It is difficult today to explain to those born after 1990 what it was like to live through the Cold War.  Before 1945, Americans enjoyed the security of two large oceans that made invasion virtually impossible.  The Second World War and dawn of the Cold War changed both perception and reality.  New technologies such as airplanes made transoceanic travel possible in a matter of hours.  By 1949, the Soviet Union evolved from a military threat to Europe to a dangerous worldwide nuclear rival.  For the first time, Americans faced the real possibility of nuclear attack and invasion.   Over the years, those fears became a permanent part of the landscape, heightened as technology improved.  By the 1960s, the US and USSR possessed ICBMs and submarine delivered nuclear missiles.  Instead of a single bomber destroying one city, either side could launch a hail of ICBMs bringing devastation to whole nations in an hour.  For the 45 years following the end of World War II, foreign affairs took the form of a roller coaster ride with periodic escalations reaching a dramatic moment where the world watched to see if one side would blink or plunge humanity into Armageddon.  We knew about some peaks like the Cuban Missile Crisis.  Others remained secret or underreported until after the end of the Cold War.  The early 1980s stand out as one of those slow assents building to a crescendo not fully revealed until years later.  With time and access to declassified information we now know that in 1983 the world came uncomfortably close to nuclear war.

The Comparative Safety of the Early 20^th Century

In the first decades of the 20^th century, the United States mostly focused inwardly.  In spite of playing a decisive role in winning World War I, Americans rejected a greater role in the international community.  They clung to George Washington’s time-honored advice of Isolationism: avoiding “entangling alliances” with European nations.  Involvement in world politics was not mandatory as the US enjoyed the impenetrable borders of two wide oceans.  Even two years into World War II with continental Europe occupied and only the British Empire opposing Nazi Germany, neutrality and Isolationism dominated American foreign policy.

This is not to say Americans were unaware of world events.  The 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia sparked fears of the spread of communism to American shores.  The Red Scare largely petered out after 1920 though.  In the 1930s, newspapers reported the mass starvation and death in Ukraine and Georgia at the collectivizing hands of a Soviet government.  However, by this time the Soviet threat was too distant.  Americans recognized inherent dangers, but communism was never more than a fringe movement.  The shock of Pearl Harbor jolted the US back into international affairs as a primary combatant in World War II.

Post World War II and the Cold War

Conditions changed significantly from 1918 to 1945.  Improving technology reduced what had once been vast distances.  Reaching the US from Europe in the early 20^th century required a trans-Atlantic voyage lasting a week or more.  Innovations in the following thirty years decreased travel time dramatically.  Airplanes could make the flight over either ocean in a day or less.  New rocket and jet technologies began maturing that soon made oceanic barriers obsolete.

World War II brought about a temporary change in the Russian image as well.  The Soviets were allies in the great struggle against the barbaric Nazis.  President Franklin Roosevelt referred to Soviet Premier Josef Stalin as “Uncle Joe” as the American media outlets glossed over Soviet repression.  On the surface, it appeared the US and Soviet Union were friendly partners in rebuilding Europe.  The afterglow of victory did not last long.  Warm feelings began to crumble when Stalin brushed aside nationalist democratic movements in Eastern Europe to install puppet communist governments.

For the Soviets, an Eastern European buffer was a matter of national security.  They suffered three devastating invasions from the west in 1812, 1914, and 1941.  The failure to heed the omens of the surprise German invasion in 1941 loomed especially large in Soviet calculations after World War II.  Preventing a fourth invasion remained a primary strategic objective for Soviet leaders from 1945 well into the 1980s.

While the historical lesson of 1941 dominated Soviet thinking, the US and western Europe focused on a different event.  Hitler’s demand for the annexation of Czechoslovakia in 1938 led to a conference in Munich and Anglo-French acquiescence known as “Appeasement.”  Giving Hitler Czechoslovakia did not sate Nazi appetites, passivity only encouraged the invasion of Poland.  The rise of Hitler demonstrated that Americans could no longer ignore tyrannical governments that aggressively expanded into surrounding lands.  The Soviets were gobbling up neighboring countries in the 1940s the way Hitler had done with Czechoslovakia, Austria and Poland in the 1930s.

The resulting threat of Soviet expansionism became real for the average American over the two year period of 1948-50.  At the end of World War II, the Allies divided Berlin, located 100 miles inside of Soviet controlled East Germany, into an awkward arrangement of four sectors controlled by the US, Britain, France (West Berlin) and the USSR (East Berlin).  Western sectors quickly became a haven for refugees escaping burgeoning communist repression.  In 1948, the Soviets suddenly closed German borders isolating West Berlin.  Stalin was trying to starve West Berlin into submission.  The US and Britain responded with an around the clock, all-out re-supply effort that became known as the Berlin Airlift.  The determined venture succeeded and after 9 months, Stalin finally backed down.

Then in 1949, the Soviets successfully tested their own atomic bomb.  That same year Mao Tse Tung and his followers ousted Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-Shek imposing a communist dictatorship in China.  Americans long considered China an ally so Mao’s ascension came as a shock.  Only a year later, Soviet protégé Kim Il Sung led a North Korean invasion of South Korea.  In reality, communism was never monolithic, but in 1950 it seemed that a great red wave was spreading across the globe through violent revolution and outright invasion.

Over the next 30 years, the Soviet Union periodically reminded the world of its repressive nature at least once a decade.  In 1956, the Red Army invaded Hungary killing off a popular uprising against hardline communism.  In 1968, Soviet tanks once again rolled over the Prague Spring reform movement in Czechoslovakia.  1979 witnessed the Red Army invasion of Afghanistan to prop up a failing pro-Soviet communist regime.

