don@allegra.UUCP (09/14/83)
I know a Major in SAC, and asked him about the Korean Airliner incident. He told me the following [unclassified] story: In 1978, a Korean airliner flew into the USSR and was forced to land. The Soviet high command sh*t bricks because the plane had gotten so far into Siberia before being detected. The commanding officers responsible were executed for allowing that to happen! In the recent incident, the airliner flew over one Soviet base and was not detected until it was out of their interception range. They called the next base which sent up some fighters to check it out. You know the rest of the story. His point was that the Soviet military is extremely screwed up. The base commanders were confused and frightened; not knowing how they could handle the situation in a way that would cover their own asses. The first base had already committed a potentially fatal blunder by not intercepting the plane itself.