Brother, they have missiles. If they wanted to launch an EMP first strike on their biggest customers, they'd use missles that takes minutes. Not balloons that takes days.
A second balloon has hit the Americas
A Defense Department spokesperson revealed the additional balloon after one was assessed to be flying 60,000 feet above the continental United States.
www.nbcnews.com
LMAO, but I should probably be shaking my head. If the Chinese (or anyone else) launches nukes at us in a first strike we will be able to detect the launches and have time to launch our intercepter missiles from the underground silos they sit in. By the way the balloon overflew those defensive silos. We would also have the time and ability to launch our own ICBMs at the offending Nation. If however a balloon is used to detonate an EMP first, we will be blind and crippled and there can be no defensive launches or retaliation strikes. These are known to be standard theory/tactics and strategy assuming you have enough knowledge of the subject to.be involved in the discussion in the first place.
As for the Patriot missile systems, they have a 93 mile radar acquisition range and no one with ANY idea about the subject thinks they are designed or capable of destroying ICBMs or MRVs. Once again a little bit of knowledge is dangerous.
And finally balloons can be steered and essentially hover over a site for extended periods of time (days) allowing much deeper, clearer and lengthy surveillance than satellites.
"Reconnaissance aircraft like drones and balloons are limited by how long they can survey an area of interest—an attribute Justin Bronk, analyst for the UK defense thinktank RUSI, calls persistence. “Even with something like the Global Hawk [the U.S. main strategic reconnaissance drone] you only get about twenty hours over the area of interest, and less than that if they have to travel a significant distance to get there,” he says. The ability to keep eyes on an area for days at a time with a low-cost platform would mean a huge increase in the military’s intelligence-gathering capability. "
Here's an article from 2021 explaining our our own newly developed advanced balloon secret weapons.
But by all means keep posting/mocking while pointing out you know nothing about the subject.
Why These Badass Balloons Are the Pentagon's New Secret Weapon
In a 2015 report for the American Leadership & Policy Foundation, Air Force Maj. David Stuckenberg, one of the nation’s leading EMP experts, wrote extensively about the threat balloons carrying bombs pose to national security.
“Using a balloon as a WMD/WME platform could provide adversaries with a pallet of altitudes and payload options with which to maximize offensive effects against the U.S.,” he wrote in the report.
“A high altitude balloon could be designed, created, and launched in a matter of months. There is nothing to prevent several hundred pounds of weapons material from being delivered to altitude,” he added.
He wrote in the report, “Peter Pry, a former CIA analyst and member of the Congressional Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from EMP Attack, stated, ‘Imagine the consequences of a balloon EMP attack that damages and destroys electronic systems at the speed of light within an EMP field with a radius of hundreds of kilometers. The Eastern Grid generates 75% of U.S. electricity and supports most of the population.” Pry also notes, “Virtually any nuke detonated anywhere over the Eastern Grid will collapse the entire Eastern Grid, not just the area within the EMP field, because of cascading failures that will ripple outward.”
Stuckenberg concluded in his paper, “In the case of EMP, the consequences of a failure to anticipate ALL delivery modes within the reach of an imaginative enemy could be immediate and widespread. As guardians of our nation’s future, planners must leave no stone unturned in the effort to deprive America’s enemies of low cost, lowtech, high-consequence military options.”
I will be pleasantly surprised if Biden/The Americans don't wait until the balloon finishes its planned surveillance and then shoot it down once it's completed its mission and has already sent all the info home, then and only then will he/they make a "show of force" and shoot it down,. Not only do the Chinese (and our other adversaries) now know we will do nothing about balloons overflying our nuclear triad, they were able to monitor our lack of response and are better prepared in the event they decide turning the lights out is advantageous to thier agenda whatever it is.
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I once met a guy who was convinced that he had talked to a guy who worked in the satellite industry- or so called. They claimed there are no satellites, it's all propaganda and that all comms works through hardware on the ground... It is not actually possible for the average person to verify the truth of this. 
