Aug 31 (EDT) -- KAL-007 Shootdown 20th Anniversary
James Oberg
This Sunday is the 20th anniversary of the downing of Korean Airlines flight
007 by the Soviet Union (Sep 1, local time). It was probably the second (to
the Cuban missile crisis) nearly-hottest point in the Cold War, as
Andropov's paranoid conviction that Reagan was preparing a nuclear sneak
attack on the USSR had their side near hair-trigger. Then this tragic
accident compounded by knee-jerking, and things tottered.... These days,
I'm most interested in any anniversary coverage with the theme of "questions
persist", mostly about long-discredited conspiracy theories. Anybody
interested in well-grounded in-depth assessment of the aviation catastrophe,
and the way it was represented and MIS-represented for political and
ideological profit, I invite to my home page collection of articles.
http://www.jamesoberg.com/kal-007.html
Jim Oberg
job...@houston.rr.com
N.S.
You're right about late 1983 being one of the hottest points
in the Cold War. But there's another lesser-known incident,
which happened only three weeks after the Korean Airlines
tragedy, that came dangerously close to triggering the start
of World War III.
Sept. 25/26, 1983, the Soviet early warning system falsely
indicated that American missiles were being launched and
heading toward the Soviet Union. Against overwhelming odds,
Soviet Lt. Col. Stanislav Petrov declared it a false alarm,
using his intuition and defying the military's satellite
monitoring system. It's a remarkable story:
http://www.brightstarsound.com/world_hero/article.html
This incident is closely related to the Korean Airlines
tragedy and its implications during the Cold War in this
way: About the time of the Korean Airlines incident, the KGB
sent a flash message to its operatives in the West, warning
them to prepare for possible nuclear war, according to CNN.
Because of the tensions caused by this incident and numerous
other factors, had Stanislav Petrov declared the nuclear
attack warning valid, as his instruments indicated, the
Soviet leadership likely would have taken his decision as
fact, tragically leading the world into a nuclear holocaust.
I'm puzzled why this incident isn't more widely known. News
of it first surfaced in 1998 and it was reported by some
credible news organizations (BBC, Washington Post, NBC and
others). But it never fully received the attention it
deserved. Wherever Stanislav Petrov is today, he certainly
deserves credit and gratitude. If it hadn't been for his
actions that day, it's anybody's guess what the world would
be like now, 20 years later.
N.S.