As america just lately despatched its cutting-edge B-2 Spirit stealth bombers to strike a strategic Iranian nuclear facility, contemporary satellite tv for pc photographs present a disturbing growth in China. On Could 14, 2025, a large, B-2-sized stealth UAV, with a nearly equivalent 52-meter wingspan, was detected at a categorized airbase near Malan in Xinjiang, prompting fears of pilfered designs.
This suspicion reignites the notorious spy case of Noshir Gowadia, an India-born engineer who performed a important function in creating the B-2 bomber’s stealth propulsion system at Northrop (now Northrop Grumman). With high-level safety clearance, Gowadia possessed a few of America’s most profound protection secrets and techniques.
However as soon as he stop Northrop in 1986 and started consulting on his personal, Gowadia’s fortunes started to go awry. In 2005, he was arrested for peddling extremely delicate US army data, together with stealth expertise, to China. FBI investigations discovered that he had made a number of journeys to China between 2003 and 2004, supposedly receiving $110,000 in alternate for his companies.
Gowadia was discovered responsible on 14 counts of violating US espionage legal guidelines in 2010 and sentenced to 32 years in jail. He’s serving his sentence in a top-security US jail, specifically the Medical Heart for Federal Prisoners (MCFP) Springfield in Missouri, the place he was moved in 2025.
Whereas Ashton Gowadia has at all times insisted on his father’s innocence and claimed an unfair trial, espionage specialists broadly maintain that the pilfered designs gave China an enormous benefit in its stealth flight applications. The revealing of China’s new stealth drone at testing has raised fears that Beijing will quickly have a stealth bomber equal to the B-2, and this may transform the world steadiness of air energy.