Able Archer 83 (Re)-revisited

Reflections on a Complex Non-crisis

Perhaps no event of the Cold War remains murkier than the Soviet response to the 1983 NATO nuclear command exercise Able Archer. For some, the Soviet response indicated a genuine fear NATO was about to attack under cover of the exercise, making the event the closest the world has come to nuclear war since the Cuban Missile Crisis. For others, the Soviet response was at best (or worst) a modest adjustment of intelligence collection and tactical posture in Europe, indicating no genuine concern of imminent attack. These two opposing views have contended for years, including in recent publications.

The February 2021 release of new documents in the Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) volume covering relations with the Soviet Union from January 1983-March 1985 reanimated one side of this debate. Nate Jones and David Hoffman claim the newly declassified materials “confirm a ‘war scare’ during some of the most tense months of the Cold War.” Fred Kaplan more bluntly states “[t]he world came much closer to nuclear war than we realized in 1983.”

I take issue with those claims but reality is often complex, and the conditions surrounding Able Archer 83 were extraordinarily so. This complexity explains the enduring nature of the belief that the exercise was a genuine, if one sided, crisis. Yet a review of all of the available evidence, including the new documents (some of which were subsequently removed from the online FRUS), on Able Archer 83 leads to the conclusion that the “crisis” was a mirage, albeit one that appeared in a genuinely tense time. (Audio summary available here)

1983: Not a Red Banner Year

Yuri Andropov. TASS photo courtesy of RFERL

Framing Able Archer requires a review of the strategic context surrounding the exercise. For the Soviet leadership, 1983 was a very bad year. In February, General Secretary Yuri Andropov, who had replaced Leonid Brezhnev only three months earlier, suffered kidney failure and his overall health began to fail rapidly. In March, President Ronald Reagan gave a speech referring to the Soviet Union as “an evil empire,” a significant rhetorical escalation. Later that month Reagan announced the formation of what would become the Strategic Defense Initiative, a wildly ambitious national missile defense program.

U.S. deployment of intermediate range nuclear weapons to NATO was also on track, with the second deployment of Gryphon ground launched cruise missiles (to Sicily) taking place in June. The first deployment, to the United Kingdom, had occurred the year before and the first deployment of Pershing II ballistic missiles to West Germany was looming. This had all taken place despite a concerted Soviet effort to prevent it, discussed in more detail below.

The U.S. Navy, in conjunction with NATO allies, conducted the large scale United Effort/Ocean Safari 83 exercises from May to July 1983. These exercises in the North Atlantic involved 90 ships and included anti-submarine warfare rehearsal and simulated strike on land targets by carrier aviation. A similarly large naval exercise in the North Pacific, FleetEx 83-1, took place in March and April. These exercises were part of the Navy’s aggressive “Maritime Strategy,” which was intended, among other things, to demonstrate to the Soviets that they were vulnerable even in their naval bastions and could not compete with the United States indefinitely.

The year went from bad to worse for the Soviets on September 1, when Soviet interceptors shot down flight KAL 007, a South Korean airliner that had strayed off course and entered Soviet airspace. Initial Soviet denials were met with withering rebukes from the Reagan administration, which include U.N. Ambassador Jeanne Kirkpatrick playing tapes of intercepted communications between the Soviet pilots and ground control. The Soviets apparently believed they were shooting down a U.S. reconnaissance aircraft, a sign of the genuine tension between the two sides of the Cold War. It was a crushing propaganda defeat for the Soviets, and the incident led to an emergency meeting of the Soviet leadership (with minimal input from the gravely ill Andropov).

This was the context in which NATO launched its series of fall exercises in 1983. These exercises culminated with the NATO command post exercise for nuclear release, Able Archer, in early November. If the Soviets were on edge during the exercise it was not without proximate cause. Yet beyond the bad year, the Soviets feared the future would be worse.

Fear of Checkmate without War: Soviet Views on Competition in the 1980s

As Brendan Green and I have argued, by the early 1980s Soviet leadership was deeply concerned about the prospects for long term competition with the United States. This was in contrast to their feelings just a decade earlier. In the late 1960s, Soviet leaders, both military and political, were satisfied with the strategic nuclear balance between the superpowers and the state of the Soviet economy (at least relative to the Western bloc).

As the 1970s gave way to the 1980s, Soviet concern with both the military balance and the economy began to mount. U.S. strategic nuclear modernization, which was focused on qualitative improvements in weapons, began to undermine Soviet confidence in their strategic deterrent. The Soviet economy had entered what future Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev referred to as “an era of stagnation,” with declining economic and productivity growth.

By 1981, while still head of the KGB, Andropov had remarked in a private meeting with his East German counterpart: “The US is preparing for war but it is not willing to start a war. They are not building the factories and palaces in order to destroy them. They strive for military superiority in order to ‘check’ us and then declare ‘checkmate’ against us without starting a war.”

Andropov well knew that U.S. military superiority would be a product of U.S. economic and technical might, as did Chief of the General Staff Nikolai Ogarkov. In a confidential interview in March 1983, Ogarkov told journalist and former U.S. government official Leslie Gelb “Modern military power is based on technology, and technology is based on computers… We will never be able to catch up with you in modern arms until we have an economic revolution. And the question is whether we can have an economic revolution without a political revolution.”

This concern about the long-term competition was mirrored by uncertainty about the near-term military balance and the possibility of U.S. attack. As a now declassified report by the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board notes about the early 1980s, “senior Soviet officials with high-level contacts said that during this time Soviet leaders formally cautioned the bureaucracy that the new US Administration was considering the possibility of starting a nuclear war, and that the prospect of a surprise nuclear strike against the Soviet Union had to be taken seriously.”

