September 1, 1983: The Soviet Union Shoots Down Korean Air Lines Flight 007

The Boeing 737-230B that later served as KAL007,

at Zurich International Airport in Switzerland, 1980.

September 1, 1983, 40 years ago: A particularly chilly moment in the Cold War. Korean Air Lines Flight 007 (or KAL007 for short), a Boeing 737-230B jet plane, having taken off from John F. Kennedy International Airport New York, and refueled in Anchorage, Alaska, is headed for the South Korean capital of Seoul.

It never gets there: It goes off course, crossing the Kamchatka Peninsula, part of the section of eastern Russia known as Siberia, which it was not authorized to do. This is noticed by the Soviet Union Air Defense Forces. It then crosses Sakhalin Island, the largest island under Soviet control. This is also unauthorized. Both crossings were almost certainly mistakes.

But tensions were already high. President Ronald Reagan had been building up America's nuclear missile presence, at home and abroad. Military exercises in the Pacific had gotten the Soviets' attention. They suspected that KAL007 might have been a spy plane. A commander ordered it shot down. A Soviet Su-15 interceptor did so. There were 269 people on board, including Representative Larry McDonald of Georgia. They all died.

The late Summer and the Autumn of 1983 was the most tense time in the Cold War since the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962. It also included a false alarm that nearly led the Soviets to launch nuclear missiles on September 26, the military exercise known as Able Archer 83 that fooled the Soviets into thinking NATO was preparing for a first strike in the 2nd week of November, and ABC's broadcast of the TV-movie The Day After on November 20.

Things calmed down after that. Soviet leader Yuri Andropov died in early 1984. His replacement, Konstantin Chernenko, died a year later. Reagan found it much easier to deal with the next leader, Mikhail Gorbachev. His reforms, liberation movements around Eastern Europe, and some of Reagan's policies led to the end of the Soviet Union and the Cold War in 1991.

Gimpo International Airport, frequently mentioned on the TV show M*A*S*H, was replaced as Seoul's main airport in 2001, by Incheon International Airport. Korean Air Lines retired flight number 007. They now use flight numbers 82, 85 and 250 in flights between JFK and Incheon, and technology is such that they no longer need to refuel at Anchorage.

Anatoly Kornukov, the General who ordered the shootdown, was never punished. Indeed, after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, he remained a senior figure in the Russian Air Force, serving as its Commander-in-Chief from 1998 until 2002. He died in 2014.

Major Gennadiy Osipovich, the pilot who fired the air-to-air missile that brought KAL007 down, was not told that the plane was a civilian one until 13 years later. He is still alive.

Country singer Lee Greenwood has said that he wrote the song "God Bless the U.S.A." in response to this incident. It was used so often during the Persian Gulf War of early 1991 that it's easy to forget that it's an older song.

President Reagan announced on September 16, 1983, that the Global Positioning System (GPS) would be made available for civilian use, free of charge, once completed in order to avert similar navigational errors in the future. Perhaps that would have happened eventually, but it was a step forward in the computer revolution.