How a war game brought the world to the brink of nuclear disaster

[AdamSmith]

How a war game brought the world to the brink of nuclear disaster

Former classified documents show how close the Soviet Union came to launching an attack in 1983

• Jamie Doward
• The Observer, Saturday 2 November 2013 08.28 EDT

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 737, 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."

http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2013/nov/02/nato-war-game-nuclear-disaster

[RA1]

Have editors gone on strike? It doesn't necessarily "ruin" a story when there are factual and other errors but it does put me on high alert. The KAL flight 007 was a 747. If the plane had not been shot down with much loss of life, the USSR's actions would be considered a comedy of errors.

It is NATO, no Nato.

How many other errors in this piece, both factual and analytical?

Best regards,

RA1

[TampaYankee]

There is actually a documentary about this that I saw on the History or Discovery Channel or some such within the last two years. I posted about it in some previous thread the specifics I do not recall now. Very chilling. The Sovs were ready to pull the trigger when Reagan backed out of the games to take care of other pressing needs, being replaced by a much lower subordinate. The Sovs figured it this was real he would not have done that. Whew!!

As chilling a tale was recently uncovered and described in another documentary on one of the said cable channels. It involved three Sov nuclear missile subs on a secret mission off the US in '87 I believe. Two subs had the usual complement of commanding officers onboard but the third also has the top guy in the Navy or the Sub branch, I do not recall now which. He was a survivor of the K-19 nuclear sub disaster. He knew first hand the devastation of nuclear poisoning as that crew lost half a dozen men to it in that disaster. I do not have time to get into the details now but the quick story is:

The mission gave each of the three sub captains authority to launch missiles on their own initiative if they lost communications on the mission. The communications was lost in the sub that had the Navy Admiral. The captain apparently became a very sketchy under pressure and actually ordered his second-in-command to assist him in activating the launch sequence. The Top Navy Admiral ordered him to stand down but the Capt refused. Only when the second-in-command accepted the Admiral's order was the event defused.

This came to light only after that Admiral died in recent years and his wife released papers of his. It is a very chilling documentary. Wish I could share more but I have to run to the bank before closing.

[RA1]

Every time the Soviets launched a nuclear sub all the crew's lives were at stake. Look at the terrible history of their fleet. I am afraid that the USSR has been largely a joke as a threat except for their "sometimes" off the wall threats.

Here is the bottom line: There will never be peace without running the risk of war. Therefore, we, or others, have to press the test. In aviation terms that means pushing the limits to achieve the best result.

Best regards,

RA1

[lookin]

Personally, I'd be up for the destruction of every nuclear weapon on the face of the Earth. If we could take back the ones we dropped on Japan, I'd vote for that too.

I'll be happy to read all the reasons why they're a good idea and about the lives saved because we used them when we did, but then I'll still vote for getting rid of all of them.

I think they take a toll on those who use them too.

[RA1]

lookin'-

Sometimes we have opposite views about politics and other things, yet we can still be friends. Why cannot this be the philosophy of the earth?

Best regards,

RA1

[MsGuy]

Sometimes we have opposite views about politics and other things, yet we can still be friends. Why cannot this be the philosophy of the earth?

Because we are status obsessed apes quick to brawl over a snatched banana?

Because genetically programmed behavioral traits well suited for small closely related clans don't work so well in a world with 8 or 10 billion apes all prone to snatching each others bananas.

Because in clans with hundreds of millions of members only apes driven quite mad by ambition will claw their way to the top.

[AdamSmith]

Because in clans with hundreds of millions of members only apes quite mad with ambition can claw their way to the top.

Ah! As I just posted in the Joke thread...

[RA1]

MsGuy-

Your post is so full of sexual innuendo---snatch, bananas, quite mad with ambition. I almost missed your point.

Best regards,

RA1

[MsGuy]

Ah! As I just posted in the Joke thread...

See, AS, your fundamental misapprehension is that you being a clever ape will somehow stop me from popping a cap on you when you fuck with my bananas.

[AdamSmith]

See, AS, your fundamental misapprehension is that you being a clever ape will somehow stop me from popping a cap on you when you fuck with my bananas.

A lesson my divorce outcome ought to have taught me already.

[MsGuy]

A lesson my divorce outcome ought to have taught me already.

Hahahahahaha...exactly.