Korean Airlines flight 007 - 9 September 1983

Labor Day, the first Monday in September, is one of the four particularly American national holidays, the others being George Washington’s birthday, Independence Day, the Fourth of July, and Thanksgiving, the fourth Thursday in November.

I better cover my flanks against any advancing patriotic American who asks how about Lincoln’s birthday, how about Columbus Day? Well, Columbus Day is celebrated in only 34 states and I don’t know why the other 16 hold out on the great man, who, the recent American historian Calvin Trillin, assures us, was known to the Indians as the big Italian fella.

Lincoln's birthday is essentially a northern institution; it's recognised in only 19 states. To this day, the whole of the south, still mindful of its humiliating defeat in the civil war, officially ignores Abraham Lincoln as a national hero.

But Labor Day, the last national summer holiday, has been a national holiday since 1894, when President Grover Cleveland proclaimed it as such, only 12 years after a New York Irishman, a carpenter, suggested the idea of having one day a year set aside as a celebration of union labour.

In most cities there used to be parades with all the locals – the steel workers, the garment workers, the restaurant workers, whatever – flaunting their union banners in a procession lead by the mayor whatever his feelings about union labour, and by, if he had any political sense, the governor of the state.

The president always gets out an inspiring message about the dignity of labour. President Roosevelt used to go on the radio and celebrate the triumph of the labour leaders, who had succeeded in tripling the number of workers enrolled in the national industrial and craft unions in his time.

He rarely missed the opportunity of taking a whack at cruel or greedy or union-busting employers, naming famous names and ensuring their lifelong envy towards him but ensuring also the certainty that the American Federation of Labor and its ally the Congress of Industrial Organisations, would vote overwhelmingly for Roosevelt in the next election.

Well, as the song says, there have been some changes made, and drastic changes in the political loyalties of organised labour, a dramatic decline in union membership. In the high technology centres of California and Texas, only five workers in 100 belong to a union, a situation inconceivable 10 years or even 50 years ago. Big, once powerful, not to say dictatorial, unions are regularly accepting wage freezes or extending an old contract which once they would have insisted on radically revising.

You might have expected, I expected, that on Labor Day this year, or the day after, in the wake of the speeches and the parades, our papers would have been choking as usual with these themes but last Tuesday must have been the first Tuesday after Labor Day in history – in memory anyway – when you could search the first page of the New York Times and find no big survey of the celebration of American labour or any message from the president addressed to the beauty and the power of the American working man.

The reason for this omission, or perhaps forgetfulness, is not hard to seek. Of course for a week or more now we have all been obsessed the White House most of all with the downing of the Korean plane, south of Sakhalin island which if we had never heard of it before, we shall not soon forget as a jealously-protected, or what we now call, a highly-sensitive, Soviet strategic base.

This time, last week, I hesitated to talk about the dreadful incident, and I am glad I did hesitate because the only commentary it was possible to make then would have been a series of questions, such as how could a commercial airliner of any nation, drift 700 miles off course, how could the Russians pretend that the United States would be wreckless or stupidly foxy enough to use another nation's passenger plane to spy on territory all of whose secrets are easily visible to the United States satellites? Who may give an order of fire – is, in the Soviet system, the pilot responsible or the Soviet ground commander, or a regional commander, or could the word have possibly come from the Kremlin itself? Is a 747, a jumbo jet, not immediately recognisable even by night, to any pilot who has got through elementary instruction? And so on and so forth.

Well, in the wash of claim and counter-claim and the torrent of moral outrage that the United States and the Soviet Union are now trading, some of these questions have been answered. It is well established that in the Russian strategic air force command, the ground commander can himself order what they call offensive action the pilot cannot, and there is no requirement to clear such an order with the Kremlin.

This is scary enough in itself, implying that the word or even the knowledge of Mr Andropov is not essential before some regional commander takes it upon himself to deliver an order that might produce a catastrophe.

It appears that the Swedes and the Finns have a special anxiety on this point, which had not occurred to us. The Swedes especially cannot understand why the Russians keep on sending submarines, some of them with nuclear weapons, ducking into Scandinavian waters. The best or the prevalent guess is that the Russians are rehearsing the search for sanctuary in neutral waters which they could use in the war.

Of course, all military manoeuvres of every country are practiced for the real thing. But it must be disturbing to say the least to a people as traditionally as invincibly neutral as the Swedes to find themselves being dragooned by stealth into a warzone in what both the Soviets and the westerners are agreed is neutral territory.

One thoughtful commentator wrote from Paris the other day, "Important Swedish and Finnish officials have begun to wonder whether Uri Andropov can really impose political control on his armed forces". There can be no more grave issue in the age of nuclear superpowers.

To come down to some of the humbler puzzles, we do now have answers. I am assured by a commercial pilot with over 250 missions in Vietnam in his record, that it is inconceivable that any pilot could mistake the humped-back 747 for an American air force RC135 surveillance plane, even on the darkest night. For a plane attempting recognition of another can adopt all sorts of angles to see a clean profile against the high sky. On the night in question the stars were out and there was a half-moon.

On the other hand and it's galling for the White House to consider another hand after its artillery barrage of righteous and justifiable indignation, it did not help the American moral case to have to disclose the, well, yes, the United States did have a reconnaissance spy plane close at one point to the Korean passenger plane.

Now the Russians have a flat rule which was one of the first things we saw on television a week ago. We saw it on a plaque, an official warning, presumably circulated to the nations that fly in that part of the world, and among international civil and military aviation authorities, which says that any foreign plane entering the prescribed sensitive areas, will be shot down without notice.

Evidently some people have not taken this notice as seriously as was intended. It’s too late now to say, "I can see that that is your rule, very tough and fraught with danger but there it is". And once Moscow began to admit that a commercial plane had disappeared from their sighting and then reluctantly admitted that it was a Korean plane, they reminded us by showing again their prohibitive warning.

In his television address to the country last Monday evening the president played over part of the tape recordings of two Soviet pilots who were involved in the shooting down.

It took a little less than eight minutes from the Soviet fighters call to a ground station saying "The air navigation lights are burning, the strobe light is flashing", for the same pilot to say "I am closing on the target" followed by "I have executed the launch and .. the target is destroyed and, I am breaking off attack".

The effect of this playback was, among Congressional leaders, certainly to wipe out the lingering impression that the Russian pilots could possibly have confused the American reconnaissance plane and the Korean passenger jumbo. Still, at one point much earlier, they had crossed the same air space. Isn’t it possible that the Soviet ground control could have been genuinely alarmed by this conjunction, that some really threatening manoeuvre was underway in concert between the Americans and the Koreans?

I am pretty sure of one thing: that, given the very limited and selective information that the Russian people get on all matters that remotely effect defence, this point, the conjunction of the Korean plane's flight path with that of the American spy plane could weigh very heavily and persuasively with the Russian people.

The whole incident, we shouldn’t forget, was first reported to those people, as a devilish and rather clumsy American plot, as a manufactured incident to provoke a war. However grotesque this may seem to us, it only reinforces what the Russian people are told all the time, that the western powers, the Americans above all, are the steady and ruthless promoters of a climate in which an American nuclear attack can be justified.

Why don’t the Russian say that it was a frightful but understandable blunder? Well they are not in the habit of admitting blunders, mistakes, in anything that has to do with foreign affairs, or relations with the United States. It seems to me hardly possible that they will accept punishment or restitution.

On the subject of the safety of mother Russia, they are paranoid. Paranoiacs never apologise.

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