The
newly released Soviet "War Scare" report - previously
classified "TOP SECRET UMBRA GAMMA WNINTEL NOFORN NOCONTRACT
ORCON" and published after a 12-year fight by the National
Security Archive – reveals that the 1983 War Scare was real.
According to the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board
(PFIAB), the United States "may have inadvertently placed our
relations with the Soviet Union on a hair trigger" during the
1983 NATO nuclear release exercise, Able Archer 83.
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The
documents prove that the "balance of terror" during the
Cold War was very fragile. The philosophy of the MAD (mutually
assured destruction), based on the theory of deterrence, might not
be sufficient to prevent a nuclear war.
According to
the theory of deterrence, "the threat of using strong weapons
against the enemy prevents the enemy's use of those same weapons. The
strategy is a form of Nash equilibrium in which neither side, once
armed, has any incentive to initiate a conflict or to disarm."
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_assured_destruction)
The
revelation also shows that the prevention of a nuclear war came not
as a result of a well-coordinated general strategy, or, effective
communication channels between the two Cold War rivals, but from the
reactions of specific individuals like Lieutenant General Leonard H.
Perroots!
From the
National Security Archive:
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According
to documents reviewed by the Board and dissected in the
declassified PFIAB report, by 1983 "The Soviets had
concern that the West might decide to attack the USSR without
warning during a time of vulnerability…thus compelling the
Soviets to consider a preemptive strike at the first sign of US
preparations for a nuclear strike." To counter this
strike (which the West never intended to launch), Soviet leader
Yuri Andropov initiated Operation RYaN, the Soviet human
intelligence effort to detect and preempt a Western "surprise
nuclear missile attack."
Fortunately
"the military officers in charge of the Able Archer
exercise minimized this risk by doing nothing in the face of
evidence that parts of the Soviet armed forces were moving to an
unusual level of alert." The decision not to elevate
the alert of Western military assets in response was made by
Lieutenant General Leonard Perroots while serving as Assistant
Chief of Staff for Intelligence, US Air Forces Europe. The report
describes Perroots's decision as "fortuitous, if
ill-informed" and states that "these officers
acted correctly out of instinct, not informed guidance, for in the
years leading up to Able Archer they had received no guidance as
to the possible significance of apparent changes in Soviet
military and political thinking."
Perroots's
instinctual decision not to respond to the Soviet escalation in
kind –an act until now unknown– may have been what ended the
"last paroxysm of the Cold War," the 1983 War Scare.
Declassified
NATO and US Air Force documents have shown that the Able Archer 83
exercise included significant new provocative features, which
could have been misperceived by the Soviets as preparations for an
actual strike. These included: a 170-flight, radio-silent air
lift of 19,000 US soldiers to Europe during Autumn Forge 83, of
which Able Archer 83 was a component; the shifting of commands
from "Permanent War Headquarters to the Alternate War
Headquarters;" the practice of "new nuclear weapons
release procedures" including consultations with cells in
Washington and London; and the "sensitive, political issue"
of numerous "slips of the tongue" in which B-52 sorties
were referred to as nuclear "strikes."
The PFIAB
report reveals even more potential warning signs that could have
been misinterpreted by the Soviets, described as "special
wrinkles," including "pre-exercise communications
that notionally moved forces from normal readiness, through
various alert phases, to General Alert;" and that "some
US aircraft practiced the nuclear warhead handling procedures,
including taxiing out of hangars carrying realistic-looking dummy
warheads."
The
PFIAB report also shows that President Reagan learned about, and
reacted to, the danger of nuclear war through miscalculation.
After reading a June 19th 1984 memorandum from CIA Director
William Casey describing "a rather stunning array of
indicators" during the War Scare that added "a dimension
of genuineness to the Soviet expressions of concern," the
president "expressed surprise" and "described the
events as ‘really scary.'"
Months
earlier, Reagan was already concerned about Soviet fears. A week
after Able Archer 83's end, on November 18, 1983, the President
wrote in his journal, "George Shultz & I had a talk
mainly about setting up a little in house group of experts on the
Soviet U. to help us in setting up some channels. 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
that no one here has any intention of doing anything like that."
According
to the PFIAB, the US Intelligence Community's erroneous
reporting made the "especially grave error to
assume that since we know the US is not going to start World War
III, the next leaders of the Kremlin will also believe that."
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Other
interesting elements from the revelation include "more
details on the primitive computer model the Soviets apparently used
to help determine if and when the US would launch a nuclear attack at
the USSR. This computer, developed by military and economic
specialists, consisted of a database of 40,000 weighted military,
political, and economic factors, including 'indicators' reported from
agents abroad. 'Before long,' the report states, the computer
'started spewing very unwelcome news:' that by 1984 Soviet power had
declined to just 45 percent of that of the United States."
A remarkable
coincidence(?), is that the same year, the film WarGames
was released, according to which a
young hacker who unwittingly accesses WOPR (War Operation Plan
Response), a United States military supercomputer programmed to
predict possible outcomes of nuclear war, gets WOPR to run a nuclear
war simulation, originally believing it to be a computer game. The
simulation causes a national nuclear missile scare and nearly starts
World War III.
The
big question naturally arise: are there any reliable mechanisms today
who could eliminate the possibility of a nuclear war? Are there any
communication channels between the US, Russia and China in the new
Cold War?
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