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Overseas, the reaction was no less emphatic. At least four West European governments summoned Soviet diplomats and delivered sternly worded protests about the shooting down of Flight 007. Italy's huge Communist Party fired off a demand to Moscow for an explanation of "this crime"; Japan's Communist Party did likewise. In Seoul, where South Korean President Chun Doo Hwan called the attack a "barbarous act," tens of thousands of South Koreans joined protest demonstrations. Similar marches were staged in Korean-American communities across the U.S. Editorial reaction in the U.S. and abroad was uniformly unforgiving. Britain's Sun posed a question that was at the heart of Western shock over the peacetime incident: "Would Washington or our government ever dream of launching killer missiles? Never in a million years."
For the Reagan Administration, the crisis over Flight 007 was an especially complex and complicated matter. Despite the many unanswered questions that continued to surround the incident, it was clear that the Soviets had committed a brutally provocative act, one that demanded an unambiguous U.S. response. The President rarely has much trouble expressing such sentiments on a visceral level, as a senior White House aide pointed out shortly after the attack. "It is further evidence that the President was right," reminded the aide, "when he said the Soviet Union is a country that is essentially evil."
Yet in recent weeks, for the first time in his Administration, Reagan had been signaling a relaxation of tensions on the American side. Two weeks ago, the U.S. signed a new multiyear grain agreement in Moscow, ending a three-year impasse over U.S. grain sales to the Soviet Union. Washington also backed away from previous objections to the sale of pipeline equipment by U.S. firms to the Soviets. Shultz was scheduled to meet with Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko in Madrid this week, and the two countries were slated to resume two sets of arms negotiations within a month. There was even talk of moving—slowly, of course—toward a summit.
As the President flew back to Washington, a high-level task force assembled at the State Department to ponder appropriate U.S. countermeasures. There was general agreement that the Administration should not do yet another about-face on the grain deal, since Reagan had criticized President Jimmy Carter's embargo and a second one would virtually eliminate the U.S. as a credible trading partner. The various courses of action considered ranged from U.S. support of expected retaliation by airline pilots all the way up to a postponement of the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) talks, scheduled to resume this week in Geneva. Above all else, State Department officials urged a retaliation that would be joined by other nations.