DrPostman wrote in message . ..
On 29 Sep 2003 17:19:35 -0700, (Jeff Root) wrote:

"DrPostman" quoted an earlier post:

On 28 Sep 2003 13:00:37 GMT, (Newssearcher1)
wrote:

(Thanks for posting this reminder. I've included a couple of other
groups that might appreciate this)

And thank you for quoting it. The original post is not on
Google, so I don't see it. Also, I never heard about this
incident before. I heard the first reports of the KAL 007
being shot down soon after it happened, and followed the news
closely for the next few weeks because I thought it would be
nice to know the details of how World War III started.

I had been sensitized by seeing Reagan's talk in which he
introduced the "nuclear shield" idea which became SDI. For
about ten minutes I thought it was pretty cool. Then I
realized he was just talking about shooting down rockets, in
a system that would have to react within about five minutes of
the first warning in order to do any "good". Meaning that it
was pretty much designed to start a nuclear war automatically
before anyone had time to even ask, "what's going on here?"

The story you quoted is actually such a perfect example of
what I was concerned about that I could have written it as
fiction.

-- Jeff, in Minneapolis

.


Stanislav Petrov ought to have a huge statue made of him.
Regan scared the hell out of me, and I served in the USAF
under him.

and yet, the whole Strangelovian concept of Mutual Assured Destruction
did keep the peace throughout the Cold War, and Petrov was a product
of that kind of strategic thinking. He considered it extremely
unlikely the US would launch less than an all out counter-force first
strike that would have left the US open to massive nuclear
retaliation, so his assessment that there was a glitch in the system
was the correct one in theory, and presumably one that would have also
been made by other, similarly trained Soviet officers at the time.