Like many who have been locked down at home this past year, I’ve been passing the time by binge-watching TV, mainly foreign series. Among the best of these is the “Deutschland” series, about East German spies in the latter days of the Cold War, much of it based on real events.
The first season, which takes place in 1983, at a time of heightened East-West tension, deals with the growing fears in Moscow and East Berlin that NATO might launch a surprise nuclear attack under the guise of one of its annual military exercises. We have long known about Soviet fears of war at the time, but newly declassified documents released by the U.S. State Department last week suggest we came much closer to war than anyone realized at the time.
The episode is instructive, not only from a historical perspective, but as a warning that as strategic competition between the United States and China heats up, it’s critically important that both sides take steps to reduce the chance of a war that neither side wants.
1983 was a fraught year in U.S.-Soviet relations. President Ronald Reagan had come to office determined to end the Cold War standoff through a massive military buildup that an ailing Soviet economy could not afford to match. He had denounced the Soviet Union as an “evil empire” and promised to leave Communism on the “ash heap of history.” He’d refused meeting with his Soviet counterpart, something all of his predecessors had done.
And despite massive public protests, Reagan stuck with the NATO-approved plan to deploy a new generation of nuclear missiles in Europe that could reach the Soviet Union. The first of the Pershing-II missiles, which could strike targets within seven minutes from launch, were scheduled to arrive in Germany in November 1983.
It was against this backdrop that NATO conducted a series of military exercises, culminating in “Able Archer,” a tabletop exercise that simulated the transition from conventional fighting to nuclear war. Able Archer was anything but routine that year. It coincided with the deployment of 19,000 U.S. troops to Europe, putting B-52 bombers visibly armed with dummy warheads on runway alert, and raising the U.S. threat level to its highest alert. Top political leaders participated in the war game (including British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, German Chancellor Helmut Kohl and U.S. Vice President George Bush). NATO commanders operated from alternate war headquarters.
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Soviet intelligence was closely observing all of these moves, as the U.S. intelligence community knew they would. But rather than seeing the actions as part of a routine exercise that the United States and its NATO allies conducted annually, a growing number of people in Moscow began to fear that the exercise was actually a preparation for launching a nuclear attack against the Soviet Union.
And these fears, we now know, were translated into Soviet actions that had previously been taken only during actual crises. Senior commanders of the Soviet rocket forces deployed to their command centers and placed nuclear forces on heightened alert. This included 75 SS-20 missiles, which were moved out of their garrisons to war-fighting deployments, as well as an unknown number of the 10-warhead SS-19s.
Even more worrisome, the newly released documents show the Soviet military ordered all units of the Soviet 4th Air Army in Eastern Europe to make “preparations for the immediate use of nuclear weapons.” This included loading actual nuclear bombs on planes in East Germany and Poland that would be ready for takeoff in under 30 minutes.
The increased preparations suggest that key Soviet officials believed war was imminent. Fortunately, the U.S. intelligence chief monitoring Soviet activities during the exercise recommended not responding to the Soviet actions, correctly believing that they were a response to what NATO was doing and that any further U.S. escalation could trigger an actual war.
A major after-action review of what came to be known as the Soviet “war scare” conducted in 1990 and only recently declassified, concluded that in “1983 we may have inadvertently placed our relations with the Soviet Union on a hair trigger.” There had been a real danger of “a pre-emptive strike against the U.S. in response to a perceived but non-existent threat.”
There are many lessons to be learned from this episode. Reagan learned the most important — that to understand your adversary you need to talk and engage with them. From then on, Reagan was more interested in meeting with Soviet leaders to talk peace than continuing to prepare for war.
The broader lesson is that competition between opposing military powers can produce their own, destructive dynamics as each assumes the worst about the other’s intentions. That is why intense dialogue, among military as well as political leaders, is critical even between countries that view themselves as adversaries.
Even as the competition and rhetoric between China and the United States heats up, engaging in a broad dialogue will be important to avoid tensions escalating into a military confrontation neither side wants.
Ivo Daalder is president of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and a former U.S. ambassador to NATO.
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