I arrived at my base in Germany about 3 weeks after Able Archer 83. By that time the US had realized that the Soviets had had a knee-jerk reaction to the exercise and we were gently winding things down. We still had armored vehicles covering the gates for a few days though.
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.
Well a few people realized what had happened. I was stationed on Ramstein AFB during Able Archer and saw the exercise while it was running. None of us had a clue that the Soviets had reacted as they did. I found out what happened about 20 years later.
"(Recent events in Ukraine should make this sound familiar.)"
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.
I recently read a fantastic book on Cold War brinksmanship. It was, "The Bomb: Presidents, Generals, and the Secret History of Nuclear War" by Fred Kaplan, published in 2020.
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 is a film that haunts me to this day, despite only having seen it once, in about 1998. For reasons I don’t fully understand our science teacher in secondary school was talked into showing it as an end of term film to show a class of 15/16 year olds. She refused to watch it with us, for reasons that will be pretty obvious to anyone who’s seen it.
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.
Reagan’s diary entry shows how familiar he was with the film and TV industry. He knows what a $7M production looks like, and he’s paying close attention to the TV network’s ad sales.
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.
Yes, that sentence immidiately brought me to respect Reagan a bit. I'm not from the US and born in the mid 80s, so I don't know a lot about Reagan, except that he was some sort of "proto Trump", dreaming of "Star Wars" with SDI.
He may still have been a bad president, but seeing this professional interest and the conclusions reached he made him relatable for me.
I recently read "The Spy and the Traitor" which was an excellent book all about Gordievsky, who is the UK-recruited KGB agent that alerted the US to the risk.
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.
> UK agents were somehow able to drive him out of Moscow
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.
It was vastly more screwed up than that. The MI6 agents were bound from Moscow and being followed by KGB the entire time, but just managed to shake their tails for long enough (basically less than five minutes in several hours) to pick up Gordievsky at a rest area, and then the KGB ignored this and didn’t bother to search their cars at the border. Gordievsky himself managed to escape his KGB tails while under active suspicion of being a double agent, but nobody thought to throw up an alert that might have gotten him caught on the train or tighten security at land borders, or (even) pay special attention to the tiny number of British embassy staff who suddenly decided to embark on a car trip to Finland at exactly the same time. There was also an incident where Gordievsky miraculously made it to the rendezvous point early, but decided to leave and go into a cafe in a nearby town — where he not only risked being spotted and questioned, but he actually got drunk and nearly missed his escape. It is basically nothing short of miraculous that any of this worked, and it wouldn’t have worked if the KGB hadn’t set him free and behaved with massive incompetence. Even the British agents viewed the plan as a Hail Mary pass, but put it in place because they believed they had an obligation to try.
I read the same book and came to the conclusion that the MI6 agents risked their lives, including that of an infant used for cover, to rescue Gordievsky.
For those interested in further reading on this and many, many other nuclear weapon safety incidents, I recommend the excellent book "Command and Control" (also a documentary but the book is significantly more comprehensive).
I am surprised the article didn't even mention the close call the world had on Sept 26, 1983 when a Soviet system false alarm showed a surprise US attack. Their commander at the time (Petrov?) refused to accept that it was real, otherwise WW3 might have started (and maybe ended too) on that day.
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.
It's a German TV series, viewable in America (at least) on Hulu. There are additional series Deutschland 86 and Deutschland 89 as well. They are fictional espionage stories but are set against real events of the times.
“[Able Archer] sounded no alarm bells in the U.S. Indications and Warning system. United States commanders on the scene were not aware of any pronounced superpower tension, and the Soviet activities were not seen in their totality until long after the exercise was over”
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.
If they were scared NATO was about to preemptively attack them, they probably wouldn't be moving air defense missiles out of Russia (including as far away as St. Petersburg) [1] to move them to Ukraine.
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].
> 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.
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.
Yes. It’s the opposite of Robert McNamara’s rule number one: “Empathize with your opponent” (by which he meant not sympathy but putting oneself in his shoes). See the documentary “Fog Of War”.
The only way WWIII happens is if we appease Russia. They didn't stop after Georgia. They didn't stop after Crimea and Donbass. They won't willingly stop now.
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...
There seems to be at least one high-ish level FSB agent talking to us. Considering current levels of Russian corruption, there's probably more than one.
Hopefully someone is thinking clearly enough to realize how stupid and unlikely it would be for Putin’s external enemies to attempt something like that at this moment. Putin’s standing in Russia is as tenuous as it has ever been and getting worse with each day. The only play at the moment is to watch and see if he manages to wriggle out of the noose.
It was this incident which terrified Reagan and prompted him to sit down with Gorbachev and negotiate an end to nuclear weapons, which resulted in the INF treaty and arms reductions.
Prior to this (1983) Reagan had been quite staunchly anti-communist and anti-Soviet repproachment. Reykjavik was in 86 so yes I think that led from this incident.
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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
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.
https://archive.org/details/AV_179-THE_WAR_GAME-_THE_REALITY...
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.
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_83https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutschland_86https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutschland_89
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutschland_83
In the US I believe it's streaming on Hulu.
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...