Guk, the KGB chief in London, had been in Moscow during the shoot down, and he later took Gordievsky aside and told him that eight of the eleven Soviet air defense radar stations on Kamchatka and Sakhalin were not functioning properly.24 Dobrynin heard a similar account from Ustinov in Moscow.25
The telegrams from Moscow were passed to the British. Geoffrey Howe, then foreign secretary, recalled that one “very powerful impression quite quickly built up in my mind: the Soviet leadership really did believe the bulk of their own propaganda. They did have a genuine fear that ‘the West’ was plotting their overthrow—and might, just might, go to any lengths to achieve it.”26 Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who also knew of the reports, visited Washington and met with Reagan on September 29. She found him worried that “the Russians seemed paranoid about their own security” and asking, “did they really feel threatened by the West or were they merely trying to keep the offensive edge?”27
“We had entered a dangerous phase,” Thatcher recalled years later. “Both Ronald Reagan and I were aware of it.” Her reaction was to reach out to specialists. “What we in the West had to do was to learn as much as we could about the people and the system which confronted us,” she wrote in her memoirs, “and then to have as much contact with those living under that system as was compatible with our continued security.” In the days after the shoot down, Thatcher arranged a seminar at her country home, Chequers, with Soviet experts. A list of possible participants came to her from the Foreign Office. “This is NOT the way I want it,” she wrote on the list, demanding “some people who have really studied Russia—the Russian mind—and who have had some experience of living there.”28
Eight scholars were invited, including Professor Archie Brown of St. Antony’s College, Oxford University. Brown submitted a paper on the Soviet political system and power structure. At the seminar, Brown identified Gorbachev, the youngest member of the Politburo, as a likely future general secretary, saying he was “the best-educated member of the Politburo and probably the most open-minded,” and “the most hopeful choice from the point of view both of Soviet citizens and the outside world.”29
Thatcher was listening.
In the autumn, a wave of fear about nuclear war—a war scare—gripped both the Soviet Union and the United States. Soviet attacks on Reagan reached a fever pitch. According to Elizabeth Teague, a Soviet domestic affairs analyst at Radio Liberty, Soviet media in the years before 1983 had refrained from making personally abusive remarks about Western leaders. But after the Korean airliner was shot down, Soviet press portrayals of Reagan reached an unusually bitter level. “Reagan was described as dangerous, lying, unscrupulous, hypocritical, even criminal,” Teague recalled, “as a man who ‘scraped his fortune together’ by speculating in real estate while governor of California, defrauding the Internal Revenue Service, collaborating with the Mafia, and switching his political allegiances whenever it served his personal advantage.”
“In short,” she added, “he was portrayed as a man who could not be trusted and with whom it was impossible to do business.”30
The Soviet media repeated over and over again that the danger of nuclear war was higher than at any time since World War II. This may have been an outgrowth of Andropov’s demand in the spring for tougher propaganda to oppose the looming Pershing II deployments, and to rally the Soviet people for still more sacrifice at home. A documentary film shown on national television portrayed the United States as a dangerous “militaristic” power bent on world domination. The forty-five-minute film contrasted scenes of U.S. nuclear explosions and various U.S. missiles with scenes of war victims, Soviet war memorials and declarations of Moscow’s peaceful intentions. An internal letter to Communist Party members warned of a deterioration of relations with the United States over the next several years.31 Svetlana Savranskaya, a university student in Moscow that autumn, recalled the war scare was very real, especially for older people. They were taken into shelters once a week for civil defense lessons. They were told they would have only eleven minutes to find shelter before the bombs would arrive from Europe. “I remember going home and looking up at a map and asking, how long would it take the missiles to hit from the United States?” she said.32
At Camp David for Columbus Day weekend, Reagan watched the videotape of a forthcoming made-for-television movie, The Day After, about a fictional nuclear attack on a typical American city, Lawrence, Kansas. The film, starring Jason Robards, was scheduled for nationwide broadcast in November. It portrayed a bucolic and happy Midwestern town, the home of the University of Kansas, with boys playing football in the late-afternoon sun, a farm family preparing for a wedding, games of horseshoes in the backyard—the America that Reagan had long idealized. Then, in the background, news reports carry word of a crisis in Europe that blossoms into a full-scale nuclear alert. “We are not talking Hiroshima here,” says one character in the film. “Hiroshima was peanuts.” The crisis quickly spins out of control and European cities are hit with tactical nuclear weapons. Then, all eyes of Lawrence, Kansas, are cast skyward as America’s Minuteman missiles are fired at the Soviet Union from nearby military bases. The B-52s take off. Within thirty minutes, the Soviet missiles arrive and hit Lawrence, setting off the blast, heat and fallout of nuclear explosions. In the second half of the film, Robards, who plays a hospital surgeon, roams through a devastated landscape. He turns pale and his hair falls out from the radiation. He sees sickness, disease and lawlessness. When Robards urges a pregnant woman who survived the blast to have hope, she retorts, “Hope for what? We knew the score, we knew all about bombs and fallout, we knew this could happen for forty years and no one was interested! Tell me about hope!”
The film highlighted many of the fears of the day about nuclear war. It called attention to nuclear winter—that after a nuclear blast, the climate would change and snow would fall in summer.
In his diary, Reagan wrote:
Columbus Day. In the morning at Camp D. I ran the tape of the movie ABC is running on the air November 20. It’s called “The Day After.” It has Lawrence, Kansas wiped out in a nuclear war with Russia. It is powerfully done, all $7 mil. worth. It’s very effective & left me greatly depressed. So far they haven’t sold any of the 25 spot ads scheduled & I can see why…My own reaction was one of our having to do all we can to have a deterrent & to see there is never a nuclear war.33
Edmund Morris, Reagan’s official biographer, said the film left Reagan “dazed” and produced the only admission he could find in Reagan’s papers that he was “greatly depressed.” Four days later, he said, Reagan was “still fighting off the depression caused by The Day After.”34
The next day, October 11, Jack F. Matlock Jr., the top Soviet specialist on the National Security Council, met a Soviet journalist he had known in earlier tours in Moscow. Sergei Vishnevsky, fifty-three, was a veteran columnist from Pravda. Matlock assumed he was bringing a message of some kind—Vishnevsky had good party connections and perhaps KGB connections too. “His trade is propaganda and his specialty the U.S.,” Matlock wrote in a memo afterward. They met at a cafeteria across the street from the Old Executive Office Building.
Vishnevsky was direct, so intent on making his points that he did not stop to debate Matlock on anything. His message: “The state of U.S.-Soviet relations has deteriorated to a dangerous point. Many in the Soviet public are asking if war is imminent.” Vishnevsky told Matlock he was worried that Andropov’s September 28 statement “was virtually unprecedented and is a reflection of the leadership’s current frustration…” While the point of the Andropov warning was, in part, to prepare the Soviet people for belt-tightening, Vishnevsky said “the leadership is convinced that the Reagan administration is out to bring their system down and will give no quarter; therefore they have no choice but to hunker down and fight back.”35