Of all these examples, the Berlin Wall stood out as the most visible and long-lasting symbol of communist repression.  With Soviet approval, the East Germans erected a border wall in Berlin in 1961 with concrete barriers, barbed wire and armed guards stationed in towers.  The Berlin Wall said it all: life was so miserable in communist countries, their governments had to imprison the population to keep them from escaping.  These reminders of repression served as stark warnings of the dangers of communism and the threat of nuclear war.

The Traumatic 1960s and 1970s

Just as the Cold War tension is difficult to explain, so too is the trauma and turmoil of the Vietnam War and Watergate Era.  The assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963 initiated a tragic series of events that left an indelible impression.   Racial tensions grew significantly in the 1960s as Americans finally sought to address age old race-based discrimination.  The assassinations of civil rights leaders such as Martin Luther King and Malcolm X and the resulting protests further roiled the US.

Years of civil rights and antiwar demonstrations (which sometimes became violent) arising from the increasingly unpopular Vietnam War created social divides resulting in the questioning of traditional American values that has never really gone away.  The loss in Vietnam created an unprecedented trauma.  The US had never before “lost” a war.

Coming on the heels of civil rights unrest and Vietnam, the Watergate Scandal exacerbated the growing division and dissention.  Revelations in congressional hearings laid bare political dirty tricks and outright illegal activity of the Nixon Administration undermining confidence in politicians and the political system in a way never before seen.  Partisan political bitterness grew and grew.  For the first and only time in American History, a president resigned in the face of certain impeachment.  Economic conditions declined significantly in 1973 as well, partially as a result of a Middle Eastern (OPEC) oil embargo.  By the late 1970s, a toxic stew known as Stagflation (high interest rates, high unemployment and slow economic growth) prevailed leaving the American economy in tatters.

In the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, economic conditions became increasingly stagnant under the long rule of General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev.  Wresting power from Nikita Khrushchev in 1964, Brezhnev reversed liberalized economic and cultural policies enacted by his predecessor returning powers to the KGB to repress dissent.  He even re-initiated public show trials, a throwback to the old Stalinist days.  The tightening authoritarian regime brought about an overbearing bureaucratic apparatus increasing corruption that strangled economic growth while stifling innovation.

Western commentators have referred to this era of Soviet leadership (Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov, and Konstantin Chernenko) as a “gerontocracy,” or an oligarchy of old men.  The term applied not just to the age of Soviet leaders but to their outlook.  They were trapped in the events of the 1940s, unable to evolve with a changing world.  Mikhail Gorbachev agreed calling the 1973-1985 period “the lowest stage of socialism” in the USSR.  Ill leaders became a regular feature of the gerontocracy.  Brezhnev suffered a heart attack in 1975 followed by a series of strokes.   Soviet doctors were at the General Secretary’s side at all times.  It is believed he had to be revived from death several times in the last ten years of his term. The illness of aging leaders (including both of Brezhnev’s successors) from the mid-1970s left the Soviet Union increasingly rudderless.

To make matters worse for the Soviets, by the 1970s, Western Europe had finally recovered from the effects of World War II flowering into affluent democracies.  Eastern European client states increasingly lagged behind their western counterparts in standards of living and economic production.  The lack of political freedom created discontent and malaise.  Because of inherent censorship, most were not aware that the economic situation in the USSR and Eastern Europe in 1980 was far more dire than reported.

At the very end of the decade, the Soviets stumbled into a morass from which they could not extract themselves.  The Red Army invaded neighboring Afghanistan in 1979 to stabilize a tottering Soviet puppet state, fortify the Afghan military and pacify the populace.  Intended to be temporary, an ineffective Afghan military increasingly sucked the Soviets into military operations.  The foreign invasion incensed many Afghans who formed a guerrilla resistance, the Mujahideen.  Harsh and indiscriminate Soviet tactics caused as many as 2 million civilian deaths over the course of the war, generating 5-10 million more refugees.  Though the Soviets initially secured urban areas, the increasingly potent Mujahideen retained control of most of the mountainous rural countryside preventing the Soviets from leaving.  Afghanistan had the makings of a quagmire.  The world reaction was intensely negative.  Antagonized Western Europeans and other non-communist populations stiffened in their resolve to oppose and limit Soviet initiatives.

The Dawn of the 1980s

Change was afoot in both the US and USSR with the coming of a new decade.  Ronald Reagan won a landslide victory in the Election of 1980 on a hopeful electoral theme.  Reagan was self-assured, patriotic and staunchly anti-communist.  He brought a message of an optimism, a new beginning domestically and a foreign policy shift away from Richard Nixon’s policy of Détente towards confrontation and competition.

 For Americans in the 1980s, two concerns took precedence, the economy and the Soviet Union.  To address both, the new administration shepherded large tax cuts through Congress and sought to reduce governmental bureaucracy and regulation.  The budget also included significant increases in military spending beefing up conventional and nuclear forces.  These first steps did not produce immediate results but set the stage for success down the road.

