Word: ogarkov
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Kvitsinsky proclaimed, as he stomped out of a meeting with his U.S. counterpart, Paul Nitze. Four days later, the U.S.S.R. broke off the Geneva INF (Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces) talks on limiting missiles in Europe. The U.S. "would still like to launch a decapitating nuclear first strike," Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov, the Soviet armed forces Chief of Staff, charged at a remarkable news conference, as he rapped a long metal pointer against a wall chart showing U.S. and Soviet nuclear arsenals...
...Soviets had telegraphed their maneuver days in advance. At an unusual Moscow press conference, Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov, Chief of Staff of the Soviet armed forces, used colored charts and a pointer to illustrate how, in the Soviet view, U.S. proposals at START were moving "in the same direction"-toward breakdown-as the foundered INF negotiations. Ogarkov reiterated the principal Soviet START proposal: a ceiling for both sides of 1,800 "strategic launchers," consisting of intercontinental ballistic missile silos, submarine-launched missile tubes and intercontinental bombers...
...point, Ogarkov's presentation confirmed the speculations of Western Kremlinologists: the order to shoot down the plane was a military decision, not checked with Andropov, who was reported to have been on vacation in the Caucasus, or other Politburo members. The order was given, Ogarkov said, by a commander in the Soviet Far East. Without exactly saying so, Ogarkov indicated that he had been informed only after the Korean liner had been destroyed. That raises a terrifying question: Are Soviet military forces under firm enough control by the Kremlin civilian leadership to prevent their obvious hair-trigger mentality from creating...
Could the Soviets have mistaken their target for a U.S. RC-135 reconnaissance plane that had been on a mission in the region near where the Korean jet went off course? Marshal Ogarkov reiterated the Soviet claim that the KAL plane was on a spy mission and flew in tandem with the RC-135 for ten minutes so that the blips of the two planes merged on Soviet radar screens. When they separated, he implied, the Soviets could not tell which was which. U.S. officials dismiss this scenario as ludicrous. The two planes, they say, passed each other 86 miles...
...system known as Identification: Friend or Foe (IFF). This device, which is ordinarily used only by the military, allows allied planes to identify themselves to each other by correctly responding to secret electronic passwords. The Korean jet, of course, did not identify itself as a Soviet-aligned plane. Marshal Ogarkov said that Soviet pilots "repeatedly tried to contact the intruder" on the frequency assigned for international emergencies, but there is no evidence of this in the published transcripts. President Reagan charged that Soviet planes are not equipped with the emergency radio frequencies because the Kremlin fears they might be used...