peterr@utcsrgv.UUCP (Peter Rowley) (09/06/83)
Random notes on KAL flight 7:
- I was dismayed by the news coverage of this event, with mostly one-sided
"The Soviets eat babies for lunch" reports. When Dan Rather called the
Soviets' excuses "lame" in a non-editorial setting, I was most surprised.
- Against this backdrop, the coverage in the Friday New York Times was very
impressive, with a good deal of excellent background material, including:
- the Israeli downing of a Libyan airliner in 1972
- reports that 6 Soviet colonels had been shot some years ago for letting
US spy planes penetrate USSR airspace
- reports of recent development of military facilities on the Soviet
islands and their highly strategic importance (contradicting Schultz's
statement that there was nothing sensitive in the area)
- On the CBC weeknightly news program, the Journal, a person working for a
military science magazine (not Aviation Week, but I can't remember the
title) said he was sure that KAL 7 was a spy plane, as KAL flights have a
history of flying over Soviet territory far more than mere chance would
predict. He also said the surveillance would likely be electronic, not
optical, in nature.
- A newspaper (Montreal Gazette, tho probably from a wire service) report
that the flight computers are not loaded by keypad, but by cassette tape,
making the chance of an error quite low.
- That Aeroflot flights have been known to "stray" over US shipyards during
submarine launches, so the Soviets have the concept of civilian-flights-
as-spies in working memory.
There are a lot of questions left, and I hope someone is working on a good
book about it all. Because of all the questions, I have a hard time coming
to any moral judgements about it except to say that the USSR's after-
the-fact statements have been far less forthcoming than appropriate and
the US was too eager to make political hay out of a human tragedy. I agree
with the statements of the Canadian government, which have concentrated
on the incomprehensibility of the incident and the unacceptability of the
Soviet response.
One thing that bothers me is that I can't come up with any answer to the
question:
"If, somehow, the Soviets knew that it was a spy plane, that it had 269
civilians on board, that it was flying over sensitive areas, that the
knowledge gained could threaten Soviet lives, and that the plane wouldn't
respond to signals for it to land, what should they have done to force it
to land?"
I hope there's no similar dilemma lurking in the shadows that involves
nuclear weapons.