The new president knew something else not apparent to the general public and even many foreign policy experts.  “Reagan, nearly alone, truly believed in 1981 that the Soviet system was vulnerable, not in some vague, long range historical sense, but right then.  And he was determined to move the United States from defense to offense.”[1]  “At the end of the day, the President believed a tottering regime could be pushed further off balance by . . . pressure.  So he pushed – hard.” [2}

The first foreign policy pivot came in a change in rhetoric at the outset.  Reagan re-defined the Cold War struggle away from the “peaceful co-existence” of Détente towards a moral clash between an American led coalition favoring freedom and liberty opposing a network of communist regimes bent on repression and domination.  In an early press conference, he bluntly criticized the Soviets saying they “their goal . . . [is] world revolution and one-world Socialist of Communist state . . . [they] reserve unto themselves the right to commit any crime lie cheat and steal in order to attain [this end]”   [3]

The US military buildup and more confrontational approach revealed a seeming contradiction.  Well before becoming president, Reagan argued in favor of reducing nuclear arms.  However, he knew nothing could be accomplished so long as the US operated from weakness.  The domestic economy and foreign policy were intertwined.  To bring the Soviets to the negotiating table, the US needed to be in a position of strength which required building prosperity at home and strengthening the military to project power abroad.  Reagan adopted Barry Goldwater’s mantra: “peace through strength.”

For the Soviets, the new American president and their own economic woes were not their only concerns.  In 1980 as the US presidential election raged, a major problem popped up in an unexpected place, Poland.  During and after World War II, Stalin imprisoned and/or killed off many Polish nationalists installing a Soviet dominated communist government in 1945.  Poles never warmed to communism retaining a strong Catholic identity.  Significantly, the Polish government was unable to ban the Catholic Church.  Attending Mass became as much an act of political defiance as religious expression.  Polish Priest Karol Wojtyla emerged as a senior Catholic figure by the 1970s.  He was popular and shrewd.  He preached about universal human rights but never directly denounced the Polish regime.  Senior Polish official Andrzej Werblan described Wojtyla as “the only real ideological threat in Poland.”  [5]  So when Wojtyla was elected Pope in 1980, taking the name John Paul II, the Soviets were greatly concerned.  They had good reason.

The new Pope visited Poland in June of 1979.  His tour was a triumph with huge crowds greeting him at every stop.  The final Mass in Krakow drew more than 2 million enthusiastic attendees.  Historian Timothy Garton Ash assessed the importance of the papal visit: “For nine days, the state virtually ceased to exist.  . . .   It is impossible to place an exact value on the transformation of consciousness wrought by the Polish Pope.”  [6]

A year later, the new consciousness took a tangible form with a general strike in Lenin Shipyards in Gdansk.  The movement spread across Poland with over 750,000 workers joining the protest.  The Gdansk workers soon formed a union, Solidarity, led by the charismatic Lech Walesa.  Within months over one million workers dropped their communist labor party affiliations in favor of Solidarity memberships.  By the end of the year Solidarity swelled to over 10 million members.

The Soviets looked on the deteriorating situation in Poland with great angst.  The fear of invasion from the West remained a guiding light in Soviet thinking.  The dissatisfaction in Poland could spread to other Warsaw Pact countries.  The Soviets could not risk losing Poland, one of the springboards of the 1941 German invasion.  KGB Director Yuri Andropov played a central role in the decision to invade Hungary in 1956 (as Ambassador to Hungary) and later masterminded Soviet military operations in Czechoslovakia in 1968.  As the rebellious Solidarity Movement gained momentum, Andropov’s response was pre-ordained.  Plans to invade Poland were hastily drawn up to suppress dissent.  At this point though the Afghan invasion came back to haunt the Soviets.  US and Western European leaders made it clear that “another Afghanistan” in Europe was unacceptable.  Needing foreign investment and oil export income, the Soviets backed down.

As Reagan bided his time waiting for the economy to rebound and the military buildup to take hold, he looked for other ways to exert pressure.  Poland presented just such an opportunity.  The President and John Paul II met in 1981 at the Vatican and laid out a strategy for supporting the Solidarity Movement with financial aid, training of activists and public moral support.  International backing from the US, Western Europe and the Catholic Church materially aided Solidarity in building an infrastructure and maintaining pressure on the Polish government

PSYOPS

The US military buildup of 1981 coincided with more aggressive US and NATO operations designed to raise anxiety and create uncertainty within the Soviet leadership collectively known as PSYOPS or “psychological operations.”  One of the prime techniques involved initiating military exercises to test Soviet early warning systems and assess responses.  In February of 1981, a mixed US-NATO naval force led by aircraft carrier USS Eisenhower sailed through the Iceland-Greenland gap in the Atlantic evading Soviet detection conducting exercises near Soviet territory.  US warplanes and warships tested early warning systems and Soviet responses in the Atlantic.  US forces also probed Soviet defenses in other areas of the world in succeeding months.  PSYOPs operations identified gaping holes in the Soviet early warning system.  Further, the Soviets had trouble tracking US and NATO warplanes and vessels in real time.  The difficulties in detection and tracking succeeded in raising anxiety within the Soviet leadership.

The more aggressive American operations re-kindled the old Soviet paranoia of invasion.  KGB Director Andropov remembered that Stalin had unfairly blamed the KGB for failing to detect the German invasion in 1941.  He was determined not to be scapegoated a second time.  In May of 1981 at a high-level meeting, three months after increased western PSYOPS, Andropov raised the specter of the surprise German invasion in 1941 in the form of a surprise nuclear strike.  His World War II fears were shared by General Secretary Brezhnev and what emerged was Operation RYaN.

Searching for Clues: Operation RYaN

Operation RYaN (a Russian acronym for “Nuclear Missile Attack”) became the largest intelligence gathering operation in KGB history.  Andropov tasked RYaN operatives with uncovering early signs of a nuclear strike.  Unfortunately for the Soviets, the KGB was in serious decline by 1980.  Ideologically friendly officials in the US and UK collaborated in espionage activities in the 1940s and 1950s.  Decades of heavy-handed repression alienated many left leaning Westerners to the point they would no longer cooperate.  The lack of western participants required KGB agents personally engage in surveillance and intelligence gathering activities which exposed them to Western security services.  Soviet agents resorted to unusual methods such as counting the number of lights on in the Pentagon at night, monitoring blood banks, meatpacking plant production, and looking for financial clues that might indicate the US was stockpiling supplies and planning for attack.

