You busy-bodies have busied your last body.
Bush’s Fault...
Fascinating read
Fascinating.
SnakeDoc
This was very good, very humorous reading. I bet the CIA guys crapped their pants with laughter when the fireball went up.
Brilliant.
I doubt that story.
The Soviets were more than capable of blowing up their own stuff. Chernobyl, for instance.
What I wouldn’t doubt is the CIA taking credit.
You busy-bodies have busied your last body.
Timely article, what with the advent of Stuxnet.
Decade old news.
I doubt that we have the competency to pull something like this off today, and certainly know that we do not have the policy intent to do something similar.
The Commies are inside our compound today!
Great band! Loved their Christmas album. Tragic. Was it pyrotechnics gone bad?
I appreciate you posting this “old news” because I was but a child in 1982, and I have no memory of the pipeline explosion. The story made me think of the gasline explosion outside of San Francisco a few weeks ago. And then there’s the chatter from fed agencies about how there are rogue terrorists running around the country undetected. “We can absorb” a terrorist attack. Or so the president says.
Gee, ya think? I'd be really surprised if only one cosmonaut was a spy.
So, you’re saying that if I have a pirated copy of Lotus 123, my toilet might just suddenly explode?
Awesomeness ping.
Tom Clancy may have adapted this incident into the opening of “Red Storm Rising”:
First the gasoline. He closed sixteen control valves—the nearest of them three kilometers away—and opened ten, which rerouted eighty million liters of gasoline to gush out from a bank of truck-loading valves. The gasoline did not ignite at once. The three had left no pyrotechnic devices to explode this first of many disasters. Tolkaze reasoned that if he were truly doing the work of Allah, then his God would surely provide.
A small truck driving through the loading yard took a turn too fast, skidded on the splashing fuel, and slid broadside into a utility pole. It only took one spark . . . and already more fuel was spilling out into the train yards.
With the master pipeline switches, Tolkaze had a special plan. He rapidly typed in a computer command, thanking Allah that Rasul was so skillful and had not damaged anything important with his rifle The main pipeline from the nearby production field was two meters across, with many branch lines running to all of the production wells. The oil traveling in those pipes had its own mass and its own momentum supplied by pumping stations in the fields. Ibrahim’s commands rapidly opened and closed valves. The pipeline ruptured in a dozen places, and the computer commands left the pumps on. The escaping light crude flowed across the production field, where only one more spark was needed to spread a holocaust before the winter wind, and another break occurred where the oil and gas pipelines crossed together over the river Ob’.
SUNNYVALE, CALIFORNIA
“God almighty!” the chief master sergeant breathed. The fire which had begun in the gasoline/diesel section of the refinery had been sufficient to alert a strategic early-warning satellite in geosynchronous orbit twenty-four thousand miles above the Indian Ocean. The signal was down linked to a top-security U.S. Air Force post.
The senior watch officer in the Satellite Control Facility was an Air Force colonel. He turned to his senior technician: “Map it.”
“Yes, sir.” The sergeant typed a command into his console, which told the satellite cameras to alter their sensitivity. With the flaring on the screen reduced, the satellite rapidly pinpointed the source of the thermal energy. A computer-controlled map on the screen adjacent to the visual display gave them an exact location reference. “Sir, that’s an oil refinery fire. Jeez, and it looks like a real pisser! Colonel, we got a Big Bird pass in twenty minutes and the course track is within a hundred twenty kilometers.”
bump
The state-of-the art in 1982 wasn't highly-modular software written to industry specs and built with easily available compilers. If they stole the source code they should have been able to locate any 'Easter eggs,' so this implies that the software stolen in this story would likely be in binary (already compiled) form in which case it's highly unlikely to have run 'as is' on the Soviet hardware.
Embedded control software (especially from the early 1980s) is highly specialized and customized to the specific hardware it is running on. If the software is expecting the valve control port is at address 0x00F7 then it darn well better be there in the hardware or the software isn't going to work.
Great story!