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KGB Software Almost Triggered War In 1983 (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Who here remembers WarGames? As it turns out, the film was a lot closer to reality than we knew. Newly-released documents show that the Soviet Union's KGB developed software to predict sneak attacks from the U.S. and other nations in the early 1980s. During a NATO wargame in November, 1983, that software met all conditions necessary to forecast the beginning of a nuclear war. "Many of these procedures and tactics were things the Soviets had never seen, and the whole exercise came after a series of feints by U.S. and NATO forces to size up Soviet defenses and the downing of Korean Air Lines Flight 007 on September 1, 1983. So as Soviet leaders monitored the exercise and considered the current climate, they put one and one together. Able Archer, according to Soviet leadership at least, must have been a cover for a genuine surprise attack planned by the U.S., then led by a president possibly insane enough to do it." Fortunately, when the military exercise ended, so did Soviet fears that an attack was imminent.
How is this suddenly news? I have watch TV documentaries years ago about this event.
They were announced. Happened the same time every year.
The man who saved the world in 1983.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
And a few years later, Lt. Col. Oliver North would propose how the president could declare martial law in the U.S. if THE PEOPLE opposed the administration's policies. For a news junkie, it was fun era to live in.
>> electing Rambo wannabe
Rambo came out in 1982 - Reagan was elected in 1980.
This was a large, well known training exercise. The Soviets were even allowed to send observers. They just thought that we were using the exercise in 1983 as cover for a real attack.
What a Country!
War games designed to test the enemy's defences with feints are a bad idea. The US and South Korea do them off the coast of North Korea every year, and every year it just escalates tensions again. They must think that the risk is worth it to check NK defences, but it doesn't help diplomatic efforts.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
LOL! You gotta love these libs! So stupid, it's funny.
Well, I would have said "John Wayne wannabe", but the young whipper-snappers don't know who that is.
Table-ized A.I.
There are stupid posts in this thread for sure, but the GGP isn't one of them...
I miss the old /. where people explained rather than complained. That was why your post was marked as a troll. You added no information.
For something comparable, the tough talk of Iran's leader affects our decision makers here and now. His quotes are quite often used by the GOP to argue their stance.
Either GOP is heavily bluffing, or they would factor in his blustery talk if there were a related international issue that required a snap judgement.
It's not silly, as you imply, it's dead serious.
Table-ized A.I.
Ever notice how these kinds of trolls (the ones who go around yelling "LIBERAL!" at anything and everything they don't like or understand) always use excessively diminutive language? "little heads" and implying that they cannot reach their own conclusions. I believe this is a specific type of projection; essentially the same fantasy that schoolyard bullies are enjoying when they physically abuse other boys they call "gay". Well, in their case, it is a repressed homosexual urge, but in the case of these Glenn-Beck-style trolls I think it is just a massive inferiority complex, possibly coupled with some physical abuse that might be hidden deep within memories of their childhoods.
Honestly, sometimes I think it's fairly common that countries periodically have to do things which say "we know you're there, we're not afraid of you, and we can fuck you up".
So, think of China building artificial islands in the South China Sea and then claiming that is territorial waters. Sailing past and waving the flag is part and parcel of reminding them that, no, this is international waters and has been for some time. Would you have them cede the waters to China and just let them annex it?
Sometimes, you need to remind the other guy that you're still there, and reality isn't defined in terms of what they claim. And you usually do that by telling me "oh, by the way, we'll be doing this right here for the next little while".
For some countries, diplomacy requires a little show of force to demonstrate you're not as intimidated as they think you should be of their supreme leader's tiny penis and huge ego.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
I was at an event where someone asked Gorbachev about the major economic changes in the early 1990s as the Soviet states re-organized into various coalitions after the USSR dissolved. In his reply, Gorbachev's main point was that it took longer for private industry to ramp up than had been hoped. I don't remember the exact words from the meat of his response; it was an "unimportant" preface clause that caught my attention. He replied:
"After Reagan defeated us Perestroika wasn't moving as quickly as we had anticipated and ..."
"After Reagan defeated us", that's how Gorbachev thinks of the fall of the Soviet Union. I'm no expert on US-Soviet relations in the 1980s, but Gorbachev certainly is. He knows the private discussions of the Politburo that historians can only guess about. And his four-word summary of the Soviet Union's fall is "after Reagan defeated us". Very interesting, I thought.
