Chilling new evidence that Britain and America came close to
provoking the Soviet Union into launching a nuclear attack has emerged
in former classified documents written at the height of the cold war.
Cabinet
memos and briefing papers released under the Freedom of Information Act
reveal that a major war games exercise, Operation Able Art, conducted
in November 1983 by the US and its
Nato allies was so realistic it made the Russians believe that a nuclear strike on its territory was a real possibility.
When intelligence filtered back to the Tory government on the Russians' reaction to the exercise, the prime minister,
Margaret Thatcher,
ordered her officials to lobby the Americans to make sure that such a
mistake could never happen again. Anti-nuclear proliferation campaigners
have credited the move with changing how the UK and the US thought
about their relationship with the Soviet Union and beginning a thaw in
relations between east and west.
The papers were obtained by Peter
Burt, director of the Nuclear Information Service (NIS), an
organisation that campaigns against nuclear proliferation, who said that
the documents showed just how risky the cold war became for both sides.
"These
papers document a pivotal moment in modern history – the point at which
an alarmed Thatcher government realised that the cold war had to be
brought to an end and began the process of persuading its American
allies likewise," he said.
"The Cold War is sometimes described as
a stable 'balance of power' between east and west, but the Able Archer
story shows that it was in fact a shockingly dangerous period when the
world came to the brink of a nuclear catastrophe on more than one
occasion."
Able Archer, which involved 40,000 US and Nato troops
moving across western Europe, co-ordinated by encrypted communications
systems, imagined a scenario in which Blue Forces (Nato) defended its
allies after Orange Forces (Warsaw Pact countries) sent troops into
Yugoslavia following political unrest. The Orange Forces had quickly
followed this up with invasions of Finland, Norway and eventually
Greece. As the conflict had intensified, a conventional war had
escalated into one involving chemical and
nuclear weapons.
Numerous
UK air bases, including Greenham Common, Brize Norton and Mildenhall,
were used in the exercise, much of which is still shrouded in secrecy.
However, last month Paul Dibb, a former director of the Australian Joint
Intelligence Organisation, suggested that the 1983 exercise posed a
more substantial threat than the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. "Able
Archer could have triggered the ultimate unintended catastrophe, and
with prompt nuclear strike capacities on both the US and Soviet sides,
orders of magnitude greater than in 1962," he said .
The exercise
took place amid heightened international tension. In September 1983 the
Russians shot down a Korean Airlines Boeing 747, killing all 269 people
on board, after the plane had mistakenly strayed into their airspace.
There is evidence to suggest that the Russians thought the Boeing was an
American spy plane.
Earlier in the same year the US president,
Ronald Reagan, made a high-profile speech describing the Soviet Union as
"the evil empire" and announced plans to build the "Star Wars"
strategic defence initiative. With distrust between the US and USSR at
unparalleled levels, both sides were operating on a hair trigger.
As
Able Archer commenced, the Kremlin gave instructions for a dozen
aircraft in East Germany and Poland to be fitted with nuclear weapons.
In addition, around 70 SS-20 missiles were placed on heightened alert,
while Soviet submarines carrying nuclear ballistic missiles were sent
under the Arctic ice so that they could avoid detection.
Nato
and its allies initially thought the Soviet response was the USSR's own
form of war-gaming. However, the classified documents obtained by the
NIS reveal just how close the Russians came to treating the exercise as
the prelude for a nuclear strike against them.
A classified
British Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) report written shortly
afterwards recorded the observation from one official that "we cannot
discount the possibility that at least some Soviet officials/officers
may have misinterpreted Able Archer 83 and possibly other nuclear CPXs
[command post exercises] as posing a real threat." The cabinet secretary
at the time, Sir Robert Armstrong, briefed Thatcher that the Soviets'
response did not appear to be an exercise because it "took place over a
major Soviet holiday, it had the form of actual
military
activity and alerts, not just war-gaming, and it was limited
geographically to the area, central Europe, covered by the Nato exercise
which the Soviet Union was monitoring".
Armstrong told Thatcher
that Moscow's response "shows the concern of the Soviet Union over a
possible Nato surprise attack mounted under cover of exercises". Much of
the intelligence for the briefings to Thatcher, suggesting some in the
Kremlin believed that the Able Archer exercise posed a "real threat",
came from the Soviet defector Oleg Gordievsky.
