Nuclear Close Calls: Able Archer 83 (2018)
atomicheritage.org
atomicheritage.org
What I have heard is that the Soviets reacted as badly as they did because the exercise replicated what they would have done: Mobilize troops and hold an exercise in a neighboring country, have senior political leadership go into bunkers and be involved in war decisions. Broadcast distracting information while you then attack. (Recent events in Ukraine should make this sound familiar.)
Afterwards, the US never used actual leaders in an exercise like this ever again. We made sure that senior leaders were visible somewhere in public, and used stand-ins to role-play National Command Authority (President, Chairman of the Joint-Chiefs, Speaker of the House, etc.)
I didn't tell my mom about this until the other year. No reason to worry her.
With the sweet, sweet detail that the grunts weren't told that they are actually going to war, so some of them sold vital fuel to Belarussian/Russian civilians. And when the war got underway, some vehicles were short on fuel. Quite a critical mistake to make.
It's a fantastic book. I couldn't put it down. (Okay, technically, I listened to it. The audio is very good!)
Kaplan agrees that Able Archer is probably the closest we ever got to nuclear war. But, something else interesting happened at this very same time, in Autumn of '83. A made-for-TV movie was released called, "The Day After."
Kaplan argues, based on Reagan's own diaries, that it was this movie that was largely responsible for Reagan's sudden about-face in '84 and beyond. Here's what Reagan wrote the first time he watched it:
> (Monday, October 10, 1983) Columbus day. In the morning at Camp D. I ran the tape of the movie ABC is running on the air Nov. 20. It’s called “The Day After.” It has Lawrence Kansas wiped out in a nuclear war with Russia. It is powerfully done—all $7 mil. worth. It’s very effective & left me greatly depressed. So far they haven’t sold any of the 25 spot ads scheduled & I can see why. Whether it will be of help to the “anti nukes” or not, I cant say. My own reaction was one of our having to do all we can to have a deterrent & to see there is never a nuclear war. Back to W.H."
Almost immediately, Reagan cooled his bellicose rhetoric. In the next few years, he started a friendship with Gorbachev, the new Soviet premier. Together, they finally ended the arms race. We got 30+ years of not needing to worry about nuclear war, all because of a story (maybe). Stories are powerful.
Threads (1984), the UK counterpart, is memorable, very bleak, and also worth watching: https://archive.org/details/threads_202007
https://archive.org/details/AV_179-THE_WAR_GAME-_THE_REALITY...
There’s a very short list of films that I think are both absolute masterpieces and something I will never watch again, and Threads sits squarely at the top of that list.
Another example of how important it is to choose the right medium for the audience. The same story conveyed as a novel wouldn’t have captured his immediate professional interest like the TV movie did.
He may still have been a bad president, but seeing this professional interest and the conclusions reached he made him relatable for me.
Although the book is a great read and makes Gordievsky out to be a hero, I couldn't help but notice that (1) most of the intelligence Gordievsky passed to the US was beneficial to both sides, as in this Able Archer example, and (2) that it was mysterious how lucky Gordievsky was to escape (UK agents were somehow able to drive him out of Moscow, after he was under suspicion by the KGB and had repeatedly been interrogated using drugs, which also mysteriously "didn't work"!) There is even a section in the book where another KGB agent "defects" to the West just long enough to give Gordievsky credibility, then "re-defects" back to the Soviet Union (with apparently no negative consequences.)
Anyway, I'm sure there's nothing to it, maybe it's just a case of a true story that seems too good to be true. But if it was an operation, I'm glad it saved us from repeating messes like this one.
If the story of the defection on his wikipedia page [0] is accurate then it was more elaborate than that. He got himself close to the Finnish border and then the MI6 agents smuggled him across the border.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oleg_Gordievsky#Escape_from_th...
It is a really good book.
Not entirely true. They had sniffer dogs going over all the cars, and Gordievsky was hiding in the boot of one. The MI6 agents "accidentally" dropped a few cheese and onion crisps by the car, plus the baby of one just happened to fill her nappy at that moment and the agent changed it next to the car. The sniffer dogs didn't stand a chance.
