The Bomb: Presidents, Generals, and the Secret History of Nuclear War

by Fred Kaplan

Under Reagan, these sorts of programs were stepped up. In August and September of 1981, an armada of eighty-three U.S., British, Canadian, and Norwegian ships sailed near Soviet waters, undetected. In April 1983, forty U.S. warships, including three aircraft carriers, approached Kamchatka Peninsula, off the USSR’s eastern coast. As part of the operation, Navy combat planes simulated a bombing run over a military site twenty miles inside Soviet territory. The ships and the planes maintained radio silence, jammed Soviet radar, and transmitted false signals; as a result, they avoided detection, even by a new Soviet early-warning satellite orbiting directly overhead. An internal NSA history noted, “These actions were calculated to induce paranoia, and they did.” The simulated bombing run, in particular, incited Yuri Andropov—the former KGB director who had ascended to the Kremlin’s top post after Leonid Brezhnev died toward the end of 1982—to issue an order authorizing air defense units to “shoot to kill” any foreign aircraft intruding into Soviet airspace. Though neither Reagan nor any other senior U.S. official made the connection at the time, this order set the stage for the shoot-down of KAL 007 four months later. In fact, just hours before the Boeing passenger plane mistakenly flew across the border, an American spy plane, sporting a similar radar profile, had been spotted in the same area. (Of course, even if Flight 007 had been a spy plane, shooting it down would have b...