Due to their deteriorated spy networks, the Soviets turned to East German spymaster Markus Wolf as well.  Wolf ran the most efficient and productive communist spy rings and he would produce much of the intelligence upon which the Soviets would rely.  RYaN continued running indefinitely to satisfy Brezhnev’s and Andropov’s paranoid fears.

Poland Festers

As 1981 progressed, conditions in Poland deteriorated.  Polish hard liners replaced First Secretary Stanislaw Kania with General Wojciech Jaruzelski after Kania tried to negotiate with Solidarity and the Catholic Church.  Unable to stem growing dissention, Jaruzelski informally formed a military junta and declared martial law on December 13, 1981.  Over 5,000 Poles were arrested including Lech Walesa and other Solidarity leaders.  The Poles were not alone in their struggle.  Western sources provided assistance and negative press coverage which buoyed Solidarity in a difficult moment.  Many Poles sensed desperation in the crackdown.  Solidarity correspondent Paul Huelle recalled his impressions at the time: “I had a feeling that if that system had to resort to tanks, nightsticks, arrests and violence, it meant that it [the Polish regime] was helpless. That this is the beginning of its end.  They could not go any further.  There was hope that the system was burning out, and victory would be on our side.”  [7]  Huelle’s comments demonstrated that the crackdown only strengthened Polish resolve instead of weakening Solidarity.  In the long run, Huelle was right.  In the short term the Poles had to endure the domestic repression of a police state.

1983: a Watershed Year

As the 1980s unfolded, the Soviets found themselves on the defensive and on uncertain ground.  Soviet General Secretary Brezhnev’s health continued to deteriorate.  After a lengthy incapacity, Brezhnev finally died on November 10, 1982.  Andropov emerged the successor within four months suffered total renal failure requiring frequent and extended hospitalizations.  He too was gravely ill and increasingly unable to govern effectively.  Brezhnev never made any serious attempts to correct the Soviet decline in his latter years and Andropov lacked the vigor to take up the challenge.

In the US, it was just the opposite.  President Reagan’s economic programs did not produce immediate results and his approval rating among Americans sagged in 1982.  However, the 1981 reforms gradually produced results.  The lingering recession ended in 1982 with the inflation rate dropping below 4% (from a high of 13.3% in 1980).  By July 1983, 1.1 million new jobs materialized, the Dow Jones was up 10%, and key sectors such as the auto manufacturing industry reported a 48% jump in sales over 1982.  In short, a booming economy replaced Stagflation.

With a rejuvenated economy and a stronger military, President Reagan became more assured and more entrenched.  He began applying more pressure offering more strident comparisons of the differences between communist and noncommunist factions.  On June 8, 1982, Reagan confidently proclaimed to the British House of Commons that “the march of freedom and democracy  . . . will leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash-heap of history.”  [8]  He followed up on March 8, 1983 denouncing the USSR as an “evil empire” and the “focus of evil in the world.”  [9]  The description became a mantra of the Reagan Administration aided by comparisons to the Soviet Union as Darth Vader and the Empire from the popular US movie series Star Wars.

Reagan backed his words with action.  One of the key concepts of Cold War competition is parity.  To allow one side to have an advantage represented weakness and invited attack.  If one party initiated a new threat, the other side must respond with an equivalent.  Intermediate range nuclear missiles became just such an issue.  In the late 1970s, the Soviet Union deployed over 400 intermediate range SS-20 missiles in European Russia.  The missiles could not reach the US but could devastate Europe.  The new threat presented a nightmare scenario for the US.  If the Soviets launched SS-20s, the US had only two responses.  Americans could counter with an all-out ICBM strike which would undoubtedly trigger a massive counterattack leaving the US a wasteland.  The only other option was to acquiesce to the Soviet conquest of Europe to preserve the American homeland.  Neither option was acceptable.

Western European nations began calling for a similar deployment of medium range nuclear weapons (IRBMs) in Europe to counteract the SS-20s.  The Carter Administration developed the Pershing II intermediate range missiles and Reagan pushed for deployment.  Pershing IIs were fast, powerful and accurate.  Capable of destroying even the most hardened silos and bunkers, they could reach their targets well inside the USSR within 12 minutes.  In addition to the standard ballistic missile design, the US introduced a new type of weapon, the cruise missile.  They were not just any old weapon system.  The cruise missile was a new high-tech threat evading radar detection by hugging the terrain.  The Soviets lacked the technology to match this innovation and might not detect them until they detonated.

The new US IRBMs could potentially destroy the Soviet command structure with no time to react.  The Soviet response was to create plans to destroy Pershing II and cruise missile sites before they could be launched in pre-emptive strikes.  For a pre-emptive strike to be effective, uncovering early signs of an attack became crucial.  Even before the first Pershing IIs arrived in Europe in November of 1983, the KGB issued orders to RYaN agents to re-double efforts to discover any clues of an impending first strike.

SDI Alters the Soviet Calculus

On March 23, 1983, President Reagan surprised the world, including many in his administration, making a nationally televised address introducing a new space based anti-missile program: the Strategic Defense Initiative.  The plan called for placement of sophisticated weapon platforms in space capable of destroying Soviet ICBM missiles before they could deliver their nuclear payloads.  Critics doubted whether SDI was feasible but for the Soviets that did not matter.  The US was creating a new program and the Soviets had to produce a counter.

