Operation ‘Able Archer’ was a five-day NATO command post
exercise
starting on 7 November 1983, that spanned Western Europe, centred on the
Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE) Headquarters at Casteau,
north of the Belgian city of Mons. This major NATO war game simulated a period
of conflict escalation, culminating in a coordinated nuclear attack.
According to Cabinet memos and
briefing papers recently released in London under the Freedom of Information
Act, ‘Able Archer’ involved some 40,000 US and NATO troops moving across
western Europe, coordinated by encrypted communications systems, according to a
scenario in which Blue Forces (NATO) defended its allies after Orange Forces
(Warsaw Pact countries) sent troops into Yugoslavia following political unrest
there. The Orange Forces had quickly followed up with invasion of Finland,
Norway and eventually Greece. As the conflict had intensified, a conventional
war had escalated into one involving chemical and nuclear weapons – since then
known as the weapons of mass destruction (WMD).
The realistic nature of the late
1983 massive exercise, conducted against the grim background of deteriorating
relations between the United States and the Soviet Union and the anticipated
deployment in Europe of the American strategic Pershing II nuclear missiles (so-labelled
“tactical”, but capable of hitting their targets in the most densely populated
part of the USSR in a maximum time of 5 minutes), led some members of the
Soviet Politburo and military leadership to believe that the Able Archer war
game was ostensibly only a cover for a covert disarming nuclear first strike.
In immediate response, the Soviets
readied their nuclear forces and placed air units on alert in East Germany and
Poland.
According to declassified British
documents, the Kremlin gave instructions for a dozen aircraft n East Germany
and Poland to be fitted with nuclear weapons. In addition, around 70 SS-20missiles
(intermediate-range ballistic missiles, IRBMs of the same category as the
American Pershing II) were placed on heightened alert, while Soviet submarines
armed with nuclear ballistic missiles were sent under the Arctic ice to avoid
detection.
NATO and its allies initially
thought that the Soviets were only playing their own war game. But the
disclosed papers have shown how close the Russians came to treat ‘Able Archer’
as the prelude to a nuclear strike against them.
Soon after being sworn in as the 40th
US president on January 1981, Ronald Reagan inaugurated the largest peacetime
defense buildup in American history, overdoing even the unprecedented military
modernization of his predecessor, to match and exceed the Soviet strategic and
global military capabilities. This acceleration of the superpower arms race
came with the climatic escalation of rhetoric, propaganda and psychological
operations in the peaking period of the Cold War.
Addressing the British Parliament on
8 June 1982, the conservative Republican president spoke on the threat of
nuclear war: “...I don’t have to tell you that in today’s world the existence
of nuclear weapons could mean, if not the extinction of mankind, then surely
the end of civilization as we know it...”
Then, he added:”Our military
strength is a prerequisite to peace, but let it be clear we maintain the
strength in the hope it will never be used...”
Reagan also referred rather vaguely
to a long-term plan and hope about “the march of freedom and democracy which
will leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash heap of history as it has left other
tyrannies...” Forthright and harsh words, spoken by one supposedly on the moral
high ground, and calculated to rattle and shake the old and ailing Soviet
leaders like General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev (who died five months later on
November 1982) and KGB chairman Yuri Andropov (who passed away shortly after on
February 1984).
But, Reagan was no prophet, and
certainly no one at that time could have foreseen or predicted the end of the
Soviet Union less than a decade away at the close of 1991!
Addressing the annual convention of
the National Association of Evangelicals in Orlando, Florida, on 8 March 1983,
Reagan delivered his so-called “Evil Empire” speech when he described the
Soviet leadership as “the locus of evil in the modern world” and urged his
American detractors not “to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive
impulses of an evil empire” (implying the Soviet Union).
In this rather remarkable but uncouth
speech of his, Reagan also curtly reminded the Soviet Union and the world at
large of his proposal for a 50% cut in strategic ballistic missiles and the
elimination of all intermediate-range nuclear missiles.
On 23 March 1983, Reagan announced
his signature so-called “Strategic Defense Initiative” (SDI in short, labelled
“Star Wars by the media and the legend of critics). SDI was his completely
naive and simplistic notion (actually his dream) of an inchoate missile defense
system to supplant the standard military doctrine of “the well-named MAD” (Mutual
Assured Destruction), which had so far worked quite well under the rubric
“nuclear deterrence” since the two nuclear superpowers had not thrown their
missiles against each other, knowing that a nuclear war would spell outright
mutual suicide. In his very first days as president, the Pentagon has briefed
him that at least 150 million Americans would die in a nuclear war with the
Soviet Union – “even if we ‘won’.”
Reagan’s SDI project appeared
problematic, if not also dangerous, to the Kremlin. At that time, the new
General Secretary Yuri Andropov (who succeeded the late Brezhnev on 10 November
1982) lambasted Reagan for planning to unleash a nuclear war in the best way,
“with the hope of winning it...”
