The illicit Chinese activity in our heavens may not have anything to do with surveillance at all
on Monday morning, it is hard to know why there ought to be a security panic in NORAD-land over Chinese “surveillance” of our landscape. We live in a world of pervasive, presumptive, ubiquitous satellite surveillance, and we have an open civilization with thousands of Chinese nationals coming and going more or less as they please. If the Chinese version of the KGB wanted to know my last McDonald’s order, they can probably get hold of it.
The theory is that there could be surveillance applications at that level, since the lowest-orbiting surveillance satellites have to stick to an orbital path and the geosynchronous ones very high up have limited optical resolution capabilities. The U.S. has even been able to make near-space balloons virtually transparent to radar, supposedly — but since these craft are still visible from commercial airplane altitudes , they often lead to UFO reports.
If you want my idiot half-baked amateur theory, well, friends, today’s your lucky day: when I see these balloons, I think submarines. Countries that run long-range nuclear submarines depend on a unique one-way “” method of signal transmission in order to keep in constant touch with authority and send cryptographically verified launch orders.
The problem is that the equipment needed to send a signal with very long waves is not small. Terrestrial VLF stations are enormous , and they require megawatts of power because you can’t build an antenna tall enough to be self-resonant with such long waves. And it’s a problem for nuclear command-and-control that these broadcasting stations are, well, stationary.
Would a system of “portable VLF” transmission be a strategically useful thing for a nuclear-armed state to develop? It probably would! Have balloons, which can dangle an antenna long enough to hypothetically allow for low-power VLF transmission, been suggested and tested as one solution to the issue?
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