The Able Archer 83 ever written, a classified 110-page report completed in 1990 by the President's Intelligence Advisory Board. The papers of former Washington Post reporter Don Oberdorfer include a summary of what Jones says may be the most comprehensive account of "I wouldn't say it has stopped, but it's proceeding at a glacial pace," Jones says.īut Russia isn't the only country hanging onto some of the secrets surrounding the 1983 war scare. Moscow's reaction to the November 1983 war games is not well documented, partly because obtaining material from Russian government archives has become was preparing a sneak attack on them, or were merely " huffing and puffing," as Reagan asked his ambassador to the U.S.S.R. diplomat Averell Harriman inīut President Reagan was unsure if the Soviets were really convinced that the U.S. was approaching the "red line" leading to nuclear war when he met with veteran U.S. One key document, released by the Library of Congress, describes howĪndropov repeatedly warned that the U.S. The Soviets certainly made no secret of their fears at the time. and NATO forces - with chemical weapons, NATO decided to respond with two After the "Orange" Soviets finally attacked "Blue" - U.S. Rising tensions and a change in the Soviet leadership triggered an invasion by the Red Army of Yugoslavia, Finland, Norway and Greece, according to theĮxercise scenario. Nuclear exercise scenario, prepared for the National Security Archive by a NATO historian, the war game began with briefings on an imaginary East-WestĬonflict in the Middle East, including "Orange" - that is, Soviet - arms deliveries to Syria, coupled with unrest in Eastern Europe. (The Russian acronym derives from Raketno-Yadernoye Napadeniye, or nuclear missile strike.)Īccording to an unclassified summary of the was planning a "decapitating" strikeĪgainst Moscow with its nuclear forces. The massive intelligence-gathering effort, called "Operation RYAN," pressured the KGB to find proof that the U.S. preparations for all-out nuclear war against the U.S.S.R. TheĪdministration responded with stepped-up surveillance, and provocative naval maneuvers, and pressed for the deployment of new Pershing II missiles in Europe capable of reaching Moscow in less than tenĬonsidered in a vacuum, Able Archer 83, in which officer's at NATO's Belgium headquarters practiced their response to hypothetical chemical and nuclearĬonflict with a thinly-disguised Soviet Union, might not have seemed particularly threatening.īut for two years prior to Able Archer 83, KGB agents had been scouring the world for evidence of what the Soviet leadership in general - and Andropov in Tensions had heated up that September, after the Soviet shoot-down of Korean Air Lines Flight 007, which had strayed into Soviet air space. Prelude to a preventative nuclear strike." Israeli historian Dmitry Adamsky calls the 1983 war games "the moment of maximum danger of the late Cold War." Able Archer, he wrote "almost became a In the current edition of the Journal of Strategic Studies, leaders might not have learnedĪs much from the Cuban missile crisis as they should have," Jones said. "This episode should be studied more because it shows that U.S. Incompletely understood episode in the U.S.-Soviet rivalry. Ranging from presidential note cards to previously secret CIA reports, the documents describing Able Archer 83 offer fresh insight into a much studied but Historian with the National Security Archive who edited and published the collection of more than 50ĭocuments, totaling more than 1,000 pages, in three installments beginning May 16 and ending Thursday. The problem with this brinksmanship was that it increased the risk of a nuclear exchange due to miscalculation, according to Nate Jones, a Cold War troops airlifted overseas in 170 missions conducted in radio silence. Troops were moved across Western Europe, including 16,044 U.S. To the Russians, it could easily have looked like a genuine preparation for a nuclear strike, the documents revealed: A total of 40,000 U.S. But its scope was hardly routine, as Americans learned in detail this week, for the first time, from declassifiedĭocuments published by the National Security Archive, a Washington-based nonprofit research organization. The Western maneuvers that autumn, called Autumn Forge, were depicted by the Pentagon as With whatever suspicious evidence they could find, feeding official paranoia. had such plans, they dutifully supplied the Kremlin that would decapitate the Soviet leadership. Two years earlier Andropov had ordered KGB officers around the globe to gather evidence for what he was nearly certain was coming: A surprise nuclear
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