Exercise Able Archer '83

History
Cold War tensions between the increasingly hawkish United States and increasingly paranoid Soviet Union had escalated to a level not seen since the Cuban Missile Crisis because of several factors like the United States' Strategic Defence Initiative (SDI), its planned deployment of Pershing II missiles in Western Europe in the March and April of 1983, and Exercise FleetEx '83, the largest fleet exercise held to date in the North Pacific and the 1983 U.S. Intervention in Grenada. The The Korean Air Flight 007 incident in 1983 had also increased paranoia on both sides of the Iron Certain. Of all the The Able Archer exercises, Able Archer exercises '83 would almost cause WW3.

Exercise
The Able Archer exercises were devised as a simulated period of conflict escalation, culminating in a simulated DEFCON 1 coordinated nuclear attack. The Exercise Able Archer '83 exercise also introduced a new, unique format of coded communication, radio silences, and the participation of heads of government.

It was a major event that spanned Western Europe's NATO members and was centred on the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE)’s headquarters in Belgian village of Casteau, north of the city of Mons.

Because it simulated an actual nuclear weapons release, so British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl and several NATO technical support units in the nuclear launch drill. United States President Reagan, Vice President George H. W. Bush, and Secretary of Defence Caspar Weinberger were also intended to participate, but did not get round to it. It is to be noted that Robert McFarlane, who had assumed the position of National Security Advisor just two weeks earlier, had uniquely realised the implications of such participation early in the exercise's planning and rejected it. A planned training move through all DEFCON alert phases, from DEFCON 5 to DEFCON 1 would occur. While these phases were simulated, alarmist KGB agents mistakenly reported them as actual.

Soviet panic
Soviet Politburo and military chiefs feared the U.S. was conducting a sly and cowardly ruse of war hide a genuine nuclear surprise attack by means of a first strike nuclear assault on them, so the Soviets readied their nuclear forces and placed Warsaw Pact air units in East Germany and Poland on alert in what became known as- the 1983 war scare. The USSR was convinced that the newly arrived Pershing II missile were part of a strike plan that was to take place from the European part of NATO on American orders. The KGB and GRU run Operation RYAN was created a few years earlier to work out just were the Americans were planning to nuke, why and how best to protect them. Their guidance system was self-correcting and the estimated flight time reach targets in the western Soviet Union from West Germany was 4 to 6 after launching. They knew there early launch radar was unreliable as they found out in The 1983 Soviet nuclear false alarm incident and so was of little if any use to them.

The Soviet intelligence establishment thought the burst of coded UK-USA communication tragic regarding the 1983 U.S. Intervention in Grenada was a very cunning and subtle cover for planning a nuclear war in Europe, while military strategists thought it was part of a plan to eventually invade Cuba.

Whilst Soviet forces were awesome on paper a sharp economic decline, endemic political corruption and bureaucratic inefficacy had devastated there battle readiness.



Soviet motivations
The Soviet's politically paranoid and bigoted military and political hierarchy (in particularly the 'old guard' led by the Soviet General Secretary, Yuri Andropov, and the Soviet Defence Minister, Dmitry Ustinov,) feared that the USA was both warwaky, militarily provocative, political bigoted and trying to undermine the post Cuba Crisis understanding on how they should act during peace time; thus they were deeply suspicious of US President Ronald Reagan's intentions and openly fearful he was planning a first strike nuclear attack against the Soviet Union. The GDR was also concerned a war was imminent as the USSR and USA squared up for war.

NATO aggravation


NATO navel forces regularly sailed up the GIUK gap in to the Barents, Norwegian, Black, and Baltic Seas mocking the Soviet's de facto crappy navel power (fuel was in very low supply, pay was crap, spares were running out and food was also getting low) and unwillingness to fight. American aircraft flew over Zeleny Island in southern Kurile Islands, close to the border with Japan. In retaliation the Soviets ordered an overflight of America's Aleutian Islands and complained to the UN over the American's airspace violations.

Soviet response
The Soviet Union, believing its only chance of surviving a NATO strike was to pre-empt it, readied its nuclear arsenal. The CIA reported activity in the Baltic Military District, in Czechoslovakia, and it determined that nuclear-capable aircraft in Poland and East Germany were placed "on high alert status with readying of nuclear strike forces" on day 9. The Soviet leaders and spy chiefs saw NATO go rapidly up it's DEFCON security levels whilst using it's unique, never-before-seen procedures and more sophisticated message formats than previous exercises, which they assumed possibly indicated the imminent treat of a surprise nuclear attack.

American reaction
President Ronald Regan had seen The Day After about Lawrence, Kansas, being nuked and felt rather upset and depressed by it.

Secretary of State George P. Shultz generally thought that the USSR would not launch a suicidal and unprovoked atomic war, but generally Speaking, Reagan did not share the secretary's belief that cooler heads would prevail, writing:

"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?"

Political aftermath
President Reagan was traumatised by the event and started a new policy of rapprochement Soviet Union to prevent it's recurrence.

The Deputy Director for Intelligence during Able Archer 83, Robert Gates, has since published his thoughts on the exercise that dispute this conclusion:

"Information about the peculiar and remarkably skewed frame of mind of the Soviet leaders during those times that has emerged since the collapse of the Soviet Union makes me think there is a good chance—with all of the other events in 1983—that they 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. After going through the experience at the time, then through the postmortems, and now through the documents, 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. And US intelligence [SNIE 11–9-84 and SNIE 11–10–84] had failed to grasp the true extent of their anxiety."

Authers note
As I remember, the British PM Margaret Thatcher, W. German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, Polish President Henryk Jabłoński and E. German Present Erich Honecker were very concerned by the escalating super power rhetoric at the time.

Duration
It lasted 9 days.

Participants
The USA, UK, FRG, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, Denmark, Belgium and France.

Link

 * 1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Able_Archer_83
 * 2) http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2013/nov/02/nato-war-game-nuclear-disaster
 * 3) http://www.wired.com/2013/05/able-archer-scare/
 * 4) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exercise_Able_Archer
 * 5) http://www.scribd.com/doc/142779988/Exercise-Able-Archer-83-After-Action-Report-1-December-1983#scribd
 * 6) http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/nukevault/ablearcher/
 * 7) http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB427/