Able Archer 83

 Able Archer 83(Military exercise,  Able Archer)

Date	7 November 1983 - 11 November 1983

Able Archer 83 was the annual NATO Able Archer exercise conducted in November 1983. The purpose, like the years before, was to simulate conflict escalation, culminating in the US military executing a simulated DEFCON 1 coordinated nuclear attack on the Soviet Union. The five-day exercise, which involved NATO commands throughout Western Europe, was coordinated from the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE) headquarters in Casteau, Belgium.

There are several articles which explain that the exercise brought the world close to nuclear war.

Background

In 1981 the U.S. Navy led an armada of 83 ships through Soviet waters, effectively eluding “the USSR’s massive ocean reconnaissance system and early-warning systems”. In the spring of 1983, the U.S. Navy's largest fleet exercise since World War II took place in the North Pacific. In early September 1983, the Soviet Air Force shot down a South Korean airliner over its airspace, with nearly 270 deaths as a result. That same month, the Soviet air defense automated system falsely reported an American missile approach to the country. On 1st September 1983, the U.S. Navy flew aircraft 20 miles inside Soviet airspace, prompting Andropov to issue orders that "any aircraft discovered in Soviet airspace be shot down".

Exercise

Researcher have pointed out that this exercise had "non-standard" aspects to it:

• 170-flight, radio-silent air lift of 19,000 US soldiers to Europe
• the shifting of commands from "Permanent War Headquarters to the Alternate War Headquarters,"
• the practice of "new nuclear weapons release procedures," with suspicious communication
• "slips of the tongue" in which B-52 sorties were referred to as nuclear "strikes."

with these factors possibly leading the Soviets to believe that "RYaN" (Raketno-Yadernoye Napadenie, the KGB code name for a feared Western nuclear missile) was in effect.

Later research pointed out that the KGB apparently did not inform the Politburo, thus the Soviet leadership was not in a panic as a whole; the double agent Topaz did hand a number of documents over to his Soviet contacts to inform them that no attack is happening - he himself believes that the Soviet leadership was under the impression:

The Soviets were completely convinced that “Able Archer” was the cover for a real nuclear strike. They believed that starting from this maneuver a strike aimed at decapitating the command, control and communication centers of the Soviet army, the state apparatus and the party apparatus would be carried out with the help of the new ultra-modern and precise tactical nuclear missiles,

According to Mark Kramer of Harvard University and others, there is no evidence in the minutes of the 1983 and early 1984 meetings of the Politburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union that the NATO exercise had raised massive fears of imminent war.

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