FWIW, apparently that baby is now a senior curator at a major London art gallery.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6452798-command-and-cont...
<https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/project/able-archer-83-sourcebook>
I learned about it years later when I saw a documentary on it. I realized that I was in Brussels Belgium on that day and would likely have been vaporized in an attack.
Stanislav Petrov, a Soviet officer who averted nuclear war, has died - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15273228 - Sept 2017 (136 comments)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutschland_83
In the US I believe it's streaming on Hulu.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutschland_83 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutschland_86 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutschland_89
This is my concern about the current tensions around Ukraine - we really have no idea what's going on in Putin's head or his inner circle. They could be calmly bluffing, or suicidal, or scared we are about to preemptively assassinate them.
But if you really want to worry about this, you don't need to consider the current war in Ukraine. You could look at this article from 2017 that describes a long-term plan to equip the U.S. submarine missile fleet with "superfuze" warheads that can accurately destroy hardened missile silos, which completely changes the strategic balance against Russia, in a way that might make things more dangerous for everyone [2].
[1] https://bnn-news.com/russia-moves-missiles-from-st-petersbur... [2] https://thebulletin.org/2017/03/how-us-nuclear-force-moderni...
I have many concerns about the current situation. For example Zelensky's frequent requests for things that would definitively mean WW3 if he actually got them, and the popular misconception that one must be ready to wage all-out total war to defend Ukraine or else you're on Putin's side. But all of our problems are amplified by the American penchant for cluelessness about what our adversaries are really thinking.
Either Russia loses now or loses later. No matter what, the Russian state will collapse. Only question is whether or not anyone follows Putin and just how suicidal they are...
I mean that is obviously overly dramatic posturing nonsense.
If we give them the territory they hold today they're in no shape to take anything else, and they certainly won't launch WWIII.
I don't support appeasement in any way, but that isn't the road to WWIII.
> no shape to take anything else, and they certainly won't launch WWIII.
Bear in mind this is only true because of the relentless resistance of the Ukrainians, backed up by the material and economic support of the west (granted, a lot of the Russian military was still in rough shape, but they would have been in a much better position to discover and fix that on their time if Ukraine had fallen quickly). If not for both of those factors together, Russia would be smacking its lips after Ukraine and looking for its next meal. We've already had to call a lot of nuclear bluffing to get here to this point where we're neither appeasing Putin or launching nukes at him.
This isn't WWII and Putin isn't literally Hitler and you sound like you read something once about WWII in a history textbook and you're desperate to a construct a parallel with appeasement that doesn't exist.
Appeasement is still bad, but it has nothing to do with causing Putin to launch nukes. The nuclear threat is still due to him having his back against the wall and while I don't think we should back down over that, you're trying to construct an alternative reality where its the opposite actions which could result in a nuclear exchange. That is a dangerous denial of reality which doesn't help in clearly thinking about the situation at all.
Your posturing to be more anti-Putin than anyone else may make you feel better about yourself and let you get angry at everyone else that isn't as edgy as you are, but being grounded in actual REALITY is the only way to get out of this crisis without a nuclear exchange (which more or less ties in with the topic of the OP since failure to clearly understand the motives of the other party in the conflict in the cold war nearly led to nuclear annihilation). You aren't helping.
> actual REALITY is the only way to get out of this crisis without a nuclear exchange
Ah yes "realpolitik". Which is straight up Russian propaganda to prevent us from reacting because "nuclear weapons". You aren't helping.
Ah, no actually? None of that. Obviously he won't launch nukes after he gets what he wants. He probably won't even launch them if he doesn't, though that counts on him keeping a shred of rationality.
My only point here (distinct from those of others on the chain, please note) is that preserving liberty globally depends on not being cowed by someone threatening to use nuclear weapons. Even if they never actually launch, it would be a catastrophe if aggressors could get away with anything just by threatening to use nukes. Without exaggeration, you're potentially talking about the death of liberty worldwide. The only reason this is unlikely is that free nations tend to wake up before they get completely boiled frog-style; this is, in fact, my read on why everyone is suddenly supporting Ukraine and cutting off Russia after doing jack shit in 2014, they've lost all deniability on the threat Russia poses.
