John Fund, in making…

John Fund, in making his case for how Reagan, Thatcher and Pope John Paul II were the team that took down the Soviet Union, has this intriguing story of how well our spy networks were operating in the 80s.

A new book by former Air Force secretary Thomas Reed reveals that the Reagan administration allowed a Soviet agent to steal gas-pipeline software that had been secretly designed to go haywire on a catastrophic scale. The ruse led to a June 1982 explosion in the Siberian wilderness that Mr. Reed says was “the most monumental non-nuclear explosion and fire ever seen from space.” It crippled the Soviet’s secret techno-piracy operation because they could longer be sure if what they were buying or stealing was similarly booby-trapped. They had reason to worry: Contrived computer chips found their way into Soviet military equipment, flawed turbines were installed on a gas pipeline, and defective plans disrupted chemical plants and tractor factories.

I’ve been reading a number of anti-Reagan articles this week, many of which talk about how he spent us into the cellar. While it’s true that the Congress didn’t restrict spending when they saw more money coming in due to the tax cuts, there was a method to the (assumed) madness of the military spending under Reagan.

That strategy rested on six pillars: support internal disruption in Soviet satellites, especially Poland; dry up sources of hard currency; overload the Soviet economy with a technology-based arms race; slow the flow of Western technology to Moscow; raise the cost of the wars it was fighting; and demoralize the Soviets by generating pressure for change.

The arms race was calculated to destroy the Soviet economy. We’ve survived. They didn’t. And some still say that Reagan was just lucky. Not so.

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