Hi there!
I build NATO air power-related subjects from the year 1983. Why so specific?
Firstly because I want to focus (and limit) what's in my stash.
Secondly, it's fits with my preference for 1980s colour schemes. Planes were prettier then.
Thirdly, it's an interesting year in the Cold War timeline: John le Carre started writing A Perfect Spy. Wargames was #5 in the box office. The Day After came out on TV, as well as other Cold War fiction that is seen as iconic today.
Factual events were much more heart-stopping however: Three weeks after Korean Air Lines 007 had been shot down by a PVO pilot flying a Su-15, another PVO officer, lieutenant colonel Stanislav Petrov, chose to take a little time to interpret early warning signals of US ICBM launches as false, which they indeed were, instead of following protocol and immediately notifying his superiors, which might have led to retaliation. Then, about a month later, Soviet forces were put on high alert after misinterpreting communications during Excercise Able Archer '83 for a real nuclear strike preparation. Historians have argued the world has never come closer to a nuclear war since the Cuban Missile Crisis, then those months in 1983. Only this time the public was blissfully unaware of this fact. Instead, Karma Chameleon hit number one in the charts. What a year.
All this made me wonder what the NATO air forces looked like if indeed the push would have come to shove. Hence 1983.
Thanks, Jay
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