Formerly classified
files reveal Thatcher was so alarmed by the briefings that she ordered
her officials to "consider what could be done to remove the danger that,
by miscalculating western intentions, the Soviet Union would
over-react". She ordered her officials to "urgently consider how to
approach the Americans on the question of possible Soviet
misapprehensions about a surprise Nato attack".
Formerly secret
documents reveal that, in response, the Foreign Office and Ministry of
Defence drafted a joint paper for discussion with the US that proposed
"Nato should inform the Soviet Union on a routine basis of proposed Nato
exercise activity involving nuclear play".
Information from the
JIC report and Gordievsky was shared with Reagan, who met the spy and
was apparently so swayed by the arguments that he pushed for a new
spirit of detente between the US and USSR.
However, Burt stressed
that the end of the cold war did not mean that the risks had gone away.
"Even though the cold war ended more than 20 years ago, thousands of
warheads are still actively deployed by the nuclear-armed states," Burt
said. "We continue to face unacceptably high risks and will continue to
do so until we have taken steps to abolish these exceptionally dangerous
weapons."
Able Archer 83
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Able Archer 83 was a ten-day
NATO command post exercise starting on November 2, 1983, that spanned Western Europe, centered on the
Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE) Headquarters situated at
Casteau, north of the
Belgian city of
Mons. Able Archer exercises simulated a period of
conflict escalation, culminating in a coordinated
nuclear attack
The 1983 exercise incorporated a new, unique format of coded communication,
radio silences, participation by
heads of government, and a simulated
DEFCON 1 nuclear alert.
The realistic nature of the 1983 exercise, coupled with
deteriorating relations between the United States and the
Soviet Union and the anticipated arrival of
strategic Pershing II nuclear missiles in Europe, led some members of the
Soviet Politburo and Soviet military to believe that Able Archer 83 was a
ruse of war, obscuring preparations for a genuine nuclear
first strike.
In response, the Soviets readied their nuclear forces and placed air units in
East Germany and
Poland on alert.
This is known as the
1983 war scare.
The 1983 war scare is considered by many historians to be the closest the world has come to
nuclear war since the
Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962
The threat of nuclear war ended with the conclusion of the exercise on November 11.
Prelude to NATO exercise
Operation RYAN
Main article:
Operation RYAN
A KGB Report on 1981 reporting that the KGB had "implemented measures to
strengthen intelligence work in order to prevent a possible sudden
outbreak of war by the enemy." To do this, the KGB "actively obtained
information on military and strategic issues, and the aggressive
military and political plans of imperialism [the United States] and its
accomplices," and "enhanced the relevance and effectiveness of its
active intelligence abilities." From the
The National Security Archive.
The greatest catalyst to the Able Archer war scare occurred more than
two years earlier. In a May 1981 closed-session meeting of senior
KGB officers and Soviet leaders,
General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev and KGB chairman
Yuri Andropov
bluntly announced that the United States was preparing a secret nuclear
attack on the USSR. To combat this threat, Andropov announced, the KGB
and
GRU
would begin Operation RYAN. RYAN (РЯН) was a Russian acronym for
"Nuclear Missile Attack" (Ракетное Ядерное Нападение); Operation RYAN
was the largest, most comprehensive peacetime
intelligence-gathering
operation in Soviet history. Agents abroad were charged with monitoring
the figures who would decide to launch a nuclear attack, the service
and technical personnel who would implement the attack, and the
facilities from which the attack would originate. In all probability,
the goal of Operation RYAN was to discover the first
intent of a nuclear attack and then preempt it.
The impetus for the implementation of Operation RYAN is still largely
unknown. However, the Nazi sneak attack and subsequent invasion on the
Soviet Union in 1941 has remained a vital lesson for the Soviet armed
forces ever since.
Oleg Gordievsky,
the highest-ranking KGB official ever to defect, suspected that it was
born of the increased "Soviet Paranoia" coupled with "Reaganite
Rhetoric". Gordievsky conjectured that Brezhnev and Andropov, who "were
very, very old-fashioned and easily influenced ... by Communist dogmas",
truly believed that an antagonistic
Ronald Reagan would push the
nuclear button and relegate the Soviet Union to the literal "
ash heap of history".
