It would have been quite the Saturday afternoon sight for beach-goers in South Carolina.
Two US fighter jets, armed with air-to-air missiles, soar above them. Then comes the launch.
One of the two jets fired a single ‘Sidewinder’ short-range missile at an altitude of 58,000 feet. It was 2:39 p.m. eastern time in the United States.
Eyewitnesses on the ground in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, witnessed an event that will shake American-Chinese ties.
Military officials at the Pentagon in Virginia, 400 miles to the north, were keeping an eye on a complex operation.
The impact of the missile was visible in amateur photographs taken on the beach. The impact was precise from 11 miles overhead.
The balloon, which had produced days of intrigue, laughter, and diplomatic drama, deflated in seconds.
The cargo beneath it plummeted more than 60,000 feet into the Atlantic below.
It was about 4 a.m. in Beijing. Officials would have known right away that their “weather balloon” had been destroyed. There is no doubt that they had been closely monitoring, if not commanding, its every action.
But it was some hours before their Foreign Ministry had drafted the predicted indignant statement of “deep unhappiness and protest against the US’s use of force to strike a civilian unmanned aircraft”.
As the sun rose above Beijing, it was setting along America’s east coast. But, six miles off the coast of South Carolina, a flotilla of boats and ships was already on its way.
Vessels and professionals from the US Coast Guard, US Navy, and FBI have begun collecting debris over a seven-mile region.
Divers and unmanned submarines will explore the sea floor in the coming days, which is conveniently shallow at just over 40ft. The weather forecast for the next four days is favourable, but this will still be a difficult operation.
It will take at least a day or two for a specialised recovery ship to arrive and remove larger pieces of wreckage from the ocean.
The goal will be to mine the debris for a potential treasure of knowledge and data. Investigators will most likely seek to reassemble the balloon’s payload and learn from it.
Among the things they’ll be looking at is whether or not the Chinese equipment contained any US technology. Officials in the United States have long suspected China of economic and technological espionage.
But, behind the spectacle on the Carolina beaches and the cable news stations’ “balloon watch” gimmicks, make no mistake: this is a very important moment.
There is no more crucial geopolitical relationship than that of China and the United States.
It’s a relationship that affects us all, and it wasn’t going well before the strange white speck emerged in the skies above Montana.