Opinion | The Chinese balloon carried a message: We need crisis communications

Now, the Pentagon’s press secretary, Brig. Gen. Patrick Ryder, has announced the balloon was not doing surveillance across the continent. “We were aware that it had intelligence collection capabilities,” he said at a briefing last week, but the United States believes “that it did not collect while it was transiting the United States or overflying the United States.” He said U.S. measures to mitigate any intelligence collection might have thwarted it.

We don’t know exactly what the Chinese were up to — they insist it was not spying — but the episode illustrates the enduring threat of misperception and miscalculation, a legacy of the Cold War arms race that remains real and concerning today as the rivalry with China intensifies. The balloon was slow-moving, giving the president time to decide what to do, but there are plenty of scenarios for a crisis that would not be as forgiving.

The Cold War was haunted by the threat of a nuclear-armed missile crossing the oceans in 30 minutes or less, which required leaders to be ready to make decisions about the fate of the earth in a flash, and possibly based on limited information. Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev kept a sculpture of a goose in his Moscow office as a reminder that a flock of geese was once briefly mistaken for incoming missiles by the early-warning radars. There were frightening nuclear false alarms.

China is steadily expanding its strategic nuclear forces, from a relatively small number to a level that might match the United States and Russia, but it has refused to join any discussions about arms control. The Pentagon reports that China keeps most of its nuclear weapons on peacetime status with the warheads, launchers and missiles stored separately, requiring time to assemble them. But China is conducting exercises involving “high alert duty” rotations in which a missile battalion is ready to launch. China is also expanding its force of solid-fueled intercontinental ballistic missiles as well as liquid-fueled, and, according to the Pentagon assessment, this suggests it intends to increase the peacetime readiness of land-based missile forces by moving to a launch-on-warning posture, in which miscalculation and misperception become enormous risks. China is also emphasizing hypersonic-glide-vehicle technology, in which weapons move through the atmosphere toward a ground-based target at least five times the speed of sound, or about 3,800 miles per hour.

There are other points of friction with China that could risk miscalculation, including tensions over Taiwan and competition in the South China Sea.

Regrettably, China is unwilling to take up a U.S. proposal for a military crisis communications line between Washington and Beijing, Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced on June 19, shortly after seeing Chinese leader Xi Jinping. Such a hotline would be in the interests of both countries — the next crisis might not be as laconic as a floating balloon.