Able Archer 83

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Memorandum from CIA Director William J. Casey briefing President Reagan on growing tensions with the Soviet Union, 1984 (released 2013)
1983 NATO autumn maneuvers

Able Archer 83 ( Listen ? / I ) ( . English for "skillful archer") was a pan-European NATO - command staff exercise from 7 to 11 November 1983, the a nuclear war simulated. The high degree of reality, the strict secrecy and the particularly tense relationship between the USA and the Soviet Union at the time led to the suspicion in the Warsaw Pact that the exercise was a cover for an imminent nuclear strike . However, minutes of the Politburo meetings published in 2013 did not confirm this. This may have been due to the fact that the KGB did not forward the information available to it, which was contradicting itself due to the contact with double agents , directly to the Politburo. Audio file / audio sample

Increasing tension

U.S. medium-range missile Pershing II

Since 1979, the stationing of Soviet SS-20s in the western part of the USSR and the subsequent forced nuclear retrofitting of NATO ( NATO double resolution ) as a direct consequence, as well as the Soviet-Afghan War , had intensified the Cold War. Both superpowers increasingly expected a first nuclear strike on the other side. In February 1981, under US leadership, NATO began a series of psychological warfare actions : NATO naval forces increasingly crossed the North Atlantic , the Baltic and the Black Sea . In addition, US bombers repeatedly came extremely close to Soviet airspace in order to demonstrate NATO's readiness for a nuclear strike and to test the effectiveness of the Soviet air defense.

On the Soviet side, this development led in May 1981 to Operation RJaN in the West : based on the assumption that NATO was preparing a nuclear first strike, the KGB started one of its largest espionage operations. In the course of this, agents were supposed to clarify how exactly the feared western attack was planned and when it was to take place.

In 1983 tensions increased. The impression of an impending nuclear strike was reinforced by a number of events during the year. On March 8, 1983, US President Ronald Reagan titled the Soviet Union as the Empire of Evil in a speech . On March 23, 1983, Reagan announced the start of the SDI missile defense program , which the Soviet Union viewed as an attempt to break the armaments balance.

The Federal Ministry of Defense (BMVg) announced in September 1983 that the Soviet Union had 39 positions with 351 operational SS-20 missiles with a maximum of 1053 nuclear warheads, 243 of which were deployed in the western Soviet military districts of Belarus, the Carpathians and the Urals . Despite the offer of the Soviet Union to reduce this to the number of British and French systems, a total of 162 missiles, the planned deployment of the Pershing II missiles in accordance with the NATO double decision was imminent and then took place exclusively in the Federal Republic from December 1983 Germany.

Events in the immediate run-up

American M113 infantry fighting vehicles roll through Stockhausen ( Hesse ) as part of the REFORGER maneuver, 1983

On September 1, 1983, the shooting down of Korean Airlines flight 007 by Soviet interceptors led to a further escalation of the international situation.

The annual autumn maneuver of the US Army REFORGER FTX - Confident Enterprise ( Autumn Forge 83 ) from September 19 to 30, 1983 involved around 65,000 soldiers. The practice room was located in the Bad Hersfeld region , Vogelsbergkreis , Gießen , Main-Kinzig-Kreis . As usual, large units of troops were flown in from the USA.

On the night of September 26, 1983, the Soviet missile early warning system malfunctioned . An attack involving five ICBMs was falsely reported from US territory. The prudent action of the Soviet Lieutenant Colonel Stanislaw Petrov prevented a nuclear counter-attack.

On October 22, 1983, 1.3 million people demonstrated on a nationwide day of action against the NATO double decision and for peace and disarmament as part of the so-called hot autumn . 200,000 people take part in the human chain from Stuttgart to Neu-Ulm ; 500,000 people were present at the rally in Bonn's Hofgarten .

In an attack on a US base in the Lebanese capital Beirut on October 23, 1983, 241 US soldiers and 58 French paratroopers were killed. As a result, US military bases around the world were put on alert.

On October 25, started in 1983 with the operation Urgent Fury , the US invasion of Grenada .

maneuver

After the annual major REFORGER maneuver of NATO, the secret NATO command post exercise Able Archer 83 began on November 7, 1983 under very realistic conditions.

Presumably, the KGB became aware of the preparations for Able Archer in early 1983. In February, Moscow headquarters instructed its agents to specifically monitor decision-makers in NATO countries and those operating the weapons systems that might have been involved in a nuclear attack. The instruction may be due to an increased activity of this group of people in preparation for the maneuver - it was noticed by the Soviet agents. In October 1983 the USSR also registered an increase in encrypted communications between Great Britain and the USA. While this was due to the US invasion of Grenada , it fit into the Soviet image of an impending nuclear strike.

Able Archer played from November 7th to 11th, 1983, primarily at the command and communication level of the European NATO countries and was supposed to simulate the processes during a nuclear war with a high degree of reality. The maneuver differed from those of previous years in the following points:

  • High-level activities, combined with a simulated run-through of the alarm conditions for the armed forces of the USA DEFCON -Level 5 to 1 ( maximum operational readiness - all available troops are deployed ).
  • The new radio encryption methods were used on a large scale for the first time during the exercise.

The Soviet side was concerned. On November 8th or 9th, the KGB gave its residents around the world instructions to use all available sources to investigate the impending nuclear attack. According to information from the then top spy Rainer Rupp , who worked under the code name 'Topas', there was nothing to indicate that a NATO attack was imminent. Vladimir Kryuchkov , the KGB chairman, could not be dissuaded from his conviction that the United States was actually planning a nuclear strike.

