Trojan Horse Caused A Siberian Explosion

An anonymous reader writes "William Safire of the nytimes [nytimes.com] has an interesting column this week describing how the Soviets purchased bogus computer chips from the West in the 1970's. These chips caused what "was the most monumental non-nuclear explosion and fire ever seen from space." Fascinating story."

Comments

Just great

[d_lesage]

Let's cause an explosion that could cause the death of hundreds (if not more), and then gloat about it.

Cold war or not, this is just callous disregard for human life.

Quote

[mirko]

Instead, according to Reed -- a former Air Force secretary whose fascinating cold war book, "At the Abyss," will be published by Random House next month

So, it's more an ad than anything else, isn't it ?
And the fact that it ended that dramatically just makes me kind of sceptical... :(

Re:Self-serving delusion

[Jerf]

They didn't toss in the towel, they were forced to re-evaluate the viability of all stolen technology. Even "legit" technology would fall under scrutiny.

This would take time proportional to the amount of stolen technology, which is to say, a lot.

Sure, this didn't stop them, but add this and that and the other thing and that thing over there, and you get "lost the war".

Nobody in the article claimed more then "helped win the cold war" (emphasis mine), and I say that if you actually read the article insteading of projecting what you think it was going to say onto the article, you'd find that assertion perfectly defensible. I do.

Reading is fundamental.

Re:Disinformation

[pubjames]

Okay: You are a kook.

That's fine.

However, I do think we need a new term. People who express opinions about the possibility of dirty tricks by governments/government agencies are often labelled "kooks" or "conspiracy theorists", with the assumption that their ideas are not based on fact or logical thinking. However, there is another type of person that is increasingly common today. They are the mirror image of conspiracy theorists, people that - even when there is clear evidence of something funny going on - refuse to even consider the possibility.

For example, in February last year Colin Powell gave a presentation to the UN - remember that? Just in case you've forgotten, he said:

1) Iraq posseses 499-500 tonnes of chemical weapons agents.

2) Iraq has hidden warheads containing "biological warfare agent... in large groves of palm trees".

3) Iraq possesses a hidden factory equipped with thousands of centrifuges to make fissionable material for nuclear weapons

4) Iraq possesses at least seven mobile laboratories for producing biological warfare agents.

And other claims like this. Notice that he didn't say "might" or "perhaps", these were statements of fact. Meanwhile, in the UK Tony Blair was telling his electorate that he had seem incontrovertible evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, but he couldn't tell us what it was so we'd just have to trust him. Now we know that nearly all these "facts" were wrong.

And yet, despite all this, there is a certain type of person that is completely unwilling to even consider the possibility that our governments have lied to us. Many people consider that the intelligence agencies "made mistakes", or perhaps even a few rouge elements in the intelligence agencies might have lied, but not the government.

I think there should be a new word for this type of person - a person who finds it impossible to imagine those in authority acting in a bad way even that is a reasonable logical conclusion based on the facts. Or perhaps there is already a word for this type of person and I don't know it. Any ideas anyone?

The fascinating thing about Bill Safire...

[tverbeek]

... is that he's such a well-preserved specimen of his breed, and his era. This partisan propaganda article of his is a fine example of him reliving the Good Old Days, scolding Americans about the Red Menace, and gloating about the covert harm American "intelligence-gathering" agencies could do to the Godless Commies. The potential loss of innocent lives is irrelevant to him, because we were (in his mind) at war with the Soviet Union, for the very soul of humanity.

Any parallels to contemporary situations are left as an exercise for the reader.

There *is* a clear definition of terrorism.

[JeanPaulBob]

The primary difference between acts of war and acts terrorism is the target. When al Qaeda destroyed the Twin Towers, that was terrorism. When they crashed into the Pentagon, that was war. Terrorism is the specific targetting of civilians for the purpose of inspiring fear.

That said, certain elements of the US media would do well to remember this distinction. If I hear Fox News calling attacks on military installations in Iraq "terrorism", I'll start suspecting them of bias. :)

Re:Pentium I bug.

[rutledjw]

I fail to see how this has ANYTHING to do with Republicans, except that Regan was present at the time.

Further, there are plenty of technical details that are "glossed over", but this is hardly suprising given that the writer is not technical. For the rest, you're making TONS of assumptions for which you simply don't have the information.

These chips didn't have to be CPUs, they could have merely been ROM chips. Remember your old design classes (yeah, it's been a while for me as well, but...)? In that manner you want it to function and give correct results nearly %100 of the time (to pass testing), but give wildly WRONG answers when a certian condition is hit. Not hard to do. With that in mind, they didn't need cutting edge technology like their VAX clone.

Therefore, the situation being described is VERY possible and even probable.

Sure you can bring the system down, but not in a predictable way.

EXACTLY my point! If anything, the author described a process which he thought was much more elegant and sophicticated than it really was. Chances are, this Gus Weiss fellow was as suprised as anyone else at the magnitude of the blast.

Finally, the CIA would have no way of knowing that their goosed up control system would not have found its way into a nuclear plant.

The article said we knew they were buying tech for this project from a certian Canadian company. From that it would appear we had pretty good info regarding where this was going.