Looks like APK is off his meds again...
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
Everyone ending up in stim tanks (hyper realistic immersive vr video games) and personal holodecks is as good for killing civilization as all out nuclear war.
Not sure why this is being flagged as off topic. If the Reagan Administration was willing to overthrow a democratically elected government in the United States, no wonder the Soviets were scared.
http://www.historycommons.org/context.jsp?item=abefore86rex84
And some of us Republicans can manage to hate both Trump and the old guard.
Rambo came out in 1982 - Reagan was elected in 1980.
And the book [First Blood, David Morrell] was published in 1972...
War games are a common event for military organizations. Despite the fact that Able Archer was particularly aggressive, it did not result in anything but a build up of forces within NATO's own territory or International airspace or waters. If the Soviets had launched a preemptive strike under those circumstances, even if they had understandable fears, it would still be an aggressive action on *their* part. They would still have pulled the trigger.
Although I don't want to understate the problematic use of brinkmanship in the Cold War, I want to be clear that running an exercise is not the same thing as actually launching an attack. If the Soviets really came under attack, they would still have likely had more then enough time to retaliate with a substantial portion of their strategic missile forces. The very fact that they did not understand this underscores the paranoia the Soviet state operated under.
Now, if the Able Archer participants had something like having a bomber or two accidentally stray over the border, then you have something more like an act of war. And that is one place where having such exercises can be very dangerous. A small scale accident can be mistaken for something it is not. Without the exercise, the bomber either would have gotten out ASAP, or at the very worst, been shot down, but without the build-up, that is as far as it would go. With the exercise, a stray bomber could cause a war.
Great Grand Parent - 3 posts above mine. It was a reach, yes.
...Blame the model.
I read this article, the model was flawed, based on a "we'll attack when we pass some threshhold". Everything else was just to feed the model. They added a lot of things, so the model could only be calculated on a computer. But its a modeling error, the tool was a computer.
And I remember all of Reagan's years, and Carter's too. I remember that after he had been president for 4 years, he won by the biggest landslide in history.
So apparently most of the voters disagreed with your characterizations. That's historical fact, no opinion required.
If I throw my opinion into it, I'd have to say we valued intangibles like human rights, economic opportunity, peace, ... far more than you apparently do today.
> I think all the players knew that, by the early 80's, the Cold War would never be fought with guns (except by proxy), but rather by the manipulation of spheres of influence and politics
I think HOPED it would end without nuclear war. The Cuban missile crisis, the events described in TFA, etc suggested that it was entirely likely that one day, eventually someone would fire a missile which would in turn trigger nuclear armageddon- unless one side won before that happened. The trick was how to win without shooting. Kennedy and Reagan both handled that masterfully.
What I do notice is that from the right it does seem more often very intelligence / education centric (you are an idiot, a know-nothing, a sheep). When couched in a 3 line shit sandwich of insults with no actual intellectual content, I have to agree that it reeks of projection and insecurity. Kind of like trying to head off any valid discussion on racial inequality by calling everybody racists for talking about race. If you are truly such a goddamn genius that will be borne out in your rhetoric, but so far you are on the level of a human bumper sticker. Kind of hard to take your claims of intelligence seriously.
I see (and cringe at) Liberals do a lot of foaming at the mouth too, but this seems to be more centered in moral outrage. I think the kids are calling it 'SJW' now, speaking of reductionist garbage.
My favorite part (talking about both sides) is how the insult is always followed up with a straw man profile of the other person that is the WWI propaganda-poster-of-the-enemy version of whatever they represent, showing that this is about the level of understanding that the commenter has for the world outside their bubble. This one really cracks me up since part of the supposedly insulting profile is that this person has a high level of education in the field about which we are all arguing, which I guess makes him dumb somehow? Or is it because all they can do is ape opinions from an idealogue authority source (hmm, think I just caught another whiff of projection).
In what fantasy realm is the destruction of all life on earth the act of a sane man?
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
"I saw thousands cheering in the streets"
Funny, I saw it on TV too, it just so happened to be occurring in the middle east.