There's no WWIII if we appease Russia. There's a lot of other bad things though, including allowing Russia to get another win and to put up with their influence in our politics and society and watching as we slide further into Fascism. But that isn't a nuclear exchange.
We are risking WWIII by confronting Russia because of all those other things.
The situation is precarious enough that Biden has threatened retaliatory decapitation strikes to kill Putin in the event of the use of Russian tactical nuclear missiles. And that sounds like a rational and proportionate response that might avoid nuclear war (but opens a massive can of worms since retaliatory assassinations become likely).
You can't "flip the script" and argue that its the other side of the debate that leads to nuclear annihilation. You don't get off that easy, you have to deal with the fact that its worth it to risk it.
(Although with the way our politics is going it may be ultimately immaterial anyway in the long run).
> I don't support appeasement in any way, but that isn't the road to WWIII.
These two statements are in conflict. You obviously _do_ support appeasement if you suggest Ukraine stops defending itself.
No it is not, not in the least. I wouldn't be so dismissive of someone when you clearly don't know the subject area (geopolitics).
There are geopolitical reasons for what Putin is doing in Ukraine. I recommend listing to "Peter Zeihan" on the subject, for starters. He's covered the war very well.
The underlying goal is to push the Russian "frontier" up to defensible geographical choke points before Russia's demographic decline makes it impossible to do so. This doesn't stop at Ukraine. The push would take all of Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Ukraine, Moldova, a north eastern chunk of Romania, and an eastern chunk of Poland up to the Vistula. Finland would also have to continue to be neutral, or would have to be taken as well. This is why the Russians have reacted badly to the suggestion that Finland is joining NATO. The gas restriction to Germany was a Russian attempt to push the country out of the NATO alliance, which would have made any NATO response difficult once Russia started on NATO states in the Baltic.
Putin has also made it clear that what he can't achieve with conventional military force, he is willing to attempt with tactical nuclear weapons. Taken together, the clear and stated desire to annex NATO nations (see Putin's recent speech on the Baltics historically belonging to Russia, and Ukraine "not being a real country"), the willingness to use nuclear weapons, and the fact that he is very clearly acting with the above aims in mind, should have you concerned.
The fact that the Russian army has been beaten back in Ukraine should not lull us into a false sense of security. They have plenty more manpower reserves they can draw on, and the Russians have a history of starting wars in somewhat of a shambles, before reforming and producing an army that is more of a stream roller.
These were all reactions to those countries being post soviet states that Russia wants to occupy due to their imperialistic ambitions.
Its why Russia hates post soviet states like Poland being in NATO because they know it means they cannot remake their imagined glory of the Soviet Union.
Except that didn't happen: the 2008 war was over a de facto independent oblast in Georgia that Georgia tried to recapture, and that's pretty much what the war remained limited to.
Lest we forget, the Iraq war occurred with zero justification half way around the world. Every bad thing you can say about Putin, you can say worse about George W. Bush (who ran a torture program).
The most important thing we can do is come to a peace agreement and an arms reduction agreement.
Ukraine isn't a pawn for world powers. They're an independent democracy with the right to choose their own destiny.
They were friendly with Russia for decades and got burned. Even Zelenskiy tried to slightly repair relations with Russia and end the war in Donbass. But in the end Russia has shown it's all a façade, their goal has never been to live peacefully with others but rather conquest and genocide.
Kennedy and McNamara knew that, because they both had experienced death and destruction firsthand in WW2. Our generation, on the other hand, only knows flame wars on Reddit. Hence the convenient, black and white rhetoric.
> The first was Reagan’s famous speech on March 8, 1983 in which he denounced “the aggressive impulses of an evil empire,” declaring the Soviet Union to be “the focus of evil in the modern world.” There was no mincing words; Reagan was calling the Soviet Union the enemy of the United States.
Reagan's nickname is "The Great Communicator" and he was one of the most effective presidential speakers of his time (I would pick Kennedy over him as being the best of the 20th century, but both were very good)
https://www.reaganfoundation.org/education/virtual-learning-...
[0] The use of Executive Orders used to be much less frequent. The President would instead use their influence to get bills passed and sent to him for signing.