On the day of 1983 the world was on the brink of nuclear war (and how we just found out)

Beginning of November 1983, the world was on the brink of nuclear confrontation which, apparently, managed to be avoided by the simple luck.

Documents recently published by the United States Department of State Bureau of History provide new evidence on how this episode, known as “War Scare 1983” (the fear of the 1983 war), it came much closer to the outbreak of a real atomic conflict than was known until now.

In addition, the documentation shows how military of the United States responsible for evaluating and making decisions, acted based on incomplete information and only years later did they learn how close they had unintentionally caused a nuclear attack from the Soviet Union. (USSR), which would have triggered the dreaded “Mutually assured destruction” both Super powers.

Although all data on what happened remains unknown, many experts – including British intelligence services – see this episode as the moment of the greatest threat of nuclear war since 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.

It all started with a war game.

In early November 1983, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) organized military exercises Capable archer (Capable Archer), which were based on the hypothetical scenario of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe which sparked a conflict that escalated to culminate in a NATO nuclear attack on USSR forces and of the The Warsaw Pact (communist bloc).

This simulation it was coordinated from the Supreme Allied Headquarters in Europe and took place on the same date each year in early November. He was considered in the West as a common practice.

So this was not the first time they were done, but this time things would be different.

On November 2, the USSR Air Force placed its divisions of fighter-bombers in East Germany on heightened alert. In addition, all command and control posts of its divisions and regiments were staffed and had to be operational 24 hours a day.

In addition, it was ordered that a squadron fighter-bombers from each regiment were loaded with nuclear bombs. These ships were placed in readiness 3, which means they would have an alert for 30 minutes before “destroying enemy front line targets“.

The Soviet Air Force also secretly suspended the routine flights of all its units in Central Europe (Communist bloc), during the days of the exercise. Able Archer, But the U.S. military was not alerted to the situation until a week later, on November 9, when an aerial photograph showed a Soviet Mig-23 fighter-bomber on a fully armed East German air base in alert position.

These details are included in a report prepared in 1989 by the American general Leonard H. Perroots, one of the main intelligence officers of the US Air Force command during the exercises Able Archer.

In this so far undisclosed report, Perroots reveals that had received information from the National Security Agency that a Soviet squad in East Germany had been given permission to dispense with the use of a security capsule on their plane due to an unexpected weight and balance problem on the airplane.

“My airline analysts were of the opinion that this message meant that at least that particular squad was loading an ammo setup it had never loaded before, that is to say (they wore) a accusation of war “, points out.

The officer says he reported the situation to the then US Air Force Commander-in-Chief in Europe, General Billy Minter, who asked if they should react to the Soviet movements.

“I told him that we will keep the situation carefully, but that there was not enough evidence to justify increasing our state of emergency “, remember.

Perroots did not know in 1983, but that reply maybe yours saved the world from nuclear war.

Still, in his 1989 report, he noted: “If I had known what I found out later, I’m not sure what advice I would have given.”

What was he talking about?

After the uneventful completion of the Capable archer new information has emerged, revealing that the real scope of the Soviet military response.

A December 1983 NSA message – cited by Perroots in his report – revealed that the alert was ordered by Soviet Air Force chief Marshal Pavel Kutakhov, and that it “included preparations for the immediate use of nuclear weapons”.

The analyzes that the American intelligence community carried out in 1984 on the “War fear” tended to consider that the aThe Soviet attitude did not obey a perception on Moscow’s part of a “real danger of imminent conflict” with the United States.

This vision would change after the defection to the west of Oleg Gordievski, who was the head of Soviet intelligence in London.

Having acted as a double spy for a few years, Gordievsky He was held in the USSR but managed to escape to the UK and shared with Western intelligence services details of what US reports classify as “paranoia” The “hysteria“Soviet, on the possibility of Washington launching a surprise nuclear attack on the USSR.

According to his testimony, in the early 1980s, the KGB began to follow clues that could indicate the intention of the United States to carry out an attack of this type.

This fear was based on the perception that the United States was obtaining a strategic advantage which, in the context of conflict, could make it inclined to use atomic weapons much sooner than expected. In addition, they were concerned about the possibility that Washington will use a military exercise to launch an unexpected nuclear attack on the Soviet Union.

In an analysis published in 2018 by the Foreign Policy Research Institute, Robert hamilton, Professor of US Army War College, underlines that one of the elements that made in particular dangerous this episode was the fact that “the Soviet intelligence community was still traumatized for his inability to anticipate the German attack of June 1941 and his determination not to be taken by surprise. “

He also mentions that, as the then Soviet minister warned Dmitry Ustinov, NATO military exercises “were becoming increasingly difficult to differentiate from a true deployment of armed forces for aggression.”

A final aggravating factor was the fact that, ignoring that the USSR truly believed that an American attack was imminent, Washington took action in the months leading up to the fiscal year Capable archer this directly fed Soviet fears.

Thus, on March 8, 1983, the American President Ronald reagan gave a speech in which he called the USSR the “Empire of evil” and, just two weeks later, launched his initiative Strategic defense -popularly called Star Wars-: a military program to build a space defense system capable of preventing a nuclear attack on American territory.

At that time, “KGB officials in Moscow had already decided that Capable archer 83 would provide excellent cover for the planned attack, ”and Soviet spies around the world had been tasked with finding proof, Perroots said in his 1989 report.

Unlike what happened in Cuba in 1962, the 1983 crisis took place in absolute secrecy, to the point that apparently even the US military was not aware magnitude the risk of confrontation with the Soviet Union.

A miscalculation by either party could have resulted in fatal consequences.

And it was a real risk, judging by a 1990 report on this incident by the Presidential Advisory Committee on Foreign Intelligence which concluded by noting the following:

“In this case, the military officers in charge of the exercise Capable archer minimize the risk by ignoring the evidence that parts of the Soviet armed forces were moving in a unusual alert level. But these officials acted right out of instinct, not sound advice. “

Unsurprisingly, at the end of his 1989 report, Perroots asked himself:

“What would have happened that day in November 1983 if we had launched a preventive movement of forces instead of waiting for more information?”.

BBC Mundo