"80% murdered by..."
Not sure what you are talking about there...
"According to Bob the Border Guard, those sneaking in are mostly criminals..."
No, it wasn't Bob the border guard, it was Fusion, a Univision owned magazine's article.
http://www.mediaite.com/online...
But don't let the facts get in the way of your dialog. Oh, and did you know, Hillary and Trump are good friends, your candidate is just as much pro business!
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
It is a common tactic of the Left as well, they just don't come out and say it directly, but they like to treat the minorities like they can't get on without government help in every section of their lives, or that women can't get jobs anywhere they like right now, so they need help/to be tricked, in order to increase the numbers of women in STEM.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
Given recent history, and past history, that would be a sensible thought :)
Many wars have been launched by using a training exercise as a deception. The 1973 Yom Kippur War began as an Egyptian exercise, which they did so regularly that Israel treated them as routine. Many of the Egyptian soldiers didn't know it was real until they opened the ammunition boxes, and found live ammo instead of blanks, just a few minutes before the shooting started.
Um, amiga3D's post is unmoderated. Logged in users start at a value determined by their Karma. With Excellent karma, you get a +1, and an additional +1 that is optional.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
https://www.fas.org/sgp/otherg...
You could look up a classification guide, or just Google any of those dissemination controls.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
On top of all of that, it isn't like the Soviets didn't run their own exercises.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
Well, an announced non-attack would be the perfect time to do a real attack. We're going to pretend we're attacking you, so don't worry if we accidentally enter your airspace.
That city was St Petersburg, then Petrograd, then Leningrad, now again St Petersburg... I wonder why they didn't pick the more Russian sounding name of Petrograd?
Speaking of which, while St Petersburg is the name of the city, the oblast name remains Leningrad. Also surprising is that while Gorky was named back to Novgorod and Sverdlovsk was named back to Ekateringrad, Ulyanovsk - named after Lenin - remains that, and didn't revert to the previous name of Simbirsk.
Would love to see a Russian leader who embraces the Tsarist heritage but rejects the Soviet legacy. Unlike Putin
I loved Reagan, but one thing I didn't like was his conflating 'Soviet' w/ 'Russian'. Since the latter meant the Russian people, whereas Soviet could more accurately capture not just the entire USSR, but the Warsaw pact as well. Countries like Bulgaria and East Germany were about as much controlled by the CPSU as was Ukraine or Uzbekistan.
I liked the Newt group in 1994, but today, I just can't recognize them. Kasich of today is nothing like the Kasich who balanced the budget in Congress. I have no problems w/ him making OH a part of Obamacare if he thought that that was what they need, but for him to attack Trump on the issue of deporting illegals or automatic birthright citizenship for anchor babies, and then talk about picking winners and losers in the bank bailouts did it for me. Mitch McConnell today is nothing like the guy who opposed McCain-Feingold, and it's tough to see why he decided to be even more of a compromiser than McCain recently. I actually have nothing against Jeb, but I hated both the George Bush policies, and fear that Jeb would be surrounded by the same coteries.
In 2008, I supported Obama just b'cos I hated both Hilary and McCain. There was no way I was gonna support McCain given how he was throwing Conservatives under the bus. Romney I was somewhat okay w/, even if he lost. This year, I support most of the candidates, except Graham, who is at the bottom, and to a lesser extent, Kaisich, Bush, Christie and Fiorina, whose chances are dim as well. I can't really decide b/w the Donald, Carson and Cruz, but would happily support any of the top 4 if they got the nomination.
Thank you for the demonstration, it goes right along with what I was saying.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
My favorite part (talking about both sides) is how the insult is always followed up with a straw man profile of the other person that is the WWI propaganda-poster-of-the-enemy version of whatever they represent
I disagree that the democrats do this. For all the issues I have regarding the left, the democrats are very good at guarding their own while the republicans tear each other down during their race to the top.
Just look at the difference during the debates. How often do you hear Bernie Sanders rip into Hillary? He even downplayed the email server issues that was plaguing Hillary.
The Republicans can learn a lot by watching how the Democrats treat each other.
