Cold War
US and USSR military and economic issues

On 1 September 1983, the Soviet Union shot down Korean Air Lines Flight 007, a Boeing 747 with 269 people aboard, including sitting Congressman Larry McDonald, an action which Reagan characterized as a massacre. The airliner was en route from Anchorage to Seoul but owing to a navigational mistake made by the crew, it drifted from its original planned route and flew through Russian prohibited airspace past the west coast of Sakhalin Island near Moneron Island. The Soviet Air Force treated the unidentified aircraft as an intruding U.S. spy plane and destroyed it with air-to-air missiles. The Soviet Union found the wreckage under the sea two weeks later on 15 September and found the flight recorders in October, but this information was kept secret by the Soviet authorities until after the country's collapse. The incident increased support for military deployment, overseen by Reagan, which stood in place until the later accords between Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev. During the early hours of 26 September 1983, the 1983 Soviet nuclear false alarm incident occurred; systems in Serpukhov-15 underwent a glitch that claimed several intercontinental ballistic missiles were heading towards Russia, but officer Stanislav Petrov correctly suspected it was a false alarm, ensuring the Soviets did not respond to the non-existent attack. As such, he has been credited as "the man who saved the world". The Able Archer 83 exercise in November 1983, a realistic simulation of a coordinated NATO nuclear release, was perhaps the most dangerous moment since the Cuban Missile Crisis, as the Soviet leadership feared that a nuclear attack might be imminent.
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