Retired Air Force Brig. Gen. Blaine Holt told Newsmax on Monday that the Chinese balloon would have held "a whole variety of intelligence" equipment and software to spy on the U.S.
Holt said on "Wake Up America" that "a proper and safe and conservative assumption that yes," the balloon likely could transmit data back to China in real-time.
He added, "There's a variety of ways to do that, there's even a variety of ways to do that to escape electronic jammers if we were trying to hold it up."
However, Holt said he's "much, much more concerned about the blind trust that we placed in this thing not having an electromagnetic pulse capability [or] some sort of biological weapons on board. What were we thinking allowing this thing to come over our nuclear missile fields when we couldn't 100% assure ourselves of intent?"
He later added, "there's a whole variety of intelligence suites and packages that you can put onboard" a balloon, "but that threat alone … is eclipsed by the fact that we couldn't possibly know what was onboard that thing and what the risk would be to our ability to defend ourselves if it's just that simple that if China wants to go to war with us, they just say, 'tell the Americans we're sending over a weather balloon,' and we're all going to be OK with that."
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Theodore Bunker ✉
Theodore Bunker, a Newsmax writer, has more than a decade covering news, media, and politics.
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