GASBAGS AT WAR
about 800 pounds. They were designed to carry incendiary/high explosive or chemical/biological bombs and depended on the jet stream to travel from Japan to the United States. Many of them successfully made the trip, coming down over an area from Alaska to Michigan to Mexico. The incendiaries were ineffective, as they were launched too late in the year, and it had been a relatively moist summer. No serious forest fires were started. Six people were killed near Bly, Oregon, when a picnicking group found the strange object and tried to figure out what it was. Another cut the power to the Hanford nuclear facility, where the military was producing plutonium, when it landed on power lines. Other than these incidents, the balloons were totally ineffective. If chemical/biological weapons were ever launched; they were lost at sea or in the forests, and had no effect. Over 200 of these bombs (or pieces thereof) have been found in the U.S. since the war.
Following World War II, balloons were used primarily in research. Military use retreated until the last few years. There is currently a resurgence in balloon use, caused primarily by budget constraints. The new 'Aerostats' are being used by the Coast Guard in the attempt to interdict drug smugglers in the Gulf of Mexico and the Carribean Sea. Most of the research and development has come from the Army, who sees the aerostat as a low cost way to monitor large areas over long periods of time. http://www.sciam.com/0696issue/0696techb... The aerostat operates without an onboard crew, but carries a full load of sensors for observing the area around it, and fiberoptic cable to transmit that data to the crew on the ground. From 60,000 feet of altitude, one aerostat could monitor an area the size of Bosnia. Captive balloons are old devices, and decidedly low tech; but their very simplicity is also their strength, and they'll probably be with us for many years to come.
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