Posted on 07/11/2004 8:32:45 AM PDT by genefromjersey
Much has been said about the late President Ronald Reagan:how he stood up to the Soviets,etc. (You've all read the words.)What was not generally known was that he did quite a bit more.
"At the Abyss" is an account of the Cold War years-from Harry Truman to George Bush,Sr.-as told by Thomas C. Reed:an Air Force officer who actually helped design our nuclear deterrent,and who went on to become Secretary of the Air Force.
One of thepoints he makes is that Ronald Reagan became aware of just how desperate the Russians' financial condition was.They were spending 50 to 70% of their income on their military,and engaging in near-insane business practices in an effort to keep revenue flowing into their system.Mr. Reagan decided-against the advice of the "peaceful co-existence" contingent-to exploit that weakness unmercifully.
Shortly after making that decision, a ripe plum fell into his hands: Newly-installed French President Mitterand bypassed the usual channels,and told him of an agent-in-place the French had in the Soviet Government. He also handed him a thick dossier the French had compiled,which identified over 100 Soviet agents who had penetrated the western democracies,and which provided a straight-from-the-top "shopping list" of items the Russians would kill to get their hands on.
Near the top of the Russian list was computer chips and data.The Russians had already managed to place an agent into a Canadian computer firm.
With President Reagan's approval,the CIA approached the Canadian company-which was outraged over the Soviet penetration,and which agreed to cooperate.The Canadians produced an "infected" batch of chips,which had crash viruses, trojan horses,etc., but which could pass the most rigorous inspection.The Canadians then made the "careless error" of leaving the chips exposed-and tried to keep from laughing when the Soviet agent seized them and disappeared.
In the months that followed,the infected chips crashed and compromised most of Russia's computer programs.One set of chips-infected with a trojan horse-was installed by the Russians in their all new natural gas pipeline control program.The chips worked beautifully-for a while. Suddenly,the computer program decided to increase gas pressure in the lines by an astronomical figure: producing one of the largest non-nuclear explosions ever recorded on earth.Nobody was injured,but the loss of counted-on revenue from the pipeline was devastating !
Even more devastating was the damage to Russia's computers: Nobody knew which programs were accurate,or which had been compromised.Since computers could no longer be trusted,defense research went down the drain.
I could relate to author Reed,as I am his age,and share quite a few of his recollections;but those of you who are younger will enjoy this well-written book as well.
Look for it in the NEW BOOKS section of your local library !
How terrible it is to exploit the others' weakness in order to win.
HA!!! I remember being in the Air Force and getting all the B.S. drummed into my head about how communism/socialism's only goal is world domination!!!!
And to think I believed it!!!! And to think I still do!!!
The fact that communist Europe fell is one of the greatest accomplishments ever. Even if this was the only legacy he left, it would make Reagan stand out as one of the best. IMHO, he is the President against which all others will be judged.
It's too bad that now that he has passed on, we're only now finding out that he had titanium balls. As more and more things become unclassified over time, we will learn just how courageous he was.
That'll cost y'all 2.5 cents.
And, now we have another enemy who is only goal is world domination and again the left wants to ignore it, along with their counterparts in Europe!
Which I believed.
I've never heard it blamed on corrupted computer chips, and I don't really see how you could mangle hardware to create a particular effect in whatever software was running on it.
It'd be easy enough to build hardware that would stop working, but to keep working but to make many pieces of software fail in specified ways seems like a very difficult task.
I rather doubt the ways they failed were specified. Unspecified, unplanned, unexpected failures of an unknown nature would be what I would shoot for. Say, for instance, a trojan that would randomly select code that does arithmetic computations to make a powers-of-ten mistake, here and there, randomly.
Sounds like any one of my apps! I think I have a future in computer software espionage...
The wording I have referenced requires an explanation. Why did President Reagan become aware? How did President Reagan become aware? When did President Reagan become aware? President Reagan receives the credit for ending the cold war in much the same way Columbus received the credit for discovering America. They each deserve the credit because they were the ones who made it stick.
My opinion on President Reagan's involvement in ending the cold war goes like this. Reagan enters office and is presented with a report of the Soviet Union's strengths. This report is presented to each President upon entering office so the president can know which government programs are required to counter those Soviet strengths.
What President Reagan did different was to ask for another report, one no previous President had requested. President Reagan requested a report on the Soviet's weaknesses. It was not President Reagan's goal to merely contain the Soviet Union; his goal was its collapse.
It'd be easy enough to build hardware that would stop working, but to keep working but to make many pieces of software fail in specified ways seems like a very difficult task.
Coming from someone with degrees in both Electrical Engineering & Computer Science, I totally agree with you. The "infected computer chip" story sounds like a load of crap some creative writer came up with based on pop-science TV shows.
The real-world financial burden that Reagan applied to the Soviets by escalating the arms race is more than enough justification for their accelerated collapse. The author didn't need to come up with goofy, albeit entertaining, science fiction to further explain what happened.
I would suggest reading the book itself,rather than relying on my week-later precise.
Speaking of "titanium balls",Reed mentions that scarce and very expensive metal in a slightly different context.
Would you believe Russia was actually selling TITANIUM SHOVELS on the world market ? They were lightweight,durable,and grotesquely UNDERPRICED.At least one of the buyers scarfed up most of the supply,threw away the handles,and re-cycled the titanium-which it was able to sell at 4 or 5 times its cost.
I'd heard the stolen software version of the story before, and I'd wondered about that - that the hardware interface of a Soviet pipeline would be similar enough to a Canadian pipeline for custom software written for one would work on the other without significant rework strikes me as unlikely.
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