Sao Paulo
The balloon crisis between the United States and China is escalating day by day, bringing echoes of the first edition of the Cold War between the superpowers, in which Washington faced Moscow from 1945 to 1991.
The Americans were the first to locate and intercept an alleged Chinese spy balloon that passed over their territory on the 4th, dropping three other suspicious objects here from Friday (10). Now Beijing is reminding that its airspace has been violated by similar floaters more than 10 times in the past year.
Both sides deny the obvious: spying on rivals is a profession as old as war itself, and the crisis takes on drama as it threatens the ongoing rapprochement between Xi Jinping and Joe Biden at the initiative of the Chinese leader. Balloons go handinhand with the antiBeijing wings of American politics.
The battlefield of this particular type of espionage operation is directly related to the Cold War resumed in 2017 in version 2.0. It is the northern region of the planet, near the Arctic, the front line of US defenses, since it is the shortest route bombers or ICBMs loaded with nuclear warheads.
From 1957 to 1993, an early warning radar line ran from Alaska to Iceland, which was replaced by a more effective line focused only on the Americas, covering 3,000 miles (4,800 km) and 15 longrange radar stations and 39 shortrange radar stations. .
It is operated jointly by the USA and Canada, united in the Norad (North American Aerospace Defense Command) system. Therefore, one of the suspicious objects over the Canadian Yukon was shot down by an American F22 Raptor fighter.
In addition to the risk of attack, sidetoside espionage attacks were common, leading to serious incidents such as the downing of an American U2 plane over the Soviet Union in 1960. The communists, of course, had their defense system.
Throughout the Cold War, proposals to reduce the threat were made, culminating in a 1992 agreement, the Open Skies, in which 34 countries (including Russia and the US) allowed rival planes to conduct regular reconnaissance flights, establishing a mutual trust that no one does would prepare an imminent attack.
Donald Trump, the same president who launched Cold War 2.0 to stem China’s rise in areas ranging from foreign trade to Hong Kong’s autonomy, saw fit to pull the US out of the deal in 2020, accusing the Russians of to hurt it.
The lack of rules helps create uncertainties that are everywhere: The recent nuclear arms control treaty, Novo Start, is stuck because there are no American inspections of nuclear facilities in Russia due to the war in Ukraine.
The balloon crisis also conjures up the paranoia manifested in periodic Cold War outbreaks. The now repeated sightings find parallels to the sickening anticommunism of the 1950s in the USA.
Of course, given the digital nature of today, the fever should pass quickly, with no greater impact on the public imagination than in the past the idea that the Soviets would infiltrate American society to undermine it was widespread and led to its cancellation sympathy from suspects of communism when that word was not even used.
The fear was so widespread that it created a phenomenon that has similarities to balloon toppling: that of flying saucers. The sequence of UFO sightings (acronym for Unidentified Flying Object) became so critical in the 1950s that the US Air Force launched a project to study them, the Blue Book.
From 1952 to 1969 he collected and analyzed hundreds of apparitions. There were always inconclusive or poorly explained cases, as the same Air Force and NASA recently reported, but the Hollywood idea of an imminent War of the Worlds had more to do with exploiting American fears of Soviet attack.
Not even Brazil escaped the wave in the last century, and it will come as no surprise if a balloon accused of spying for Beijing now appears over, say, the Amazon. But the fact is that the foam of political strife only masks the reality: countries are spying on each other.