The Chinese sent at least one (probably several) “meteorological baloons” over America:
This doesn’t look meteorological to me, by any stretch of the imagination; it has a large antenna array which probably serves the purpose of monitoring the frequencies that would get absorbed by the atmosphere before they reached orbit, and probably amplifies and relays the results to a spy satellite in the geosynchronous orbit above. Considering how long it took the Americans to shoot it down, we can consider the north-American airspace basically undefended from ICBMs.
What the hell ever happened to NORAD?! All the guys there got retired or are dead and never got them replaced or what?! 🤔 Anyway, seems like Americans would fare even worse than in 1979 when this fictional documentary https://youtu.be/7lJ3mMzLZuY had been released. Even without Russian first strike!
They rely on deterrence – basically, if you attack us, you won’t manage to destroy everything, or even most of it, and what we have left will nuke you. It’s also arrogance – we’re America, we have nothing to fear. Lots of it is sheer incompetence; they don’t have effective air defenses and they don’t see a problem with that, or inconsistency with their general attitude that everything they have is the best in the world. It’s all deeply in facepalm territory.
This meme sums that up the best, in my opinion …https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/4e1e8d58cd332d1bb635572d1ee4b6d37ff349ab5ada766bcf1e5938d88e423f.jpg