The Soviet reaction was predictable.  Though hospitalized, Andropov publicly denounced the program: “Engaging in this [SDI] is not just irresponsible, it is insane.  Washington’s actions are putting the entire world in jeopardy.”  [10]  Privately, Andropov called his advisors to his bedside saying: “The USSR will just stop being a superpower. . . . It looks like it [SDI] can’t be done now . . . However, in 10 to 15 years the situation might change.”  [11]  Andropov’s fears of irrelevancy reverberated throughout the Soviet leadership.

The Soviets faced significant obstacles in meeting the new challenge.  They were behind the US in the development of key components such as tracking, laser weaponry, missile guidance and lacked the skilled engineers and scientists to catch up.  Additionally, one of the few positive trends for the US in the 1970s came in significant technological advancement and innovation.  Malaise in the 1970s prevented the Soviets from staying abreast.  As a result, by the 1980s, the Soviets were on the wrong end of a significant technology gap.  That gap was particularly wide in computer-based technology.  Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov, First Deputy Defense Minister and Chief of the General Staff, was remarkably candid about the dilemma in private comments to American journalist Leslie H. Gelb:

“We cannot equal the quality of U.S. arms for a generation or two.  Modern military power is based on technology, and technology is based on computers.  In the US, small children play with computers…. Here, we don’t even have computers in every office of the Defense Ministry.  And for reasons you know well, we cannot make computers widely available in our society.  We will never be able to catch up with you in modern arms until we have an economic revolution.  And the question is whether we can have an economic revolution without a political revolution.”  [12]

Funding new research and advanced programs required enormous resources, money the Soviets did not have.  Director of Space Research and the USSR Academy of Sciences Roald Z. Sagdeev described the situation in the 80s: “in the field of computers and microelectronics, the Soviets trailed behind the world standard by about 15 or so years.  . . . The most striking indication of Soviet backwardness was the absence of domestically made supercomputers.  The supercomputer was considered a strategic attribute, the lack of which was inexcusable for a superpower.”  [13]

It is useful here to point out that US success came through cooperation between government and private business.  Often, the government set priorities and allowed the private sector to find solutions independently.  The process encouraged innovation and development of new and sometimes unexpected applications.  The centralized, cumbersome Soviet bureaucracy discouraged novel approaches and solutions.  To compete, the Soviets needed decisive, informed, forward thinking at the top.  Unhealthy general secretaries lacked all three qualities which prevented the formulation of priorities and initiation of comparable advanced programs.  Brezhnev and Andropov were trapped in the past, unable and unwilling to consider new solutions.  Paralysis was damaging in and of itself as the US continued an impressive research and development pace which meant the technology gap only widened.

The lack of funding and deficit of technical knowhow also crippled efforts to catch up.  The US was expanding in so many technological directions, the Soviets could not keep up and they knew it which fueled paranoia.  Combine anxiety over the technology gap with economic malaise, growing dissention in Eastern Europe and a quagmire in Afghanistan and it is not hard to conclude the Soviets were very uneasy by 1983.

Intensifying Tensions and the Tragedy of KAL 007

As if a new, expensive space based weapons system was not enough, the US intensified PSYOPS operations in 1983 initiating a naval war game named Fleet Ex ’83 a month after the SDI announcement.  Over 100 US warships gathered in the Northern Pacific simulating nuclear exchanges.  Not only was the size of the exercise significant, to date, the US had not been active in this area of the world.  US jets overflew Soviet territory and even military bases as “peacetime maneuvers . . . focused on pressuring, provoking or confusing the Soviet Union.”  [14]

Fleet Ex ’83 stretched the Soviets into trying to defend all of their massive territory, a nearly impossible task.  The exercise also embarrassed the Soviets.  The high command demoted officers who failed to engage US warplanes.  Their replacements understood that failure to interdict future incursions would end their careers.

On September 1, 1983, Korean Flight KAL 007 accidentally strayed into Soviet airspace.  Soviet fighters shot the commercial airliner down killing all 269 the passengers and crew.  At the time the KAL 007 disaster seemed to be an isolated event.  It was generally believed that the regional Soviet commander overreacted.  However, we now know that a lot was going on in the Soviet Union.  Fleet Ex had Soviet commanders in the Northern Pacific on edge, so KAL 007’s inadvertent entry into Soviet airspace came at a bad moment.

 

 

The Soviets mishandled public relations badly which made the crisis worse.  Initially they denied responsibility and when forced to admit culpability, Andropov angrily accused the CIA of intentionally flying the commercial airliner into Soviet territory: “The sophisticated provocation, organized by the US special services and using a South Korean airplane, is an example of extreme adventurism in policy.”  [15]

Reagan responded by calling the shootdown “an act of barbarism born of a society that wantonly disregards individual rights and value of human life and constantly seeks to expand and dominate other nations.”  [16]  World opinion sided with the US president’s assessment with protests erupting in Japan, South Korea and elsewhere.  The Soviets’ reputation suffered enormously as the world met Andropov’s protestations with incredulity and outrage.

 

False Alarm

A week after the KAL 007 incident, Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei A. Gromyko said “The world situation is now slipping toward a very dangerous precipice . . . Problem No. 1 for the world is to avoid nuclear war,”  [17]  Soviet resolve was soon to be tested, not from external provocation, but an internal crisis.  On September 26, 1983, alarm bells went off at Serpukhov 15, an early warning command center south of Moscow.  Soviet satellites monitoring US silo sites indicated an ICBM launch.  Soon four more missiles appeared on the screen.  Serpukhov 15 commander Lieutenant Colonel Stanislaw Petrov had to make quick decisions.  A warning required him to alert his superiors immediately.  Petrov had worked with the Soviet early warning program for almost two decades.  He knew designers rushed the system into service without solving a number of bugs and flaws.  For the next few minutes, Petrov kept a phone to his ear listening to reports and called for more information over his intercom.

