Going Public - GPS Declassified: From Smart Bombs to Smartphones - page 85

A Calculated Response
In the days following the shoot down, President Ronald Reagan and his advi-
sors drafted a National Security Decision Directive (nsdd 102) outlining the
administration's response, which focused largely on strategies to marshal world
opinion against the Soviets. 5 It is important to appreciate the dismal state of
U.S.-Soviet relations at the time. Five months before, on March 8, Reagan had
called the Soviet Union the “focus of evil in the modern world” in his famous
“evil empire” speech. 6 On March 23 he delivered a prime-time address from
the Oval Office announcing a program to develop a defense against icbms. 7
Officially named the Strategic Defense Initiative, or sdi, the program was tarred
by critics with the moniker “Star Wars”—from the 1977 George Lucas film—
because it proposed using exotic new technologies to destroy icbms during
their flight through space. 8 By December 1983 the United States was set to
begin fielding nuclear-tipped Gryphon cruise missiles and Pershing II
intermediate-range ballistic missiles in Western Europe to counter the Soviet's
ss- 20 missiles. 9 Reagan's military buildup pushed federal spending in 1983 to
its highest level as a percentage of gross domestic product since World War
II. 10 Thus, it was within a general state of high anxiety that the Soviet regime
committed the atrocity and responded to world reaction.
As administration actions under nsdd 102 gained traction, the U.S. Con-
gress, the International Civil Aviation Association, the International Federa-
tion of Air Line Pilot Associations, and the United Nations Security Council
expressed condemnation through resolutions (with a Soviet veto blocking for-
mal adoption of the un resolution). Numerous airlines and entire nations sus-
pended flights to or from the Soviet Union. For weeks, Reagan mentioned the
incident in speeches and interviews, using the shoot down to draw a stark con-
trast between Soviet values and behavior and those of democracies. Beyond
apologies, Reagan pushed for reparations to the victims' families. There were
passengers from thirteen countries aboard ke007, including sixty-six Ameri-
cans. 11 One was Congressman Larry McDonald of Georgia, part of a six-person
delegation en route to South Korea to mark the thirtieth anniversary of the U.S.
defense treaty with that nation. The other five delegates were aboard Korean
Air Lines Flight 015, which departed Anchorage only minutes after ke007 but
was 350 miles away at the time of the shoot down. 12 Reagan also called for new
aviation protocols to prevent a repeat of the tragedy in the future. Anticipating
that twenty- four gps satellites would be in orbit and operational by 1988, the