ARMS-D-Request@MIT-MC.ARPA (Moderator) (01/04/86)
Arms-Discussion Digest Saturday, January 4, 1986 10:36AM
Volume 6, Issue 2
Today's Topics:
KAL007
Balance Of Power
Conflict Resolution
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Date: Fri, 3 Jan 86 10:08:40 EST
From: Michael_Joseph_Edelman%Wayne-MTS%UMich-MTS.Mailnet@MIT-MULTICS.ARPA
Subject: KAL007
By request of our moderator (n.b.: My reply to you was returned
by your postmaster), a summary of James Oberg's review of literature
regarding KAL007 appearing in the October (oops!) 1985 American
Spectator.
The first author to make the "spy-plane" claims was the pseudononymou
"P.Q. Mann" in Defense Attache, May-June 1984. The use use of the
pseudonym fooled many who should have known better (including The
Economist) that the author was a highly placed source. He was not; He
was actually Tony Deveraux, a PR executive with no military, space or
intelligence background.
Deveraux claimed that KAL007 had been coordinated with the overflights
of both an American spy sattelite and a Space Shuttle mission. To make
his case he alluded to a 1964 incident where (he claimed) the flight
of a ferret plane had been coordinated with a spy sattellte.
Unfortunately, the 1964 sattellite mentioned was a weather sattellite,
and the shuttle and KAL007 were over the horizon from each other,
making VHF or UHF communications impossible. A full rebuttle of the
Deveraux claims appeared in the February issue of Defense Attache, but
was not carried by any of the news services who picked up the original
story.
The most quoted source on KAL007 in this country has been David
Pearson's piece in the August 18-25 1985 Nation. Pearsonmakes a number
of glaring errors including relying on what Time's science editor
refered to as "flat earth physics" to prove that USAF radars such as
Cobra Dane must have tracked the entire flight. He claims that the
nearbt RC-135 was "certain" to have tracked KAL007 through what was
essentially an affirmation of the consequent. He reports that the
dummy payload carried on the space shuttle to test the robot arm was
a "secret dipole antenna".
Another piece of astounding mis-information was Oliver Clubb's
"KAL Flight 007: The Hidden Story". Clubb claims that the crew of
007 turned off their "IFF system" while crossing the Kamchatka
peninsula. Of course, airlines do not have an IFF, which is a military
system; they have transponders. But Clubb goes on to say that KAL007's
"IFF" would have immidiately identified the flight as a commercial
airline. Clubb also quotes a pair of former RC-135 crewmen on RC-135
operational policies, equipment, missions and
capabilities, neglecting to mention that the cremen were involved
in operations fifteen years earlier in support of B-52's in Vietnam,
or that there are a number of different versions of the RC-135.
Clubb's final claim is that it is impossible that KAL007's deviation
from course could have gone undetected for two and one-half hours.
He insists that nearby ground control stations, with their highly
sophisticated radars must have tracked this "highly sensitive" route
from end to end. The truth is that airlines in the north Pacific
are entirely on their own; there are no air traffic radars to guide
them, and military radars would have ignored them.
The best single article on 007 has been Murray Sayle's in the April
1985 New York Review of Books. Sayle prepared his research for a
planned British television documentary. The show was canceled, though,
when Sayle's research failed to find a conspiracy. He recounts being
told "Conspiracies are sexy, accidents are not. We have to at least
put forward the possibility that Regan and the CIA were involved,
or we don't have a viable program".
Sayle recounts past accidental incursions (and one forced landing)
of flights on KAL007's flight path. (The airline forced down was
searched by the Soviets, who found no "spy equipment".) Sayle also
documents maintainance problems with KAL007's navigation equipment.
His theory is simple: KAL007 left Anchorage on a magnetic heading
of 246. Sometime after takeoff, the crew should have switched the
autopilot from magnetic to inertial guidance. Normally, there is a
flag on the autopilot that indicates the aircraft is on a magnetic
heading, but KAL007's system had had previous problems with this
indicator. The aircraft flew on a magnetic heading of 246 up until
the time it realized its error and correvcted its course, shortly
before it was shot down.
Sayle discounts a number of claims, such as the one that KAL007
purposefully altered its course to circle around a Soviet radar
installation. Much has been made of Soviet radar tracking data
showing 007 apparantly circling around the radar station. But this
was instanttly recognizable to those familiar with radar to be an
illusion caused by the aircraft passing by in a straight line path.
Other authors were less ingenious, and more inventive. Conn
Haliman, of the US Peace Council published a pamphlet claiming that
Ernest Volkmann of Defense Science magazine stated that KAL regularly
overflies the USSR to gather intelligence. But Volkmann denies he
ever made such a statement. an "Akio Takahashi", identified as a
leading Japanese journalist was credited with a pamphlet entitled
"The President's Crime". The pamphlet was published in Japan and
soon after in a Russian edition. But noone in Japan has apparantly
ever heard of Takahashi, and all the checkable parts of his
bibliography turned out to be false, according to Oberg. The book
also showed a number of distinctive fingerprints of Soviet work,
according to Oberg. In alleged spy sattellite data, "B" is translated
not into 2, being the second letter of the alphabet, but into 3, as
"B" is the third letter of the Cyrillic alphabet.
I encourage digest readers to check out the Oberg and Sayle articles
for themselves; any errors in the above are, of course, mine alone.
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Date: 3 Jan 86 08:17:29 PST (Friday)
From: Hoffman.es@Xerox.ARPA
Subject: Balance Of Power
"Playing With Apocalypse" in the New York Times Magazine, Dec. 29, 1985,
page 22 is a story about Chris Crawford and his Macintosh game, "Balance
Of Power". The sub-head says it is "as much about peace as it is about
nuclear war."
The author, David Aaron, has a 20-year background in foreign policy work
and was Deputy Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs
from 1977 to 1981. He calls the game "the most sophisticated strategic
simulation in America other than Pentagon war games," and concludes that
the game "is about as close as one might get to the cut-and-thrust of
international politics without going through confirmation by the
Senate."
"Balance Of Power" has sold more than 10,000 copies since November, and
has been praised as possibly "the best new computer simulation of 1985."
In one all-too-common end of the game, the screen says:
You have ignited an accidental nuclear war.
And no, there is no animated display of a mushroom
cloud with parts of bodies flying through the air.
We do not reward failure.
--Rodney Hoffman
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Date: Fri, 3 Jan 86 12:04:05 PST
From: prandt!mikes@AMES-NAS.ARPA (Peter O. Mikes)
Subject: Conflict Resolution
From: alpert at harvard.HARVARD.EDU
Armies are needed because war is an practiced method of resolving
international conflict.
From: Herb Lin <LIN@MC.LCS.MIT.EDU>
Violence and war is the means of last resort to impose your will. If
playing GO were, then both sides would have GO players.
The point is you have leaders/nations unwilling to take "no" for an
answer; as long as you have that, you will have war and armed forces.
Comment by Peter Mikes: Reply to mikes@ames-nas / all disclaimers:
It is not a LAST resort. The THREAT of war is the only currently working
method for allocation of the global resources. Surely leaders/nations
must be able to say 'no' sometimes. You would be freezing in the dark
if they would not. The problem is in inability to devise more civilised
allocation techniques, not in saying 'no'. The difference is important
becouse the former is possible, the latter is not...
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End of Arms-Discussion Digest
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