Ground based radar showed no launches.  Petrov later recalled: “I had a funny feeling in my gut. . . . . I didn’t want to make a mistake. I made a decision, and that was it.”  [18]  With conflicting reports from satellites and radar, Petrov concluded the satellite warnings were false, not believing the US would begin a first strike with only five missiles.   Petrov was right, early warning satellites misinterpreted an atmospheric anomaly for missile launches.  Had Petrov reported a missile launch up the chain of command, the Soviet Union could have erroneously retaliated.  The false alarm remained secret until 1998, but was one moment where the world potentially hung in the balance.

A Final Provocation

On November 2, 1983, The US and NATO embarked on their annual European war game exercises.  The operation has acquired several names, but is generally known as Able Archer (other names: Reforger, Autumn Forge).  Lasting eleven days, Able Archer involved more than 100,000 NATO personnel, and simulated a conventional war with the Warsaw Pact and USSR that escalated from DEFCON 5 to DEFCON 1, culminating in a nuclear exchange.

Primarily designed to test command readiness, Able Archer ’83 added new wrinkles including direct participation by British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and German Chancellor Helmut Kohl.  On November 7^th, the exercise went into the nuclear phase.  For the first time, NATO forces fully simulated a nuclear launch and employed new communications codes and extended radio silence.

The following day KGB operatives erroneously reported that NATO bases had gone on high alert touching off a frenzy in the USSR.  The Soviets believed the Western allies might use a military exercise to mask the buildup to a surprise attack.  KGB Colonel Oleg Gordievsky later stated that some KGB factions warned that Able Archer might be the beginning of a countdown to a nuclear strike against the Warsaw Pact and/or Soviet Union.  Nuclear bombers in Poland, Czechoslovakia and East Germany went on high alert.  The Soviets deployed 75 SS-20 RCBMs and an undisclosed number of older SS-19 RCBMs to camouflaged launch sites with coordinates for Western European targets.  ICBM silos were also likely placed on alert status.  The KGB sent a flash message to all RYaN agents to urgently search for clues of a possible attack.  Fortunately, the Soviets stood their forces down when Able Archer ended on November 11^th.  Nevertheless, the 5 days of simulated nuclear exchange were a moment of high Soviet tensions who made actual preparations to launch nuclear weapons.

The Aftermath

By December of 1983, as Pershing IIs and cruise missiles began deploying across Europe, reports of the Soviet reaction to Able Archer began trickling in to Washington.  The British informed their American allies that the Soviets were becoming increasingly nervous about deficiencies in their early warning systems and anxious over increased risks of war.  The British source, Colonel Gordievsky, was one to be taken seriously.  He was the senior KGB official in the Soviet embassy in London and had long acted as a British intelligence asset.  National Security Advisor Robert McFarlane issued an assessment in 1984 reflecting increased Soviet jitters regarding a first strike based on Gordievsky’s secret reports and other sources.  President Reagan was incredulous commenting to McFarlane: “Do you suppose they really believe that? …I don’t see how they could believe that–but it’s something to think about.”  [20]

Reagan did think about it and slowly he came to a different opinion about how to approach the Soviet Union reflected in his autobiography:

Three years had taught me something surprising about the Russians: Many people at the top of the Soviet hierarchy were genuinely afraid of America and Americans. Perhaps this shouldn’t have surprised me, but it did…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.  [21]

Reagan’s evolving change of heart convinced him of the need: “to get a top Soviet leader in a room alone and try to convince him we had no designs on the Soviet Union and Russians had nothing to fear from us.”  [22]  He would have to wait two years for that “top Soviet leader” to emerge.

Senior CIA official Herbert Meyer wrote a report in November 1983 entitled Why Is the World So Dangerous?  Meyer’s conclusions were shocking at the time: “Present US policies have fundamentally changed the course of history in a direction favorable to the interests of ourselves and our allies.  . . . If present trends continue, we are going to win the Cold War.”  [23]  Meyer predicted that as the Soviets became aware of this reality, they might take desperate measures to reverse the trend by inciting violence around the world and perhaps even launching a pre-emptive invasion.

Meyer’s breathtaking prediction proved remarkably accurate, but the Soviets never followed through on the more extreme options Meyer envisioned.  One of the major reasons was that Soviet leadership underwent a titanic shift.  By the end of 1983, Andropov was permanently hospitalized and was not seen publicly for the following six months.  He died in 1984 and his successor Konstantin Chernenko, also seriously ill, lasted barely a year.  The Old Guard gerontocracy finally exhausted its stable of leaders.

A younger Mikhail Gorbachev came to power with a different mindset.  He agreed with First Deputy Defense Minister Ogarkov’s assessment above that the USSR had to fundamentally change to compete.  Gorbachev was also not burdened with the old, World War II era paranoia.  He instituted his now famous Perestroyka and Glastnost programs, attempting to reform and open up the political and economic spheres.  Reagan finally had a Soviet General Secretary with whom he could establish a working relationship.  Better relations eased tensions, resulting in an historic agreement to reduce nuclear arms in 1987.  Unfortunately for the Soviets, they already lagged too far behind economically and technologically.  Gorbachev’s policies unleashed centrifugal forces that ultimately tore the USSR and Warsaw Pact apart.  The Cold War ended iwith a wave of elections in Eastern Europe ousting decrepit communist regimes in favor pro-Western liberalism and capitalism. The USSR was not far behind dissolving in 1991.

