There is No Alternative (39 page)

On August 31, 1983, Korean Airlines Flight 007 lumbered aloft from Kennedy airport, refueled in Anchorage, and continued its journey westward toward Seoul. Most of the 269 passengers, I imagine, fell asleep as the plane chugged through the sky; perhaps a few insomniacs listened to show tunes or traditional Korean folk
music on the audio system. Among them were twenty-three children and sixty-three American citizens, including an American congressman. They were unaware that their pilot had made a navigational error and strayed into Soviet airspace.

The voices of the pilots who sent the civilian airliner plunging into the Tatar Strait were picked up by a National Security Agency listening station.
Yolki Palki
is a euphemistic rendition of the Russian curse
yob tvoyu mat,
meaning “Your mother has been fucked.”
The black box from KAL 007 was recovered. Suffice to say that the passengers' deaths did not come immediately.

Grey-faced, grim, and unyielding, the Kremlin's apparatchiks refused to admit error. They insisted first that the plane had crashed of its own accord, then admitted that their air force had shot it down, yes, but with ample justification, they said, for it had been a spy plane, dispatched by the United States as a deliberate provocation and a test of their air defenses.

Six days later, Ronald Reagan delivered one of the angriest speeches of the Cold War. Although his “Evil Empire” speech is better known, the text of this speech was in fact more belligerent, and given the context, far more minatory.

Thatcher made no effort to encourage Reagan to temper his rhetoric. Quite the contrary. “My views on the barbarity of this act,” she immediately wrote to him,

Reagan's speech, responded the Kremlin, was a compilation of “obscenities alternating with hypocritical preaching.”

I remember these events well. I was fifteen years old. I remember our very serious discussions at school. Was this the beginning of the end? Would there be a nuclear war? Would we be more likely to survive if we left the city? Would we
want
to survive? The Soviets were clearly insane: They had just shot a civilian plane out of the air. But Reagan was insane, too: There was no way he would let this rest—just listen to him! Maybe we could go up to Canada? No good, we concluded; we would nonetheless perish in the nuclear winter. Besides, none of us had our driver's licenses yet.

Do you realize how close we really came to nuclear war that autumn? Most people don't. I didn't, until recently. Not long after the downing of KAL 007, NATO conducted a military exercise called Able Archer, simulating a nuclear launch. Reagan's response to the downing of flight 007 had so spooked the Kremlin that Soviet leader Yuri Andropov and his top aides believed Able Archer to be the preliminary to a genuine first strike. The KGB sent out a
molinya
—a flash message—to its operatives in the West, warning
them to prepare for nuclear war. Frantic, the Soviets readied their nuclear forces and their air units in Eastern Europe. Soviet fighter-bombers sat laden with nuclear weapons on the runways, on red alert, their engines roaring.

On September 26, Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov sat watch in the Serpukhov-15 bunker on a cold Moscow night. Shortly after midnight, red lights lit up the bunker: According to satellite data, a nuclear missile had been launched from the United States. Petrov stared at his computer screen in incredulity. It made no sense. Just
one
missile? Why? Against his standing orders, he decided not to press the button that would send this information up the chain of command and precipitate the launching of a massive nuclear counterstrike.

Then the satellite spotted a second missile.

Then a third.

Then a fourth.

Then a fifth.

Everyone in the bunker began screaming. Sweat poured off Petrov's face. According to the computer, they would all be vaporized within minutes.

By the grace of God, Petrov decided this
simply couldn't be happening.
He didn't know what was going on, but it just
couldn't
be what it seemed to be.
It just could not be.
He broke his orders outright and refused to press the button. The sirens wailed as the minutes ticked past. The bombs didn't fall.

Petrov was right, of course: It wasn't happening. The signals had been caused by a freak sunlight alignment. A lone Soviet lieutenant colonel prevented the Apocalypse. The Kremlin rewarded Petrov for breaking his orders by demoting him and sending him into exile, where he suffered a nervous breakdown.
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“We had entered a dangerous phase,” Thatcher recalls in her memoirs.
¹⁹⁴
One week after the downing of KAL 007, Thatcher convened a meeting of top-flight Sovietologists at Chequers. She asked the experts to present papers on the state of the Soviet Union's economy, its military doctrine, its power structure.

A recently declassified memorandum, written by J. L. Bullard of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), summarizes the papers presented at the seminar. Overwhelmingly, the participants predicted no change of course in the Soviet Union: “The general message seems to be that the Soviet leaders do indeed face problems in a number of areas, but
not on such a scale as to compel them to change course drastically, still less change the system
.” This is underlined in the document, although it is not clear by whom—perhaps by Thatcher. One of the experts argued that “the enormous Soviet effort on defense is a dynamo rather than a millstone in the Soviet economy.” There was, apparently, one—and only one—dissenting view among the British specialists: “In a class by itself, it seems to me, is Michael Bourdeaux's paper, with its conclusion that we may one day see the collapse of the Soviet system from within.”
¹⁹⁵

A second FCO memorandum recorded that the meeting considered “whether British policy should aim at, in the words used by the U.S. Secretary of State on 15 June, 1983, ‘the gradual evolution of the Soviet system towards a more pluralistic political and economic system.' The view was reached that the realistic possibilities of change in the Soviet system were such that it was very doubtful whether in the foreseeable future any substantially greater diversity could be expected.”
¹⁹⁶