Just before the Ides of March 1985, the Senate hosted an exchange on "nuclear winter" featuring Steve Schneider and Carl Sagan , seen here behind Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Pearl, who had some cautionary words to say about the problematic independence of climate science in the Soviet Union, where at the time, Andrei Sakharov was under house arrest in the closed city of Gorky:
Two weeks later our mutual friend Vladimir Alexandrov, a Candidate Academician and Moscow's favorite climate modeling talking head, addressed a conference of peace activists in Spain aimed at preventing Nato deployment of tactical nuclear weapons in Europe to offset the expansion of Soviet and Warsaw Pact tank and mobile artillery forces in East Germany.
The organizer of the conference, Cordoba's Eurocommunist Mayor, found Alexandrov's remarks disconcerting, and informed the Soviet Embassy in Madrid, which requested his delivery to their door. The Mayor complied and had him escorted to his official car for the 400 kilometer drive to the capital, which arrived in front of the Embassy on the Calle de Velázquez in the early hours of Palm Sunday
The driver and escort say they found a white van waiting, and that when three men emerged from it, Alexandrov bolted, but was seized by them and put into the vehicle, which drove off into the night. The time was ~1:30 AM, March 31, 1985. Alexandrov has not been seen since.