Central Intelligence Agency historian
Benjamin B. Fischer lists several concrete occurrences that likely led to the birth of RYAN. The first of these was the use of
psychological operations (PSYOP) that began soon after President Reagan took office.
PSYOP
Psychological operations by the United States began mid-February 1981 and continued intermittently until 1983
These included a series of clandestine naval operations that stealthily accessed waters near the
Greenland-
Iceland-United Kingdom (GIUK)
gap, and the
Barents,
Norwegian,
Black, and
Baltic
seas, demonstrating how close NATO ships could get to critical Soviet
military bases. American bombers also flew directly towards Soviet
airspace,
peeling off at the last moment, occasionally several times per week.
These near penetrations were designed to test Soviet radar vulnerability
as well as demonstrate US capabilities in a nuclear war
.
"It really got to them," recalls Dr. William Schneider, [former] undersecretary of state
for military assistance and technology, who saw classified
"after-action reports" that indicated U.S. flight activity. "They didn't
know what it all meant. A squadron would fly straight at Soviet
airspace, and other radars would light up and units would go on alert.
Then at the last minute the squadron would peel off and return home."
In April, the United States Navy conducted FleetEx '83, the largest fleet exercise held to date in the
North Pacific.
The conglomeration of approximately forty ships with 23,000 crewmembers
and 300 aircraft, was arguably the most powerful naval armada ever
assembled. U.S. aircraft and ships attempted to provoke the Soviets into
reacting, allowing the U.S.
Office of Naval Intelligence
to study Soviet radar characteristics, aircraft capabilities, and
tactical maneuvers. On April 4 at least six U.S. Navy aircraft flew over
Zeleny Island, one of the
Kurile Islands. The Soviets were outraged, and ordered a retaliatory overflight of U.S.
Aleutian Islands.
The Soviet Union also issued a formal diplomatic note of protest, which
accused the United States of repeated penetrations of Soviet airspace.
Korean Air Lines Flight 007
On September 1, 1983 the
Korean Air Lines Flight 007 (KAL 007) was shot down over the
Sea of Japan near
Moneron Island just west of
Sakhalin island over prohibited Soviet airspace. All 269 passengers and crew aboard were killed, including Congressman
Larry McDonald (D), a sitting member of the
United States House of Representatives
from Georgia. In conjunction with the extremely secretive PSYOPs
against the Soviet Union, the attack brought relations between the two
superpowers to a new public low. Illustrating the historically
antagonistic relations between the USA and USSR in the early 1980s, the
Soviet attack on KAL 007 also lends several insights into Able Archer
83.
Weapons buildup
From the start the
Reagan administration
adopted an assertive and resolute stance toward the Soviet Union, one
that favored matching and exceeding their strategic and global military
capabilities. The administration's rigorous focus on this objective
resulted in the largest peacetime military buildup in the history of the
United States. It also ushered in the final major escalation in
rhetoric of the Cold War. On June 8, 1982, Reagan, in a speech to the
British House of Commons confidently declared that, "...
Freedom and Democracy will leave
Marxism and
Leninism on the ash heap of history."
On March 23, 1983, Reagan announced one of the most ambitious and controversial components to this strategy, the
Strategic Defense Initiative
(labeled "Star Wars" by the media and critics). While Reagan portrayed
the initiative as a safety net against nuclear war, leaders in the
Soviet Union viewed it as a definitive departure from the relative
weapons parity of
détente and an
escalation of the arms race into space.
Yuri Andropov, who had become General Secretary following
Brezhnev's death
in November 1982, lambasted Reagan for "inventing new plans on how to
unleash a nuclear war in the best way, with the hope of winning it".
Despite the enormous Soviet outcry over the "Star Wars" program, the
weapons plan that generated the most alarm among the Soviet Union's
leadership during Able Archer 83 was the 1979 NATO approval and planned
deployment of intermediate-range
Pershing II missiles in Western Europe.
These missiles, deployed to counter Soviet
SS-20
intermediate-range missiles on its own western border, represented a
major threat to the Soviets. The Pershing II was capable of destroying
Soviet "hard targets" such as underground
missile silos and command and control
bunkers.
