IRVINE : Reporter Will Discuss KAL Incident at UCI

Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Seymour Hersh will explain in a lecture next week at UC Irvine how incompetence and abuse of sophisticated computer systems were to blame for the 1983 Korean Air Lines disaster.

Hersh, a writer for the New York Times, spent two years investigating the KAL incident in which 269 people died when a Soviet fighter shot down an off-course airliner.

In his new book, “The Target Is Destroyed,” Hersh concluded that there was no evidence to support the Soviet claim that Korean Air Lines Flight 007 was a spy plane. Instead, the passengers and crew were victims of a computer programming error in the flight control system and a failure in communications that led Soviet fighter pilots to believe that the jet was a U.S. military plane.

Hersh received the Pulitzer Prize in 1970 for his reports on the My Lai massacre in Vietnam. He also wrote “The Price of Power,” a scathing account of U.S. foreign policy during the Nixon years.

Hersh’s talk, the first in a four-part series entitled “Human Safety and Complex Technology,” will be held at 8 p.m. Feb. 11 in the university’s science lecture hall. The lecture is free to the public, but reservations are required. They can be obtained by calling the Office of Arts and Lectures at (714) 856-6379.

Other lecturers scheduled in the series are Andres Zellweger, chief planner for the Federal Aviation Administration, who will discuss “Computers, Safety and Air Traffic Control” on April 8; Yale sociology professor Charles Perrow, who will speak about nuclear safety and lessons learned from the Three Mile Island and Chernobyl nuclear reactor meltdowns on May 7, and UC Irvine physics professor Gregory Benford, an award-winning science fiction writer, on May 27.