[Valin]

The catch: Computer chips would be designed to pass Soviet quality tests and then to fail in operation.

[Simon666]

Look, the pipeline was probably already there in January as you can't built a pipeline in Siberia in the winter for the simple reason it is freezing the soil rock hard. You don't build that thing under 6 months. That means also there was already hardware and software on it. So I really doubt the Soviets would change existing software/hardware with something unproven you bought from dubious sources unless the existing stuff was really bad.

And the time window is just too small if you consider the plan is from January 1982 and the "effect" is in the summer of 1982 already. That would require the plan to be executed in record time by both the American and Soviet bureaucracy. Now the American bureaucracy is feasible, but passing the Soviet bureaucracy at such speed as well? If it would have been the 1989 explosion of a pipeline that killed 600 people on passenger trains, I might have believed it.

[driftdiver]

Soviet quality tests? Exactly what planet are you talking about?