I have seen a television interview with this guy. Living in a crappy little pensioner’s apartment in Moscow. Someone really should take up a collection for him.
He said all his training taught him that if the US ever launched on the Soviets it would be massive, not two or three missiles. So he ignored the false signal. For that he was summarily drummed out of the military.
Interesting story and I’ve read about it in the past.
Soviet doctrine may have been an immediate counterattack but Stanislav thought something just didn’t seem right. Why would the U.S. launch 5 ICBMs......and then stop? It didn’t figure to him so he held up a response until it became clear that this was a false alert and that no launches had actually occurred. Thank goodness.
“...On September 1, the Soviets had shot down a South Korean passenger plane that strayed into its airspace, killing a number of Americans...”
They shot down a jumbo jet with a flashing light on top. Some spy plane! They murdered 269 people including eleven infants.
The most anti-communist and most conservative member of the House of Representatives was on that flight. Congressman Larry McDonald was a thorn in the Soviet side with his constant support of Eastern European dissidents through his Western Goals Foundation. McDonald had recently become the Chairman of the John Birch Society and was bringing that organization back as a player. Would the Soviets shoot down a commercial plane to kill one man? Pablo Escobar did. If it was not done to kill McDonald it was quite a coincidence that their number one enemy in Washington just happened to be aboard.
“ground-based radar can’t see over the horizon...” LOL
Yes, thirty years ago, I was stationed at Spangdahlem Air Base, West Germany. We were in an exercise and we were in our chem gear doing our jobs humping ammo and running the bomb dump 24/7. While we were doing this our future leader was smoking his pot and snorting his coke. I guess we were fighting the Cold War while all the marxists leftists were back home reading Alinsky and Marx. Yes, thirty years ago.
Thank you for posting this. I saw a documentary about this and couldn’t remember the name of the exercise that we were conducting at the time. Thankfully, the article does reference it as AbleARcher83.
I was stationed at SHAPE during Desert Storm as a Crypto Specialist. I was very likely running the same Crypto room in the bunker as was doing the AbleArcher exercises!