Never heard about this one before. It was recovered by the Soviet Union after Apollo 13 launch 1970 and a secret mission to Murmansk load it onto US Coastguard cutter Southwind Sept 6. Could they really have just launched boiler plates? Isn't this proof that the US and Soviet Union were in cahoots during the cold war? ri34j
So you'd like to make a blanket statement about a conflict lasting 40 years on the basis of one event lasting a few days (the amount of time the
Southwind was in Murmansk)? How about I make a blanket statement that "
The Cuban Missile Crisis is proof that the USA and USSR were on the edge of nuclear holocaust throughout the Cold War". Consider, after all, that the CMC lasted
13 days.
And anyway, collusion theories about the Cold War have another hurdle to cross: Who on each side of the "fake" conflict knew it was fake? Consider that on both sides, the people who knew had to come into possession of that knowledge. Every senior military official, diplomat, politician...whatever...had to start out as a snotty-nosed lieutenant, consular official or state party official of some sort before they reached the top of the relevant seniority ladder.
Then what? They get promoted to a certain level, and on their first day on the job they get called into an office and have it explained to them that everything they'd known up to then about the Cold War was wrong: all those people shot trying to cross the Berlin Wall, all those maneuverings of opposing submarines deep in the Earth's oceans, all those ballistic missile tests, all those shipments of arms to conflicts where Our Allies were fighting Them or Their Allies, all that propaganda and ritualised name-calling...all for nothing.
And yet, throughout the Cold War, all those people in the know of How Things Really Were never once spilled the beans to their underlings who thought it was all real?
Sorry, but, as my kids would say,
Seriously?
