had what Chase called false confidence about being seen. American military officials later said the United States had failed to detect at least three earlier Chinese balloon approaches in recent years. If planners believed detection was unlikely, and that even a detection would be hard to pin on China, they could treat the political cost as manageable. That calculation ended when the Pentagon publicly called the balloon Chinese within hours.

The diplomatic bill was specific. Blinken's cancellation knocked over the largest attempt to steady the relationship since the November 2022 summit between Biden and Xi. On February 8 the United States declined a Chinese proposal for a phone call between defense chiefs. Planned Defense Policy Coordination Talks were postponed with no new date. Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman briefed nearly 150 foreign diplomats from about forty countries over two days on what the United States had found about the wider balloon program. In May 2024 the Commerce Department added 37 Chinese entities to its Entity List, the roster of foreign parties subject to extra export restrictions. Eight of them were named for the balloon program.

There is another reading that starts from the years the program was not on television. Balloons tied to the Chinese military had flown over more than forty countries on five continents without a single international incident before February 2023. PLA researchers, in the 2022 journal Shipboard Electronic Warfare, wrote a case for high-altitude balloons that is different from satellites. A satellite in low orbit circles the Earth about every ninety minutes. A balloon can hang over one place. They noted that balloons give off little radar or infrared signature, and that most aircraft and surface-to-air missiles are not built to hit them. The 2023 flight partly matched that claim: the balloon was in U.S. airspace for more than a week before it was shot down, and the shot took an F-22 and a specialized air-to-air missile.

The route past nuclear bases matches a documented priority. Malmstrom's 341st Missile Wing is responsible for 150 intercontinental ballistic missile sites spread across 13,800 square miles of Montana. The Pentagon has described a large expansion of China's nuclear force, with projections as high as 1,500 warheads by 2035. PLA writers have also said balloons can serve as decoys, forcing a defender to spend expensive missiles and aircraft on them. In that use, a transit can test how fast a country detects, names, and answers, whether or not the balloon itself records signals.

Rush Doshi's reading of Chinese strategy documents lays out three phases: hiding capabilities and biding time from 1989 to 2008, actively accomplishing something from 2008 to 2016, and great changes unseen in a century from 2017 on. Inside that frame, one diplomatic loss from one collection flight can be priced as the cost of a program that serves long-term planning against the United States.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said the United States had taken steps to protect against collection, and that the overflight was of intelligence value to the American side, which was able to study the balloon and its equipment. The chapter notes the reverse as well. The American response showed China something about detection, attribution, and how a decision to shoot gets made. China did not stop the balloon operations. It did not apologize in any substantive way. After months of freeze, the relationship had steadied again by late 2023.

The chapter sets an older flight next to this one. On January 11, 2007, the PLA launched an SC-19 ballistic missile from near the Xichang Satellite Launch Center in Sichuan and destroyed the Fengyun-1C weather satellite at 865 kilometers up. The closing speed was about eight kilometers a second. The satellite broke into more than 3,500 pieces large enough to track and an estimated 150,000 smaller particles, many of which will stay in orbit for decades. It was, at the time, the largest field of orbital debris on record. By April 2019, 3,000 of the roughly 10,000 tracked debris pieces threatening the International Space Station came from that one event.

Australia's foreign minister spoke of an arms race in space. Japan's prime minister invoked the peaceful use of space. The U.S. National Security Council called the test inconsistent with the spirit of cooperation. China said nothing official for twelve days. On January 23, Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao said the test was not directed at any country and was not a threat to any country, and repeated that China opposes the weaponization of space.

The first Western reading was recklessness, maybe even a shot the civilians had not cleared. Stephen Hadley, President Bush's national security advisor, speculated in public that, after three failed anti-satellite attempts, Chinese leaders may not have expected this one to work, which would explain why they looked unprepared when it did. The ministry's apparent surprise and the lack of a ready statement fed that reading.

The test had a record before the hit. At least three non-intercept attempts came on October 26, 2005, in early 2006, and on February 6, 2006. Each try put the interceptor closer. The altitude, 865 kilometers, matched the orbits used by American and Japanese reconnaissance satellites. A 2006 PLA Air Force publication argued that a rising power could close a technology gap faster through space than through ordinary military modernization. Strategists had argued for a phased posture in space that began with a show of space strength. The chapter says the test fit that early stage.

The coordination failure was real. The Foreign Ministry was not inside the military decision. Chinese analysts and diplomats reportedly said they did not know the PLA's motives. Analysis of Central Military Commission deliberations, though, suggests Hu Jintao, as chairman of that commission, almost certainly gave explicit approval, and that the secrecy was deliberate compartmentalization rather than ignorance at the very top.

In 2008 the United States ran its own anti-satellite test and destroyed a reconnaissance satellite that no longer worked. By the 2010s China had moved toward tests that do not smash satellites, while building ground lasers, electronic warfare, co-orbital microsatellites, and, by 2025, high-power microwave weapons aimed at constellations such as Starlink. The 2007 shot established that China could hit a satellite. The later shift away from debris-making methods kept the capability and dropped the kind of backlash the fragments produced.

The same seam shows up in the size of the military that grew around these programs. The PLA of the 1995-1996 Taiwan Strait crisis was outmatched and could not contest an American naval intervention. The force described for 2026 has three aircraft carriers in commission, hypersonic missiles, a nuclear stockpile grown from roughly 20 warheads to about 600, and what the Department of Defense calls a pacing challenge, meaning the military the United States measures itself against. An overhaul on a scale unseen since 1949 replaced seven military regions with five theater commands, made the Rocket Force a full service, created a Strategic Support Force for space, cyber, and electronic warfare, cut about 300,000 people, and changed the doctrine from high-technology conditions to conditions of informationization. In April 2024 that support force was broken into the Information Support Force, the Network Space Force, and the Military Aerospace Support Force.

In cyberspace the chapter traces a similar arc from identifiable hacks to quieter access. PLA Unit 61398, in the period known as APT1, ran for seven years before the firm Mandiant publicly attributed it in 2013. Individual operators left mistakes that traced to places, phone numbers, and social-media accounts. Volt Typhoon, a later operation, kept undetected access in the U.S. electric grid for about 300 days using what practitioners call living off the land: using the target's own ordinary tools so there is no obvious piece of malware to find. Salt Typhoon got into major American telecommunications companies and reached metadata, the records of who contacted whom and when, on more than one million targets. PLA cyber doctrine calls for operations that paralyze an enemy's operational system of systems before air and sea dominance. The chapter says the 2020s sophistication of Volt Typhoon may be an original design or a forced adaptation after APT1 was exposed. Both fit. Neither rules the other out.

By February 13 the divers had the sensors. In June the Pentagon said the balloon had not collected on the way across. In May 2024 eight Chinese entities were listed specifically for the balloon program. The fragments of Fengyun-1C were still in orbit. China had not halted the balloons, and it had not offered a substantive apology. Late in 2023 the relationship that Blinken's cancelled trip was supposed to steady had stabilized again, at the APEC summit.