The missiles could be emplaced and launched from any surveyed site in
minutes, and because the guidance system was self-correcting, the
missile system possessed a genuine "
first strike capability". Furthermore, it was estimated that the missiles (deployed in
West Germany)
could reach targets in the western Soviet Union within four to six
minutes of their launch. These capabilities led Soviet leaders to
believe that the only way to survive a Pershing II strike was to
preempt
it. This fear of an undetected Pershing II attack, according to CIA
historian Benjamin B. Fischer, was explicitly linked to the mandate of
Operation RYAN: to detect a decision by the United States to launch a
nuclear attack and to preempt it.
False alarm from the Soviet early missile warning system
On the night of September 26, 1983, the Soviet orbital
missile early warning system (SPRN), code-named
Oko, reported a single intercontinental ballistic missile launch from the territory of the United States.
Lieutenant Colonel
Stanislav Petrov,
who was on duty during the incident, correctly dismissed the warning as
a computer error when ground early warning radars did not detect any
launches. Part of his reasoning was that the system was new and known to
malfunction before; also, a full scale nuclear attack from the United
States would involve thousands of simultaneous launches, not a single
missile.
Later, the system reported four more ICBM launches headed to the
Soviet Union, but Petrov again dismissed the reports as false. The
investigation that followed revealed that the system indeed
malfunctioned and false alarms were caused by a rare alignment of
sunlight on high-altitude clouds and the satellites' orbits.
Exercise Able Archer 83
A US Air Force after action describes three days of "low spectrum"
conventional play followed by two days of "high spectrum nuclear
warfare." From the
The National Security Archive.
Thus, on November 2, 1983, as Soviet intelligence services were
attempting to detect the early signs of a nuclear attack, NATO began to
simulate one. The exercise, codenamed Able Archer, involved numerous
NATO allies and simulated NATO's
Command, Control, and Communications
(C³) procedures during a nuclear war. Some Soviet leaders, because of
the preceding world events and the exercise's particularly realistic
nature, believed—in accordance with Soviet military doctrine—that the
exercise may have been a cover for an actual attack.
Indeed, a KGB telegram of February 17 described one likely scenario as such:
In view of the fact that the measures involved in State Orange [a
nuclear attack within 36 hours] have to be carried out with the utmost
secrecy (under the guise of maneuvers, training etc) in the shortest
possible time, without disclosing the content of operational plans, it
is highly probable that the battle alarm system may be used to prepare a
surprise RYAN [nuclear attack] in peacetime.
The February 17, 1983 KGB Permanent Operational Assignment assigned
its agents to monitor several possible indicators of a nuclear attack.
These included actions by "A cadre of people associated with preparing
and implementing decision about RYAN, and also a group of people,
including service and technical personnel ... those working in the
operating services of installations connected with processing and
implementing the decision about RYAN, and communication staff involved
in the operation and interaction of these installations."
Because Able Archer 83 simulated an actual release, it is likely that
the service and technical personnel mentioned in the memo were active
in the exercise. More conspicuously, British Prime Minister
Margaret Thatcher and West German Chancellor
Helmut Kohl participated (though not concurrently) in the nuclear drill. United States President Reagan, Vice President
George H. W. Bush, and Secretary of Defense
Caspar Weinberger were also intended to participate.
Robert McFarlane, who had assumed the position of
National Security Advisor just two weeks earlier, realized the implications of such participation early in the exercise's planning and rejected it.
Another illusory indicator likely noticed by Soviet analysts was an influx of
ciphered
communications between the United Kingdom and the United States. Soviet
intelligence was informed that "so-called nuclear consultations in NATO
are probably one of the stages of immediate preparation by the
adversary for RYAN".
To the Soviet analysts, this burst of secret communications between the
United States and the UK one month before the beginning of Able Archer
may have appeared to be this "consultation". In reality, the burst of
communication regarded the US
invasion of Grenada on October 25, 1983, which caused a great deal of diplomatic traffic as the sovereign of the island was
Elizabeth II.
A further startling aspect reported by KGB agents regarded the NATO
communications used during the exercise. According to the Moscow
Centre's February 17, 1983 memo,
It [was] of the highest importance to keep a watch on the functioning
of communications networks and systems since through them information
is passed about the adversary's intentions and, above all, about his
plans to use nuclear weapons and practical implementation of these. In
addition, changes in the method of operating communications systems and
the level of manning may in themselves indicate the state of preparation
for RYAN.
