Going Public - GPS Declassified: From Smart Bombs to Smartphones - page 87

which ordered flags to be flown at half-staf at all federal facilities. After approv-
ing nsdd 102 on September 5, 1983, Reagan addressed the nation on television
that night, playing a tape of the Soviet pilot communicating with ground con-
trol and saying (in Russian), “The target is destroyed.” The president devoted
his weekly radio address to the incident on September 17 and worked refer-
ences into a speech—devoted almost entirely to the arms race—to the United
Nations General Assembly on September 26. 17 On that very night, the world
was closer to nuclear Armageddon than anyone knew. In an underground mis-
sile silo near Moscow, a computer screen began flashing an alarm that the
United States had launched five icbms. Disaster was averted only because a
Soviet lieutenant colonel, Stanislav Petrov, correctly concluded that the alarm
was an error and chose not to react. 18
In all of Reagan's public comments about the ke007 shoot down, and in
numerous other settings in which he might have strayed onto the subject, he
apparently never mentioned gps. Speakes, it seems, made the only official
public reference to gps, while reading a prepared statement before a press
conference September 16. It came at the end of the first paragraph in a brief,
two-paragraph text: “World opinion is united in its determination that this
awful tragedy must not be repeated. As a contribution to the achievement of
this objective, the President has determined that the United States is prepared
to make available to civilian aircraft the facilities of its Global Positioning Sys-
tem when it becomes operational in 1988. This system will provide civilian
airliners three-dimensional positional information.” 19
That is all. There was no formal proclamation or presidential speech. (If
nsdd 102 addresses civil aviation's use of gps, it is unclear why information
made public at a press conference would remain classified.) Given the public
relations skills that earned Reagan the “great communicator” tag and the
approach he used to announce sdi, it seems safe to say that if the gps announce-
ment were truly a change in policy, he would have opted to make a bigger
splash. In any case, all gps satellites orbiting at the time of Reagan's announce-
ment already broadcast two signals—one for the military and another for civil-
ian use.
In fact, from the earliest days of planning a navigation satellite system, gov-
ernment officials envisioned civilian use. When Deputy Secretary of Defense
William P. Clements directed the services to create a joint program in April
1973, his memo included the following instructions: “The Joint Program Office
would invite concerned non-dod government agencies to participate in the