In retrospect, the Cold War seems like a bit of hot air. It's easy for us to think about how paranoid both the US and the USSR became when fighting the other. It's easy to assume that there was never really a chance that a nuclear war would start because of the MAD phenomenon.
But that's not true. Able Archer 83, conducted by the US and its NATO allies, made the Soviets so fearful of a nuclear attack that they were inches away from countering.
Practiced by allied soldiers across Europe, its objective was to “practice command and staff procedures, with particular emphasis on the transition from conventional to non-conventional operations, including the use of nuclear weapons.”
Operation Able Archer involved 40,000 US and NATO troops fighting the Warsaw Pact countries following their mobilization into Yugoslavia. The Warsaw forces had quickly followed this up with invasions of Finland, Norway, and Greece. It was also partially in response to Operation RYaN, which was the Russian arms buildup at this time. However, as the conflict intensified, this conventional war was quickly escalating into a chemical war, and the threat of nuclear warfare loomed.
Another reason for the fear of war was because of Reagan. At this point he was very against detente, and his "evil empire" speech summed up what he thought of the Soviet Union. He had also sent medium-ranged missiles to Western Europe, which were being deployed while Eastern Europe was in chaos. Additionally, his "Star Wars" defense program threatened to disrupt the MAD equilibrium by providing a way to destroy ICBMs. As a whole, the year of 1983 was a year of tensions unprecedented since two decades earlier.
So, the Soviets responded in fear. They built new missile systems, preparing them for launch on Western Europe. They wanted to strike first and destroy as many nuclear weapons as they could, even if they couldn't get all of them. That way, they would have a numbers advantage in case of a real nuclear war.
Operation Able Archer allowed the West to realize that the Cold War had to come to an end. After 1983, the year of this operation, the ice of the war began to thaw.
No one knows precisely how close the world came to nuclear war in 1983, but Reagan soon changed his approach to the Soviets. On Nov. 18th, after the highest tensions had passed, he wrote in his journal, “I feel the Soviets are so defense minded, so paranoid about being attacked that without being in any way soft on them we ought to tell them no one here has any intention of doing anything like that.”
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2017/06/able-archer-almost-started-a-nuclear-war-with-russia-in-1983.html
https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Able_Archer_83
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2013/nov/02/nato-war-game-nuclear-disaster
Great job on the post Bennet. It was interesting to read about Operation Able Archer 83. You are absolutely right that many of us are not fully aware of how possible a nuclear war was at one point. There was even one incident where a Soviet satellite system falsely indicated that the US had launched five nuclear missiles at the Soviet Union. However, the officer overseeing the system decided it was likely a computer malfunction and didn't tell his superiors about it. It did turn out to be a false alarm, and that event became one of the closest a nuclear war came to actually occurring.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/09/18/551792129/stanislav-petrov-the-man-who-saved-the-world-dies-at-77
I really enjoyed your post and was able to gain a deeper insight into just how volatile the Cold War was. Both sides were very scared of an escalation within the war and did everything they could to try to prevent it. However, it's interesting to see how Operation Able Archer 83 was one moment in history when such de-escalation seemed impossible. Surprisingly, the causes of such danger was based off of false facts. Yuri Andropov, the leader of the USSR at that time, was so paranoid about the United State that he asked KGB officers to collect any information regarding a possible attack by the USA. Many of these officers, in attempts to do their job, made up events, such as skirmishes in the Middle East. It's hard to imagine what our world would be like if the greatest superpowers of the time started a nuclear war over a couple of facts that the KGB came up with to appease their dying leader.
ReplyDeleteSOURCE : https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/05/the-ussr-and-us-came-closer-to-nuclear-war-than-we-thought/276290/
Great post! It's strange to think just how close we were to an actual nuclear war back in 1983, that both sides were so prepared for the threat that both NATO and Warsaw Pact troops were mobilized in Europe. In fact, the possibility of war rested on the decision of a single person. Stanislav Petrov was a Soviet lieutenant colonel who was informed about the launching of American ICBMs during his shift as the duty officer. Although the computer systems insisted that the reliability of the information was at the “highest” level, he ultimately decided not to retaliate and fire missiles back but rather state that the alarms were a false alert. If he had made the decision to fire missiles, war would have been inevitable. However, due to his quick 50-50 choice to not take action, he was able to save the world from a devastating nuclear war.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/18/world/europe/stanislav-petrov-nuclear-war-dead.html
I really enjoyed your post Bennett! I had no idea that such an operation even existed. I guess it goes to show the level of secrecy that surrounded that period on both sides of the Cold War. I've found several articles that are recently covering the full extent of the operation, as information is only coming out now under the Freedom of Information Act. Some intelligence officers have said that Operation Able Archer was led to tensions that were even higher than the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1963, a well known point of high tensions between the Soviets and the Americans during the early Cold War. After Operation Able Archer, Margaret Thatcher, the prime minister of Britain at the time, realized the danger of the rising tensions and pressed upon Reagan to relax his policies.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2013/nov/02/nato-war-game-nuclear-disaster