Soviet Intelligence appeared to substantiate these suspicions by
reporting that NATO was indeed using unique, never-before-seen
procedures as well as message formats more sophisticated than previous
exercises that possibly indicated the proximity of nuclear attack.
Finally, during Able Archer 83 NATO forces simulated a move through all alert phases, from
DEFCON 5
to DEFCON 1. While these phases were simulated, alarmist KGB agents
mistakenly reported them as actual. According to Soviet intelligence,
NATO doctrine stated, "
Operational readiness No 1 is declared
when there are obvious indications of preparation to begin military
operations. It is considered that war is inevitable and may start at any
moment."
Upon learning that US nuclear activity mirrored its hypothesized
first strike activity, the Moscow Centre sent its residencies a flash
telegram
on November 8 or 9 (Oleg Gordievsky cannot recall which), incorrectly
reporting an alert on American bases and frantically asking for further
information regarding an American first strike. The alert precisely
coincided with the seven- to ten-day period estimated between NATO's
preliminary decision and an actual strike.
This was the peak of the war scare.
The Soviet Union, believing its only chance of surviving a NATO
strike was to preempt it, readied its nuclear arsenal. The CIA reported
activity in the
Baltic Military District, in
Czechoslovakia,
and it determined that nuclear-capable aircraft in Poland and East
Germany were placed "on high alert status with readying of nuclear
strike forces".
Former CIA analyst Peter Vincent Pry goes further, saying he suspects
that the aircraft were merely the tip of the iceberg. He hypothesizes
that—in accordance with Soviet military procedure and history—
ICBM silos, easily readied and difficult for the United States to detect, were also prepared for a launch.
Soviet fears of the attack ended as the Able Archer exercise finished
on November 11. Upon learning of the Soviet reaction to Able Archer 83
by way of the
double agent Oleg Gordievsky, a British
SIS asset, President Reagan commented, "I don't see how they could believe that—but it’s something to think about."
Soviet reaction
The
double agent Oleg Gordievsky, whose highest rank was KGB
resident in London, is the only Soviet source ever to have published an account of Able Archer 83.
Oleg Kalugin and
Yuri Shvets,
who were KGB officers in 1983, have published accounts that acknowledge
Operation RYAN, but they do not mention Able Archer 83.
[38] Gordievsky and other
Warsaw Pact
intelligence agents were extremely skeptical about a NATO first strike,
perhaps because of their proximity to, and understanding of, the West.
Nevertheless, agents were ordered to report their observations, not
their analysis, and this critical flaw in the Soviet intelligence
system—coined by Gordievsky as the "intelligence cycle"—fed the fear of
US nuclear aggression.
According to
Vitaly Shlykov,
the Soviets started arming their nuclear weapons, and war was only
averted because they malfunctioned when the wrong launch codes were
entered.
Marshal Sergei Akhromeyev, who at the time was Chief of the main operations directorate of the Soviet General Staff, told
Cold War
historian Don Orbendorfer that he had never heard of Able Archer. The
lack of public Soviet response over Able Archer 83 has led some
historians, including
Fritz W. Ermarth
in his piece, "Observations on the 'War Scare' of 1983 From an
Intelligence Perch", to conclude that Able Archer 83 posed no immediate
threat to the Soviet Union.
American reaction
In May 1984, CIA Russian specialist Ethan J. Done drafted
"Implications of Recent Soviet Military-Political Activities", which
concluded: "we believe strongly that Soviet actions are not inspired by,
and Soviet leaders do not perceive, a genuine danger of imminent
conflict with the United States.
Robert Gates, Deputy Director for Intelligence during Able Archer 83, has published thoughts on the exercise that dispute this conclusion:
Information about the peculiar and remarkably skewed frame of mind of
the Soviet leaders during those times that has emerged since the collapse of the Soviet Union
makes me think there is a good chance—with all of the other events in
1983—that they really felt a NATO attack was at least possible and that
they took a number of measures to enhance their military readiness short
of mobilization. After going through the experience at the time, then
through the postmortems, and now through the documents, I don't think
the Soviets were crying wolf. They may not have believed a NATO attack
was imminent in November 1983, but they did seem to believe that the
situation was very dangerous. And US intelligence [SNIE 11–9-84 and SNIE
11–10–84] had failed to grasp the true extent of their anxiety.
