Men of the Year: Ronald Reagan & Yuri Andropov

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fateful morning of Sept. 1 that the plane they were destroying was a civilian jetliner. Though the Soviets tracked KAL 007 for 2½ hours, their fighter planes did not fire on it until it was about to leave their airspace. It is quite plausible that the Soviet military, acting without consulting Andropov, decided to shoot down an "intruder" before it got away, without making sure what it was. If so, Reagan would have had a fully provable, and only slightly less damning, case had he charged the Soviets with the equivalent of criminally negligent manslaughter rather than premeditated murder.

The Soviets immediately made matters worse for themselves by refusing to apologize. They indicated they would commit the same act in similar circumstances, and accused Reagan of causing the deaths of KAL 007's passengers by sending the plane on a spy mission. Says Michael Howard, Regius professor of modern history at Oxford University: "The incident was a nasty indicator of the inability of the U.S. and the Soviet Union to talk to each other intelligently about what was on the balance of probabilities a horrible mistake."

By then, too, the Politburo had other reasons to be on the defensive. The West German and British elections, and the inability of the European peace movement to mount demonstrations quite so large or angry as anticipated, meant that Moscow's strident campaign to stop deployment of the Pershing II and cruise missiles hi Europe had failed.

The Kremlin summed up its accumulated frustration and resentment in a carefully crafted statement issued on Sept. 28 in Andropov's name. It accused Reagan of mouthing "obscenities alternating with hypocritical preaching" and, in so many words, said that it could no longer do business with him. America-Watcher Arbatov hammered the same point home in an interview with TIME. Said he: "We have come to the conclusion that nothing will come from dealing with Reagan."

Two months after the Andropov statement, the U.S. missiles started going into Britain, Italy and West Germany The Soviets reacted by announcing that they would begin to take their oft-threatened countermeasures, installing new ballistic missiles in Czechoslovakia and East Germany and intermediate-range war heads on submarines plying the waters just off U.S. shores.

Meanwhile, vilification reached new heights, or depths. After the shootdown of KAL 007, American indignation boiled furiously; one video-game operator reprogrammed his devices to show as the target "Andropov, Communist mutant from outer space." The Soviets have more than reciprocated, and on a quasi-official level. The controlled Soviet press abounds in descriptions of Reagan as a crypto-Nazi. Soviet cartoonists, who have long depicted the President as a gunslinging cowboy, now add swastikas or ghostly faces of Hitler to their drawings.

Unsettling though all this is, it does not necessarily increase the danger of war. New missiles in Eastern Europe and on submarines will not significantly increase Soviet fire power aimed at Western Europe or the U.S. Nor are the American missiles in Europe the first-strike weapons that Kremlin propaganda incessantly proclaims them to be.

Despite the comparisons between the current impasse and the crises over Berlin and Cuba, there is an all-important difference. In 1948, Soviet