That's sort of like building a large bomb in your house attached to a motion detector pointed at the sidewalk and when a pedestrian gets too close to your house, he trips it and the bomb annihilates the pedestrian and your entire house with you in it. You then point out that it's the pedestrian that triggered it, which is true, but hilariously misses the point.
If you build a system that causes you to launch a preemptive strike without an actual attack underway, it doesn't matter who triggered it. You're still the idiot that created a system that almost launched WWIII when no one was actually attacking you.
Luckily, the Soviet people were not stupid, but the leadership mindset at the time was very much insular and paranoid. The extent to which that was true shocked Reagan himself badly when he realized that they actually believed that we were going to attack.
I remember life in the USA in the early 1980's. We were constantly concerned with nuclear war, but no one actually believed we'd be the ones to fire the first shot of WWIII. We had no interest in actually attacking the Soviet Union, but we were rightfully concerned that they'd roll through Germany with a lot of tanks. And frankly, given the fact that they had shown no qualms about doing so in either 1956 or 1968 in their own allied states, I'd say we had reason to be concerned. The Soviet Union might have been paranoid of an attack, but they earned that paranoia by exporting revolution and outright expansionism.
What the fuck is wrong with you? Have you considered seeking professional help? Just so you know your attacks on Coren now mean I hold him in much higher regard.
You can't have been alive at the time. It really did seem that Reagan may have been crazy enough to attack the USSR under the belief he was doing gods work.
Even if some Marine Lieutenant Colonel writes a memo advocating actions to take during nuclear war or mass insurrection, that doesn't either make it national policy or legal. It is nonsense.
Report says North authored plan to suspend Constitution
Reached by telephone Sunday at his home in northern Virginia, Brinkerhoff denounced as 'ridiculous' the report involving him and the Marine now at the center of the Iran-Contra scandal.
Saying he left government in 1982, Brinkerhoff added, 'There never was a plan to install martial law or martial rule. The whole purpose of emergency preparedness is and was to maintain civil rule.
'A lot of memos and lot of plans were written. We have a responsibility to plan for mobilization in case of emergency or war. As far as some evil plot ... it simply is untrue.'
The missing idea is known as MILITARY SUPPORT TO CIVIL AUTHORITIES: THE ROLE OF THE DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE IN SUPPORT OF HOMELAND DEFENSE
That's not martial law.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
I didn't really mean it to be insightful. It was spiteful and mean on purpose to show my disdain and disgust at the incestuous asshole's post. Not the one I replied to but the one he replied to. I am not really sorry if you were offended. Your sensitivities were simply collateral damage though. And I have some Karma to burn.
Trivia save! Thanks.
Table-ized A.I.
They're not so much artificial islands as augmented. In my opinion the territorial claim by USA's ally, the Philippines, on these islands is quite weak. The claim: An island was claimed by a Filipino fisherman and subsequently confiscated by the government. Meanwhile the Philippines has a very strong claim on the (now Malaysian) territory of Sabbah, but they'll never get that back. There was a very ugly and bloody attempt that led to years of political unrest.
If it acquires resources on instantiation like a duck, then its a shared_ptr<Duck>
If the Reagan Administration was willing to overthrow a democratically elected government in the United States...
Please stop and think about what you just wrote. The Reagan Administration by definition couldn't overthrow the democratically elected government BECAUSE IT WAS THE DEMOCRATICALLY ELECTED GOVERNMENT. (For the pedantic, yes, Reagan was part of the government, not the whole thing, but North's plan wasn't to arrest Congressmen.)
For example, you know the whole "Obama was born in Kenya" thing? Hillary's 2008 campaign started that during the primary.
Sanders didn't hit Hillary over the emails because he's not serious about running for President.
You haven't been paying attention to the Right Wing echo chamber in recent years. President Obama will suspend the Constitution via executive order (never mind that George W. has issued more executive orders), activate the FEMA camps (hello, Oliver North), send all the white men to be executed by guillotines (paper cutters) and send all the white women to be raped by black men (white fear). Angry old white people believe this will happen any day now (For the pedantic, a democratically elected government can turn into a dictatorship by convincing citizens to trade in freedoms for security from terrorists.)