On 1 September 1983, slightly over five
months after the out-of-the-blue SDI presentation, the Soviet attack on the
Korean Air Lines Flight 007 (KAL 007) in prohibited Soviet airspace over the
Sea of Japan, killing all 269 passengers and crew aboard, brought plunging
bilateral relations to a new public low.
About three weeks later, on the night
of 26 September 1983, there were false alarms of an ICBM attack. According to
the online Wikipedia article, the
Soviet orbital missile early warning system (codename Oko) reported a single intercontinental
ballistic missile (ICBM) launch from the territory of the USA.
Luckily, Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav
Petrov who was on duty, correctly dismissed the warning as a computer error
when the ground early warning radars did not detect any launch. He had also
considered that a full-scale attack would involve thousands of simultaneous
launches, not just a single strike.
The Oko later reported four more ICBM
launches, which Petrov again rightly dismissed as false. The warning system was
then investigated and found to have malfunctioned; false alarms were caused by
a rare alignment of sunlight on high-altitude clouds and the satellite orbits.
Col. Petrov’s admirable good sense
and steady nerves prevented a possible nuclear war.
According to Andrev Mikhailov,
writing in Pravda.Ru 28.09.2012, the
purported launch involved 5 Minuteman III ICBMs, each armed with 10 nuclear
warheads. He wrote: “...Relying on common sense (five missiles is not enough
for the first strike in the war), he (Colonel Petrov) declared a false alarm
here and was right: there was a failure in the notification system. The third
world war did not break out. It is hard to imagine what would have happened if
the USSR reciprocated...”
More than a decade later, January
2006, an international public organization “Association of World Citizens”
gratefully and rightly presented the retired Colonel Petrov, with an award for
the Prevention of a Nuclear War. It’s a statuette of a hand holding a globe
(the world’s fate in one man’s hand).
Even while Soviet intelligence
services were then attempting to detect the early signs of a nuclear attack,
NATO began to simulate one on 2 November 1983. “Able Archer 83” thus led some
frightened Soviet leaders to believe into taking it as a military cover for a
pre-emptive nuclear strike.
On 8 or 9 November 1983, the Moscow
Center sent its residencies a flash telegram incorrectly reporting an alarming
alert (DEFCON) on American bases and frantically asking for further information
regarding an American first strike with nuclear weapons. The alert precisely
coincided with the estimated 7-10-day period between NATO’s preliminary
decision and an actual strike. This was the peak of the war scare in late 1983
(“The most dangerous year,” said Andrew R. Garland of the University of Nevada,
Las Vegas).
The Soviet Union, believing that its
only chance of surviving a NATO strike was to pre-empt it, readied its huge
nuclear arsenal. The CIA reported activity in the Baltic Military District, in
Czechoslovakia, and the agency determined that nuclear-capable aircraft in
Poland and East Germany were placed “on high alert status with readying of nuclear
strike forces.”
According to former CIA analyst Peter Vincent Pry,
the Soviet ICBM silos, easily readied and difficult for the US to detect, were
also prepared for launch.
Soviet fears of a nuclear
first-strike ended as the Able Archer was game finished on 11 November 1983. So
also ended the threat of nuclear war.
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 October 1962 when October 27 was recalled as “the most
dangerous day”.
Paul Dibb, a former director of the
Australian Joint Intelligence Organization, suggested in October 2013 that Able
Archer 83 posed a more substantial threat than even the 1962 Cuban missile
crisis.
“Able Archer could have triggered the
ultimate unintended catastrophe, and with prompt nuclear strike capabilities on
both the US and Soviet sides, orders of magnitude greater than in 1962,” Dibb
said.
In 1962, the US had over 27,000 nuclear
warheads and the SU over 3,300.
In 1983, the American military had
24,000 nuclear warheads and the Soviet counterpart had over 35,000. The Soviets
had a numerical advantage, developed post-haste since their complete and utter
humiliation in the 1962 Cuban missile crisis.
In his memoir An American Life, Reagan has written (pp. 588-9):
“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...”
And, why not? In 1983 the US had more
than 20,000 nuclear weapons. What were they for? And what, and where were their
targets?
The Soviet Union had more than 30,000
then. What if most of those nukes were unleashed against cities and military
assets in the US?
Reagan has also written (ibid., p.
257):
“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?...”
On 16 May 1983(about six months before
Able Archer) when President Reagan announced that he was deploying the new MX
ICBM (designed with 10-12 350KT nuclear warheads and developed during Carter’s
presidency to counter the formidable Soviet SS-18 (Satan) ICBM first deployed
in 1974 with 10 megaton-warheads), Reagan expressed his fervent hope that,
somewhere along the line, the process of making more and more deadly nuclear
weapons would be reversed, and that all
nuclear weapons would be eliminated.
No comments:
Post a Comment