1983 had seen a steady rise in Cold War tensions, with the vehemently anti-communist US president Ronald Reagan dedicating vast sums to military hardware and announcing an elaborate new missile-defence system called SDI – which was pejoratively known as ‘Star Wars‘.
So when NATO conducted a military exercise – “Able Archer 83” – in November to test its readiness for nuclear conflict in Europe, the Soviets were already spooked.
Able Archer simulated a scenario in which escalation between NATO and the Warsaw Pact became unavoidable, complete with dummy warheads and a rise in the US military threat level to DEFCON 1 – also known as “Cocked Pistol” – a scenario where nuclear war is imminent or has already begun.
While the phased escalations were simulated, alarmist KGB agents mistakenly reported them as real.
Moscow had been pre-warned about the exercise, but the Soviets looked on with alarm, believing the whole thing was a ploy to disguise a real and imminent attack on the Soviet Union and its satellite states in Eastern Europe.
The Soviet Union, believing its only chance of surviving a NATO strike was to preempt it, readied its nuclear arsenal (the Soviet 4th Air Army began loading nuclear warheads onto combat planes), and prepared to deploy submarines and aircraft for war.
Although playing out in a less public arena than the Cuban Missile Crisis two decades earlier, Able Archer 83 was no less dangerous. A Soviet finger hovered over the big red button – a finger belonging to the sickly and paranoid premier, Yuri Andropov.
The apparent threat of nuclear war ended when Lieutenant General Leonard H. Perroots – the assistant chief of staff of the US Air Force in Europe – advised against responding to the Warsaw Pact military activity, which ended with the conclusion of the exercise on 11 November.
Thankfully, the war game ended with nuclear escalation remaining a simulation rather than a reality.
News of the reaction, though, encouraged President Reagan to tone down his rhetoric of the Soviet Union as an “evil empire” from then on.