The Final Analysis

So just how close did the world come to nuclear Armageddon?  The answer depends on the source.  The CIA released an analysis in 1984 claiming that the Soviet protestations were not based in actual fear but merely a “rattling of pots and pans” designed to gain political advantage in preventing deployment of Pershing IIs and cruise missiles in Europe.  [24]

Other observers and participants disagree.  Historian Richard Rhodes has argued that the events surrounding Able Archer were as dangerous or more so as the Cuban Missile Crisis era:

“During the Cuban [Missile Crisis]…both sides were at least aware of the danger and working intensely to resolve the dispute, . . .  During Able Archer 83, in contrast, an American renewal of high Cold War rhetoric, aggressive and perilous threat displays, and naïve incredulity were combined with Soviet arms-race and surprise-attack insecurities and heavy-handed war-scare propaganda in a nearly lethal mix” (Rhodes 166).  [25]

Paul Dibb, former director of the Australian Joint Intelligence Organization, claimed: “Able Archer could have triggered the ultimate unintended catastrophe, and with prompt nuclear strike capacities on both the US and Soviet sides, orders of magnitude greater than in 1962.”  [26]  Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev likewise affirmed, “Never, perhaps, in the postwar decades has the situation in the world been as explosive as in the first half of the eighties”  [27]

In 1990, President George H. W. Bush’s Presidential Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB) reassessed the events of 1983 and concluded “we may have inadvertently placed our relationship with the Soviet Union on a hair trigger  . . .  the US intelligence community did not at the time, and for several years afterwards, attach sufficient weight to the possibility that the war scare was real.”  [28]

Colonel Gordievsky wrote about his impressions from 1983:

In the tense atmosphere generated by the crises and rhetoric of [1983], the KGB concluded that American forces had been placed on alert–and might even have begun the countdown to war…. The world did not quite reach the edge of the nuclear abyss  . . .  But during ABLE ARCHER 83 it had, without realizing it, come frighteningly close–certainly closer than at any time since the Cuban missile crisis of 1962.  [29]

Former Secretary of Defense and CIA Director Robert Gates, a senior official at the CIA in 1983, offered his opinion:

There is a good chance with all of the other events in 1983 that they [the Soviets] really felt a NATO attack was at least possible and that they took a number of measures to enhance their military readiness short of mobilization.  . . . I don’t think the Soviets were crying wolf.  They may not have believed a NATO attack was imminent in November 1983, but they did seem to believe that the situation was very dangerous.  [30]

For what it is worth, I tend to agree with Gates’ assessment.  It is important to point out a subtlety not mentioned above.  Soviet intelligence services were divided.  The civilian based KGB generally reflected the fears of longtime chief Yuri Andropov.  KGB reports were far more likely to include the possibility of a surprise attack as a real possibility.  The GRU, the Soviet military intelligence agency was less convinced of a US first strike.  Though active in RYaN intelligence gathering activities, East German spymaster Markus Wolf also discounted the possibility of a US/NATO first strike dismissing such fears as overreaction.

Even if much of the Soviet intelligence community was skeptical, they were not leading the nation.  Brezhnev and Andropov were, and they were genuinely concerned.  The Soviet political leadership was anxious about President Reagan’s shift in rhetoric and foreign policy away from Détente.  Increased US defense spending coupled with more confrontational PSYOPS came at a time of the USSR’s deteriorating ability to compete with the West, particularly in the field of computers and cutting-edge technology.  Events in Poland, the deployment of Pershing II RCBMs and cruise missiles to Western Europe exacerbated fears.  The Soviets were also losing the battle of public relations due to brutal Soviet tactics in Afghanistan and the KAL 007 tragedy.  They were up against a public relations master in Ronald Reagan, very aptly nicknamed “The Great Communicator.”  He had a stronger, more appealing message that Soviet responses never effectively countered.  To the contrary, Soviet responses often unintentionally reinforced Reagan’s message.

When looking at Soviet propaganda and rhetoric, it is difficult to differentiate between actual fear and a cynical attempt to spin events favorably.  However, the Soviet political leadership exhibited signs of paranoia in believing the US/NATO might launch a first strike and they took tangible action in setting up RYaN specifically tasked with monitor the West for clues.   They put nuclear forces on high alert during Able Archer with the KGB sending a panicked flash message to RYaN operatives seeking evidence that the US countdown was taking place.  In sum, the words and actions of high ranking Soviet political leaders provided solid evidence of heightened anxiety and paranoia that could have escalated into actual nuclear conflict.

 

I lived through this era and though decently informed on daily events, was oblivious to the larger implications described above.  I would love to hear your opinion and/or your perceptions of those times.  Please leave a comment if you are so motivated.

 

Footnotes:

[1] (Robert Gates From the Shadows, 197.)

[2] Ibid, 192.

[3]  Gwetzman, Bernard, “President Sharply Assails Kremlin; Haig Warning on Poland Disclosed.”  New York Times, January 30, 1981, p. 1.  https://www.nytimes.com/1981/01/30/world/president-sharply-assails-kremlin-haig-warning-on-poland-disclosed.html

[4] Weiss, Gus. W., The Farewell Dossier, declassified CIA Memo   https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/kent-csi/vol39no5/pdf/v39i5a14p.pdf

[5]  Hayward, Steven F., The Age of Reagan: The Conservative Counterrevolution 1980-1989.  New York: Three Rivers Press, 2009. P. 97.

[6] Ash, Timothy Garton, The Polish Revolution: Solidarity.  New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002.  P. 35.

