Originally Posted by
henra
???
What would be the benefit of one nuclear bomb dropped from a balloon???
The immediate response would be hundreds of ICBM strikes and would likely impede the initial attackers possibilities for second strike!? You couldn't conceive anything much more suicidal than this.
The Chinese are thinking "out of the box". I doubt they have any intention of putting nukes on these things. They are/were doing two things:
They were trying to demonstrate that they have a capability to fly over other countries with a low probability of detection. They got away with this for a few years. In the past few weeks not so much.
They were gathering vast amounts of short range comms data. My bet is that they've downloaded (and uplinked) gobsmackingly large amounts of this. The key stuff will be encrypted but they now have a very large database of transmissions to feed into their decryption/hacking/jamming processes. Not many other ways to do this. Only other way is people on the ground with covert receivers near enough to the transmitting sources.
For the tinfoil hat brigade there are other, very light, and debilitating/lethal weapons that are ideal for release from balloons/airships. Something non-lethal would be ideal. Just releasing a massive cloud of influenza virus would be a very effective weapon. Sick people don't fight well. Another option is to use them to carry incendiaries and start big forest fires. As we've seen, natural forest fires absorb a lot of military manpower and assets to tackle.
There is history of the use of balloons as intercontinental weapons. The Japanese Fu-Go balloon bombs for example:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fu-Go_balloon_bomb If they had been steerable and had solar propulsion (as the Chinese UAV airships are) then they could have been a lot more effective.