tonyw@ubvax.UUCP (Tony Wuersch) (03/25/85)
In this month's issue of Transaction/Social Science and Society,
an exchange between Jeane Kirkpatrick and social science commentators
includes some news by Alec Nove on the KAL007 which implies that
an international news consensus pins the responsibility for both
the KAL007's going "off-course" and the KAL007's not responding to
frequent Soviet warnings squarely on the US.
I've not seen a final summing-up analysis on the KAL007 in the US,
except for an article in the Nation magazine, some months ago, which
is hard to judge since no where else have I seen any agreement or
disagreement with its analysis.
Aside from this Nation article, commentary I've seen in the US claims
that the USSR is wholly responsible for this tragedy. There is very
little news here which contradicts the Reagan Administration depiction
of the event. (Unfortunately, I don't regularly read the Economist
or Le Monde or Der Spiegel or the other journals I could read)
Can anyone sum up what is now believed to have happened?
Tony Wuersch
{amd,amdcad}!cae780!ubvax!tonywbaba@spar.UUCP (Baba ROM DOS) (04/01/85)
> Can anyone sum up what is now believed to have happened?
It appears that:
The Russkies were commencing a sensitive weapons test
in the area at the time of the incident.
A US reconnaisance aircraft trying to monitor the test
matched course with KAL007, hiding for a time in its
radar "shadow".
KAL007's subsequent course took it into Soviet airspace
and toward the test area.
Soviet air defences reacted to the intrusion relatively late,
considering the level of alert they should have been on.
Soviet interceptors made contact with KAL007 only as it
was about to exit Soviet airspace, and blew it away without
having positively identified the aircraft, on orders from
the commanders on the ground.
I have heard of no evidence to support either the assertion that
KAL007 was in fact a US spy flight, as the Soviets have suggested,
nor the assertion that the Russki commanders knew they were shooting
down a commercial, passenger aircraft, as some in the US have claimed.