[7] Gliński, Mikołaj, The Day Poland Stood Still: Memories from the Introduction of Martial Law.  https://culture.pl/en/article/the-day-poland-stood-still-memories-from-the-introduction-of-martial-law

[8]  Gershman, Carl, Reagan’s Westminster Address and Democracy 35 Years Later.  World Affairs Journal.  http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/article/reagan’s-westminster-address-and-democracy-35-years-later

[9]  Reagan, Ronald, The Evil Empire Speech.  March 8, 1983.  https://nationalcenter.org/ReaganEvilEmpire1983.html

[10]  Fischer, Benjamin B., A Cold War Conundrum: The 1983 Soviet War Scare, declassified CIA memo posted March 19, 2007.  https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/books-and-monographs/a-cold-war-conundrum/source.htm

[11]  Hayward, p. 277.

[12] Gelb, Leslie H., “Foreign Affairs: Who Won the Cold War?,” New York Times, August 20, 1992, p. 27.  https://www.nytimes.com/1992/08/20/opinion/foreign-affairs-who-won-the-cold-war.html

[13]  Sagdeev, Roald Z. The Making of a Soviet Scientist. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1994, p. 298 .

[14] William N. Arkin, Provocations at Sea, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists November 1985, p. 6.  https://books.google.com/books?id=vAYAAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA6&lpg=PA6&dq=fleet+ex+1983&source=bl&ots=8uFQmrXCL6&sig=eQJ8I3l4X21V-T5mg2FsdziO8YQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwj8h6fl4tvdAhXKtlkKHSupARwQ6AEwB3oECAEQAQ#v=onepage&q=fleet%20ex%201983&f=false

[15]  Fischer.

[16]  Radchenko, Sergey, “The Shoot-Down Heard ‘Round the World.’”  Foreign Policy, July 18, 2014.   https://foreignpolicy.com/2014/07/18/the-shoot-down-heard-round-the-world/

[17]   Andrew, Christopher, Gordievsky, Oleg, KGB: The Inside Story.  Excerpt printed in The Los Angeles Times, November 11, 1990.  http://articles.latimes.com/1990-11-11/opinion/op-5889_1_soviet-air/2

[18]  Hoffman, David “I Had A Funny Feeling in My Gut.”  Washington Post, February 10, 1999; Page A19. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/inatl/longterm/coldwar/soviet10.htm

[19] Sagan, Scott D. “Nuclear Alerts and Crisis Management.” International Security 9, no. 4 (1985): 99-139. doi:10.2307/2538543.

[20]  Oberdorfer, Don, The Turn: From the Cold War To A New Era: The United States and the Soviet Union 1983-1990.  New York: Poseidon Press, 1991, p. 67.

[21]  Reagan, Ronald, An American Life.  New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990, p. 585.

[22]  Ibid, 588-589.

[23]  Meyer, Herbert, Why Is the World So Dangerous?   De-classified CIA Memorandum to CIA Director William E. Casey, November 30, 1983.  http://worldsodangerous.com/documents/CIA-Report.pdf

[24]  The 1983 War Scare: “The Last Paroxysm” of the Cold War Part I.  National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 426, Edited by Nate Jones, 2013.  https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB426/#_ftnref2 quoting a CIA Special National Intelligence Estimate by Fritz Ermarth.  Earmath has written about his 1984 assessment and maintains that his original conclusions were accurate: See Earmath, Fritz, Observations on the “War Scare“ of 1983  From an Intelligence Perch, Parallel History Project on NATO and the Warsaw Pact (PHP) (Nov. 6, 2003).  https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB427/docs/Observations%20on%20the%20War%20Scare%20from%20an%20Intelligence%20Perch%20by%20Fritz%20Ermarth.pdf

[25]  Rhodes, Richard, Arsenals of Folly: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race.  New York: Vintage Books, 2007, p. 166.

[26]  Doward, Jamie, “How a Nato war game took the world to brink of nuclear disaster.”  The Guardian, November 2, 2013.  https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2013/nov/02/nato-war-game-nuclear-disaster

[27]  Rhodes, 167.

[28]  Anonymous, Nuclear Close Calls: Able Archer 83.  Atomic Heritage Foundation, June 15, 2018.  https://www.atomicheritage.org/history/nuclear-close-calls-able-archer-83

[29]  Fischer, citing: Andrew, Christopher and Gordievsky, Oleg, KGB: The Inside Story of Its Foreign Operations from Lenin to Gorbachev.  New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 1991, p. 605

[30]  Gates, 273.

 

Additional Sources (not identified in footnotes):

Andrew, Christopher M, Gordievsky, Oleg, Comrade Kryuchkov’s Instructions: Top Secret Files on KGB Foreign Operations, 1975-1985.  https://books.google.com/books?id=6ahujvo6ukwC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false

Anonymous, Able Archer ’83.  https://vdocuments.site/able-archer-83-561ed8fbbe108.html

Fischer, Benjamin B., A Cold War Conundrum: The 1983 Soviet War Scare, declassified CIA memo posted March 19, 2007.

French, Matthew, Tech sabotage during the Cold War.  FCW: The Business of Federal Technology, Apr 26, 2004.  https://fcw.com/Articles/2004/04/26/Tech-sabotage-during-the-Cold-War.aspx?Page=1

Gaddis, John Lewis, The Cold War, New York: Penguin Books, 2006.

Gordievsky, Oleg: Testimony before the Military Research and Development Subcommittee of the Committee on Armed Services, US House of Representatives, October 26, 1999:  http://commdocs.house.gov/committees/security/has299010.000/has299010_0f.htm

Jones, Nate, ed., The 1983 War Scare: “The Last Paroxysm” of the Cold War.  National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 426, Edited by Nate Jones, 2013.  (Introduction and Parts I-III).  This source contains many relevant documents.

 

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