2023-09-01 04:10:45
While the 1970s were about the “relaxation” of the Cold War, the symbolic event of which was the Soyuz-Apollo program in 1975, in the first half of the 1980s, Gorbachev Until he came to power in 1985, until the announcement of “perestroika” and “glasnost”, it is not an exaggeration to talk about the freezing of US-Soviet diplomatic relations.
A little cold war
The beginning of the “little cold war” can be traced back to the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan in December 1979: in response to the imperialist policy of the Soviet Union, the US Senate no longer ratified the SALT-II treaty limiting the number of strategic nuclear weapons, the Carter presidency imposed a grain embargo on the Soviets, the US Olympic team (and with it the entire West) boycotted the 1980 Moscow Olympics. It was in this atmosphere that the Soviet Air Force shot down Korean Air Lines flight 007 on September 1, 1983, causing perhaps the most outrageous scandal of the Cold War period: 269 people (the 240 passengers and 29 people) on the Boeing 747 crashed into the sea staff) died.
Although when it comes to Cold War stories – the title of the unofficial 1983 James Bond film – “never say never”, we’ll probably never be completely sure what happened. According to the official version, the Boeing 747 passenger plane en route from New York to Seoul via Anchorage, Alaska drifted into the airspace of the Soviet Union due to an error in the navigation system. Since one of its radio navigation beacons was not working, the aircraft was switched to an inertial navigation system after refueling in Alaska, but due to its incorrect use, while continuing towards South Korea, the aircraft gradually deviated from its original course, so instead of going around to Japan, it entered the into Soviet airspace.
Searching for wreckage.
He violated the airspace, so he was shot
To destroy the Boeing 747 flying over Kamchatka, the Soviet air defense, which reacts sensitively to any potential espionage activity due to their nuclear arsenal accumulated in the Far East, first sent two MiG-23 fighter jets, but the fighter jets missed the target that quickly left the peninsula. Thus, when the South Korean plane again strayed into Soviet airspace near the island of Sakhalin, the Boeing 747 was followed by two Su 15s in addition to a MiG 23. One of the latter also fired two R-98 air-to-air missiles, one of which hit, if not hit:
the damaged aircraft began to descend and ten minutes later crashed into the Sea of Japan.
The Japanese first started looking for the South Korean flight that disappeared from radar, but the wreckage was still raised from the sea by the Soviet Navy on September 15, but the contents of the plane’s black box were not made public until the collapse of the Soviet Union. The material only Boris Yeltsinwas handed over by the President of the Russian Federation to the South Korean government in 1993.
For the first time, the Soviet Union denied having anything to do with the KAL 007 tragedy, since its downing was inexplicable: the Boeing 747 aircraft type, i.e. the well-known “Jumbo Jet”, was used only for civilian purposes (in contrast, after the modifications, it was also used for espionage taken with version 707). But the United States soon exposed the Soviet lies: since there were 62 American passengers on the plane, including a US congressman, the legendary Patton general’s nephew, Larry McDonaldthe president of the ultra-conservative John Birch Society also lost his life, understandably they demanded an answer to the “incident”, and they got it, if the Soviets didn’t give it themselves.
Evidence
The Soviet Union was destroyed not only morally, but also technologically, when President Ronald Reagan looked American TV viewers in the eye on September 5, 1983, in a speech broadcast from the White House, and announced that Soviet air defenses had shot down the civilian airliner. “This was a barbaric act,” Judged President Reagan, who said that this barbarism followed from the nature of the state-socialist dictatorship, and recalled the 1956 Hungarian revolution and the 1968 “Prague Spring” stomping on the cobblestones, as well as the atrocities in Afghanistan. He emphasized that the Soviet Union committed an assassination not simply against South Korea, but against humanity and humanity.
As evidence, they played a part of the conversation between the Soviet air traffic control and the pilot of the Su-15 that shot down the airliner, which was overheard by the Americans. In doing so, they simultaneously refuted the Soviet propaganda machine that lied about the downing of the plane, disguised as “information”, and made it clear through the eavesdropping how technically superior the Soviets were. In addition, two weeks later it turned out that the Americans already had a satellite positioning system, after President Reagan began to advocate that GPS be allowed for civilian use to prevent similar disasters, but this finally happened only in 1995, now Bill Clinton with his permission.
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