following new details about that chinese spy balloon traveling across the country. new video into the cnn newsroom showing the balloon now hovering over asheville, and charlotte, north carolina in the last hour. and it could make it out to sea at any moment. the balloon was first spotted over montana on wednesday. china claims it s a civilian research vessel that blew offcourse, but the u.s. isn t buying that, calling the balloon s flight over u.s. soil an irresponsible act. secretary of state antony blinken postponing a planned trip to beijing in response. cnn s oren liebermann is at pentagon for us. oren, officials say the balloon doesn t currently seem to present a threat, but why is the pentagon also preceding with caution on it? reporter: so the pentagon has said for now that it will not be shooting this down, because of the risks from two different perspectives, first there s the risk to what s below, blow something up at 60,000 feet and that could be scattered over q
i think, and i m sure that obviously the administration has thought of this, how do we exploit this incident to further improve relations with china, and i think this does give us some leverage toward that end. here s another perspective, just earlier today, gordon chang, who is a senior fellow at the gatestone institute, had this to say on cnn. the chinese are being very blatant about this. they were over at the air force base in montana where we have intercontinental ballistic missiles, they went near the air force base where we have the b-2s which are strategic bombers, and this track could take it very close to king s bay georgia, where we have our bloomers. ballistic missile submarines. that s all three legs of the triad, and so really, this is an in your face operation by the chinese, and it really smacks of the very provocative and blig