you re live in the cnn newsroom. i m jim acosta. we are following breaking news at this hour. the president declaring moments ago that he ordered the pentagon to shoot down the chinese spy balloon as soon as possible. the u.s. is in a recovery effort after a u.s. fighter jet launched a precision strike on the chinese spy balloon. it came after days of watching it float from montana, to missouri to the carolinas. here is another video of that strike. this is a tense moment in u.s./china relations. the world will be watching in the hours and days ahead. let s get straight to cnn s oren liebermann at the pentagon. oren, what more are you learning? i understand you were listening to officials explain how all of this went down. what can you tell us? it started on wednesday when president joe biden gave the authorization to shoot down the chinese balloo n as soon as possible. there were tankers and others to shoot this down. it was an f-22 that fired an a 9 side wind er. the ai
we heard from the president a short while ago. he was very emphatic that he ordered this balloon to be shot down. what more can you tell us? reporter: he was, jim. president biden was on air force one traveling from syracuse, new york, to hagerstown, maryland, when the military undertook this operation. president biden spoke to reporters just in the last hour where he tried to clearly lay out the time line of when he gave that order saying he told his military officials he wanted to shoot down that plane as soon as possible. take a listen to what the president had to say. on wednesday when i was briefed on the balloon i ordered the pentagon to shoot it down on wednesday as soon as possible. they decided without doing damage to anyone on the ground they decided the best time to do that was when it got over water within a 12-mile limit. they successfully took it down
state delaying his trip to china as a result of this. this was a brazen move. why would they want to be p provocative in this sense? why not, i guess? it operates in an ambiguous sense. it s not as provocative as senting it in. it flies at 18 miles an hour. nevertheless it s a serious provocation they knew was going to create a response, but not so disproportionate a response it would get way out of hand. so in that sense the balloon is
was probably a whole lot of work going into this throughout this week. as you said a minute ago, the president finally gave the order on first opportunity shoot the thing down when it doesn t pose a risk to the population of falling debris. and that s what i was just going to ask you because the president was saying just a short while ago that on wednesday he ordered the balloon to be shot down as soon as it was safe to do so. you were just eluding to this. there were folks in washington saying, oh, let s shoot it down as soon as possible. i mean, let s talk about had that been done, what kind of unintended consequences we might be dealing with and i guess juxtapose that with waiting until it gets over the water. well, it s not only the unintended consequences of debris, perhaps, jim, i m going to give something i m going to say something that i haven t heard anybody yet say in some of this reporting, and that is, yes, the chinese are collecting
planes are now back in the air all along the kcarolina coast just ahead of the efforts to shoot down the balloon which occurred a short while ago. we ve been following that all afternoon. pete muntean joins us now. pete, when the faa put out that notification, that was a pretty clear indication as to where this was heading. yeah. you know, the faa really sort of gave off the signals with arrows in red pointing towards exactly what was going to happen here. the shootdown that took place not far off the coast of the carolinas. you can see in the video there the contrails of the f-22 and the missile as it goes for that chinese spy balloon. the dot in the center there apparently the envelope of that balloon and we ve seen in other videos. the impact of the aim 9 side winder missile into the balloon and the instrument array below it falling to the ground