Nobody with any stature on the right believes any of those things. The fever swamp left thinks that the Military Industrial Complex planned and executed the 9/11 attacks so Bush would have an excuse to steal Iraq's oil. It's not fair to hold that against Democrats in general because most Democrats (and indeed anyone with two brain cells to rub together) recognizes that theory as bullshit.
Nobody with any stature on the right believes any of those things.
No Establishment Republican believes that BS, but the base that listens to conservative radio does and they are the voters. Which is why Congressional Republicans are suffering a massive case of swamp fever and can't get anything done.
I also believe their Soviet counterparts deserve half the credit. Both parties (Kennedy vs Kruschev, Reagan vs Gorechav) were matched pairs necessary for the resultant peace.
One thing that makes Kennedy and Reagan stand out to me is that they did precisely the right thing at the right time -despite- everyone around them pushing to do the opposite. During the Cuban missile crisis, a lot of top people wanted to basically start WW3. The Soviet government, headed by Kruchev, pushed the US that direction.
Later, as the USSR was weakened to the point that the US could actually win the Cold War and end it, all of Reagan's advisors wanted him to play nice, to get along with the USSR rather than defeat them. EVERYBODY said the "tear down this wall" line was too confrontational. Reagan went ahead and got confrontational and won the cold war, very much making that decision -personally-.
I think Gorbachev was in a somewhat similar position- he had the wisdom to recognize that statist communism wasn't working, and markets had to be opened. That recognition of the failure of the soviet ideology wasn't popular.
I don't know that Kruschev was in the same boat. A lot of people in his position probably would have done more or less the same thing he did.
Do you think vaccines cause autism? Because apparently all liberal Democrats do.
Do you think vaccines cause autism? Because apparently all liberal Democrats do.
You seem willfully ignorant of liberal Democrats, as they believe in government healthcare. Republicans, not so much.
http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2015-02-04/why-do-republicans-have-such-a-hard-time-with-vaccines-
I know I shouldn't do this as it is picking on the disabled. But you and I have a seriously different understanding of crushed if you think Coren came off badly. Mate I don't think there is anyone on this site that gets crushed as often and as repeatedly as you do. You might think Coren has a million sock puppets that are busy downmodding you but the truth is you are the red headed step child of the slashdot family and it's you that gets crushed, not the people you decide to stalk.
Yes, I was alive then. The Soviets didn't buttsecks Reagan like they do The Zero.
Thank you for the defense, but it is all good. I think he honestly knows he is a huge troll, but he has this need to claim otherwise. It doesn't bother me, and for those who it annoys, just click the title of his posts and they don't exist for you anymore.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
I think these posts are done by a script he runs, I don't think APK honestly copy pastes these, as there are often numbering errors (1, 2, 3, 5, 4) or missing posts (1, 2, 3/5, but no 4 or 5), and if frequently misses some of my posts to reply to, though it appears he intends to post on every post.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
You double posted your fake response APK, you really should be more careful of that, it might make more people see how it is you agreeing with yourself.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
Do you think vaccines cause autism? Because apparently all liberal Democrats do.
You seem willfully ignorant of liberal Democrats...
No shit? That's the entire point of the thread.
OF COURSE it's unfair to accuse all liberal Democrats of being 9/11 Truthers or thinking that vaccines cause autism. There's only a couple people in the dickhead left that believe those things, and that set includes NOBODY with any power. You're doing the converse, by claiming that a few people on the dickhead right represent all conservatives. And you're doing this because at this point, you're obviously a fundamentally dishonest person.
Since you're arguing the "point" about vaccines instead of the point about "You can't point at the Dickhead wing of $party and claim it represents all of $party," it's clear that you're not reading what I'm writing. I'm done with this conversation. Don't even bother typing a response.
No worries Coren. I figured you were pretty comfortable in your self and not considering ending it all because of APK. I was just in a grumpy mood last night and fancied kicking a troll.
I have to admit that APK annoys me less than all the Cow goes Moo and Gay Nigga auto posts.
And you're doing this because at this point, you're obviously a fundamentally dishonest person.
I used to be a Republican. I'm speaking from experience. Doesn't help that my Tea Party relatives in Idaho keep emailing every little thing that comes out of the right wing echo chamber.
Don't even bother typing a response.
You accused me of being a dishonest person and don't want me to respond? You must be new around here.