A memorandum from Director of the Central Intelligence Agency William
Casey to President Reagan and other Cabinet-level officials after Able
Archer 83 warning of a "rather stunning array of indicators" showing
that "The [Soviet] military behaviors we have observed involve high
military costs … adding thereby a dimension of genuineness to the Soviet
expressions of concern that is often not reflected in intelligence
issuances." From the
The National Security Archive.
A still-
classified
report written by Nina Stewart for the President's Foreign Advisory
Board concurs with Gates and refutes the previous CIA reports,
concluding that further analysis shows that the Soviets were, in fact,
genuinely fearful of US aggression.
Some historians, including Beth A. Fischer in her book
The Reagan Reversal,
pin Able Archer 83 as profoundly affecting President Reagan and his
turn from a policy of confrontation towards the Soviet Union to a policy
of
rapprochement.
Most other historians say that Reagan always intended to increase the
United States defensive ability and then negotiate with the Soviet Union
from a position of strength
.
The thoughts of Reagan and those around him provide important insight
upon the nuclear scare and its subsequent ripples. On October 10, 1983,
just over a month before Able Archer 83, President Reagan viewed a
television film about
Lawrence, Kansas being destroyed by a nuclear attack titled
The Day After. In his diary, the president wrote that the film "left me greatly depressed".
[42]
Later in October, Reagan attended a Pentagon briefing on nuclear war.
During his first two years in office, he had refused to take part in
such briefings, feeling it irrelevant to rehearse a nuclear apocalypse;
finally, he consented to the Pentagon official requests. According to
officials present, the briefing "chastened" Reagan. Weinberg said,
"[Reagan] had a very deep revulsion to the whole idea of nuclear
weapons ... These war games brought home to anybody the fantastically
horrible events that would surround such a scenario." Reagan described
the briefing in his own words: "A most sobering experience with [
Caspar Weinberger] and
Gen. Vessey in the
Situation Room, a briefing on our complete plan in the event of a nuclear attack."
These two glimpses of nuclear war primed Reagan for Able Archer 83,
giving him a very specific picture of what would occur had the situation
further developed. After receiving intelligence reports from sources
including Gordievsky, it was clear that the Soviets were unnerved. While
officials were concerned with the Soviet panic, they were hesitant
about believing the proximity of a Soviet attack. Secretary of State
George P. Shultz thought it "incredible, at least to us" that the Soviets would believe the US would launch a genuine attack.
In general, Reagan did not share the secretary's belief that cooler heads would prevail, writing:
"We had many contingency plans for responding to a nuclear attack.
But everything would happen so fast that I wondered how much planning or
reason could be applied in such a crisis... Six minutes to decide how
to respond to a blip on a radar scope and decide whether to unleash Armageddon! How could anyone apply reason at a time like that?"
According to McFarlane, the president responded with "genuine
anxiety" in disbelief that a regular NATO exercise could have led to an
armed attack. To the ailing
Politburo—led
from the deathbed of the terminally ill Andropov, a man with no
firsthand knowledge of the United States, and the creator of Operation
RYAN—it seemed "that the United States was preparing to launch ... a
sudden nuclear attack on the Soviet Union".
In his memoirs, Reagan, without specifically mentioning Able Archer 83, wrote of a 1983 realization:
"Three years had taught me something surprising about the Russians:
Many people at the top of the Soviet hierarchy were genuinely afraid of
America and Americans. Perhaps this shouldn't have surprised me, but it
did...During my first years in Washington,
I think many of us in the administration took it for granted that the
Russians, like ourselves, considered it unthinkable that the United
States would launch a first strike
against them. But the more experience I had with Soviet leaders and
other heads of state who knew them, the more I began to realize that
many Soviet officials feared us not only as adversaries but as potential
aggressors who might hurl nuclear weapons at them in a first
strike...Well, if that was the case, I was even more anxious to get a
top Soviet leader in a room alone and try to convince him we had no
designs on the Soviet Union and Russians had nothing to fear from us.
It has been described as the "high point" of the
Cold War by
Raymond L. Garthoff.