In accordance with its military doctrine, which reckoned with a seven-day preparation period for a NATO nuclear attack, the Warsaw Pact put troops in the GDR and the Baltic states on alert in this situation in order to anticipate the alleged Western threat. Research has disputed whether a Soviet nuclear strike was actually prepared. Neither the Politburo nor the senior management of the Soviet Ministry of Defense appeared to have been informed of these events. The US secret service, the CIA, registered some of these activities, for example the alerting of atomic bomb groups in Czechoslovakia , the People's Republic of Poland and the GDR. The double agent KGB Colonel Oleg Gordijewski provided important information about the reaction of the Soviet Union to the maneuver during this time. The senior NATO officers became aware of the dangerous situation in which the superpowers were, and it was ordered that the exercise not be played out in every detail. In particular, the planned participation of high-ranking members of the government, including the American President Reagan himself, which included their accommodation in command bunkers, was canceled. Reagan showed up at the White House, then took a short vacation to his ranch and made sure it got media coverage.

When Able Archer ended on November 11, the USSR, in turn, suspended war preparations.

Reactions

The incidents became public knowledge from 1988 through the KGB officer and Soviet-British double agent Oleg Gordijewski.

The Soviets never officially confirmed that Able Archer 83 had triggered military reactions or that the maneuver was even noticed. Deputy Chief of Staff Sergei Akhromeev could not remember that an alarm was triggered due to the NATO maneuver. Even Mikhail Gorbachev testified that in the Politburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union , of which he was at that time, the matter was not discussed.

Some political commentators speculate that the imminent nuclear war in the course of the maneuver contributed to a turn in US President Ronald Reagan's policy towards détente towards the USSR. Reagan wrote in his memoirs that it was only after this crisis that he realized how much the Soviet leadership would have feared a US nuclear strike.

Mark Kramer of the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University put the real threat into perspective, as he found no evidence of it in the minutes of the meetings of the Politburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1983 and early 1984. Kramer published corresponding research in September 2013.

After the presentation by Rainer Rupp, who at that time in NATO in Brussels for the HVA of Stasi spying, the absence was such reactions also to him in the GDR provided information that had been forwarded to "receiver in the USSR" .

Documents

Several documents on Able Archer 83 were released by the US and UK in 2013 and have been analyzed by journalists and scholars ever since. Here is an overview:

Films / documentaries

literature

  • Stephen J. Cimbala: Through a Glass Darkly: Looking at Conflict Prevention, Management, and Termination . Greenwood Publishing Group 2001, ISBN 0-275-97184-8 , pp. 23–53, esp. Pp. 30–42 ( excerpt from Google book search)
  • David E. Hoffman : The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy , Anchor Books 2010, ISBN 978-0-307-38784-4 , pp. 74-100, especially pp. 94-100 ( 2010 Pulitzer Prize Winner )

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Summary of the maneuver from the perspective of NATO.
  2. ↑ Markus Kompa: The mighty bow of the ZDF. Retrieved September 26, 2018 (German).
  3. ↑ Ricardo Tarli: The legend of "Able Archer" , NZZ , November 5, 2013.
  4. ↑ When NATO was practicing nuclear war and it came to a near-catastrophe . In: az Aargauer Zeitung . ( aargauerzeitung.ch [accessed on September 26, 2018]).
  5. ^ Benjamin B. Fischer: A Cold War Conundrum: The 1983 Soviet War Scare. In: Central Intelligence Agency. March 19, 2007, accessed on September 25, 2008 : "RYAN may have been a response to the first in a series of US psychological warfare operations (PSYOPs in military jargon) initiated in the early months of the Reagan Administration. "
  6. ^ Frank Umbach : The Red Alliance - Development and Disintegration of the Warsaw Pact 1955 to 1991 , p. 222 ff., Ch. Links Verlag, Berlin 2005, ISBN 3-86153-362-6 .
  7. ↑ a b Secret documents on NATO maneuvers: The world came so close to nuclear war in 1983. In: Spiegel Online . November 3, 2013, accessed June 9, 2018 .
  8. ↑ Benjamin Bidder: The Man Who Prevented World War III , Spiegel Online , April 21, accessed May 1, 2010.
  9. ↑ Henning Sietz: Petrow's decision , Zeit online , October 13, 2008, accessed on May 1, 2010.
  10. ^ Richard Rhodes: Arsenals of Folly . Knopf Doubleday, 2007, p. 175
  11. ↑ Heise.de The RYAN Crisis - when the Cold War almost got hot, accessed on May 1, 2010
  12. ^ Paul Rodgers: From Evil Empire to Axis of Evil. In: Oxford Research Group. November 2007, archived from the original on July 6, 2008 ; Retrieved September 25, 2008 .
  13. ↑ Video 1983 - Die Welt am Abgrund (Min .: 41: 00-44: 15)  in the ZDFmediathek , accessed on February 27, 2011.
  14. ^ Raymond L. Garthoff: The Great Transition: American-Soviet Relations and the End of the Cold War . S. 139 ff .
  15. ↑ Ronald Reagan: An American Life . S. 585 ff .
  16. ↑ The non-crisis around Able Archer 1983: Did the Soviet leadership really fear a major nuclear attack in autumn 1983? . In: Oliver Bange and Bernd Lemke (eds.): Ways to reunification. Munich: Oldenbourg 2013, pp. 129–151.
  17. ↑ Ricardo Tarli: The legend of "Able Archer" , NZZ , November 5, 2013.
  18. ↑ The hot line to the NATO Council ( Memento from February 26, 2012 in the Internet Archive )
  19. ↑ 25th anniversary of NATO's double resolution on heise.de
  20. ↑ 1983 - At the atomic abyss , entry in the Internet Movie Database .