From the Cold War Dirty Tricks Department: The Washington Post carried a story two weeks ago of how the CIA planted bugs in software bound for the Soviet Union which caused the detonation of the Trans-Siberian natural gas pipeline in 1982.
“In order to disrupt the Soviet gas supply, its hard currency earnings from the West, and the internal Russian economy, the pipeline software that was to run the pumps, turbines, and valves was programmed to go haywire, after a decent interval, to reset pump speeds and valve settings to produce pressures far beyond those acceptable to pipeline joints and welds,” Reed writes.
“The result was the most monumental nonnuclear explosion and fire ever seen from space,” he recalls, adding that US satellites picked up the explosion. Reed said in an interview that the blast occurred in the summer of 1982.
Sadly, the CIA project has become obsolete, now that the same thing can be accomplished with the “Commercial-Off-The-Shelf” software known as Microsoft Windows.