This concern led to the creation of a Soviet-Warsaw Pact intelligence initiative known as RYaN- a Russian acronym for “nuclear missile attack”- that was intended to detect signs of impending U.S. attack. While RYaN was in its infancy in the fall of 1983, it was indicative of Soviet leaders concern. Soviet KGB officer and British intelligence source Oleg Gordievsky would also cite communications about RYaN in the fall of 1983 as key evidence that the Soviet leaders were afraid Able Archer 83 was cover for an imminent attack. We will return to Gordievsky’s account of Able Archer 83 later, but overall RYaN underscored genuine Soviet fears.

Despite (or perhaps due to) these fears the Soviet leadership remained engaged with the United States throughout 1983. In particular, negotiations on limits to U.S./NATO and Soviet intermediate range nuclear forces continued through the year and were still technically ongoing at the time of Able Archer 83. The reason for this continued engagement was at least in part because it supported an overarching Soviet active measures effort to split the trans-Atlantic alliance.

Practiced at the Art of Deception: Soviet Active Measures and Able Archer 83

“Active measures” is “a catchall expression used by the KGB for a variety of influence activities.” It includes coercive diplomacy, propaganda, deception, and covert action used to influence target behavior. While a long standing element of Soviet foreign policy, the United States had not made a concerted effort to counter it during the 1970s era of détente.

As Fletcher Schoen and Christopher Lamb have described, U.S. policy towards active measures began to change in the Reagan administration. President Reagan and several members of his administration had a serious interest in countering active measures, in addition to undertaking offensive action (such as the response to KAL 007 or the program to support the opposition to Communist rule in Poland). The Reagan administration’s focus led to the production of a highly classified assessment of Soviet active measures in July 1981, which, according to Schoen and Lamb, highlighted in particular “the magnitude of the Soviet disinformation campaign against North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) nuclear force modernization in Europe.”

While the assessment remains classified, elements of it were declassified to enable effective counters to active measures. In October 1981, the State Department released a special report on active measures that described the campaign against NATO intermediate range forces as a “good illustration” of an active measures campaign. According to the State Department report, the Soviets offered to reduce the price of Soviet oil sold to at least one European country if it would oppose the deployment of Gryphon and Pershing II missiles. The Soviets also made extensive use of front groups and a variety of bombastic diplomatic statements in attempt to thwart the deployment.

The Soviet active measures campaign against NATO intermediate range forces is a crucial part of the context for Able Archer 83 for two reasons. First, it underscores both that the Soviet fears described in the previous section were real but also that the Soviets were willing to play them up in order to influence target audiences. As I have described previously, this is true of Soviet and now Russian concerns about U.S. missile defenses- a genuine core of concern about a military capability that is amplified to shape perceptions.

Second, U.S. officials in the 1980s were aware of the highly classified intelligence on active measures. This knowledge shaped the contemporary views of both policy and intelligence officials regarding Able Archer 83. In contrast, many accounts of Able Archer 83 after the fact focus more narrowly on the exercise and Soviet fears without any real discussion or knowledge of active measures. For example, the now declassified and widely cited 1990 study of the “war scare” by the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board consigns discussion of active measures to a one sentence footnote.

Genuine Soviet fears and the active measures campaign are thus two lenses for viewing the Able Archer 83 issue. Both are genuine- and intimately related- but cause observers to look in entirely different directions in interpreting the events of 1983. Observers choice of lens thus goes far in explaining the enduring difference in views of whether the events of that November are the closest the world has come to major nuclear exchange since the Cuban Missile Crisis or a non-event. Resolving this issue requires close examination of the events of 1983, particularly the interaction of communications, intelligence, and military doctrine.

Most Secret Cold War: Intelligence and Nuclear Communications in 1983

The Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies devoted extensive effort to understanding NATO nuclear command and control. In one of the newly released documents, Lieutenant General Leonard Perroots, former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency and head of intelligence for U.S. Air Forces Europe during Able Archer 83, observed “We knew that there was a history of intensive Soviet collection against practice Emergency Action Messages (EAM’s) related to nuclear release.” A former deputy chief of the Soviet General Staff concurred after the Cold War: “We listened to the hourly circuit verification signal of your [NATO] nuclear release communications systems and we believed we would recognize a release order.”

Soviet signals intelligence prowess regarding NATO nuclear command and control was understood by U.S. intelligence in the 1980s. A declassified 1985 CIA assessment noted the extensive signals intelligence of the Warsaw Pact focused on NATO nuclear forces. It concluded “Pact planners believe they can interpret the meaning of even encrypted messages.” The same assessment also lists NATO activities in wartime that “could spark a reaction by Pact nuclear forces. The least reaction would be an immediate increase in readiness condition.” One of the listed activities is “transmittal of Emergency Action Messages;” another is “changes in the codes on NATO radio nets.”

Just prior to Able Archer 83, NATO apparently undertook just such a change in its emergency action procedures and communications. Nate Jones references a document describing a course in October 1983 at the NATO School in Oberammergau, Germany where these new nuclear release procedures were taught. While I have not reviewed this document, which is not available online, the communications change is verified by the account of Lee Trolan in Marc Ambinder’s The Brink.

During Able Archer 83, Trolan was a junior U.S. Army officer commanding the 501^st Army Artillery Detachment. His unit maintained custody of nuclear warheads that would, when directed, arm West German Luftwaffe Nike Hercules surface to air missiles as part of NATO nuclear sharing arrangements. According to his account, as part of the exercise Trolan’s unit rehearsed some of the transfer procedures, which included receiving and decoding exercise Emergency Action Messages.

Over the course of the exercise, Trolan claims he received and decoded two such messages that matched the old format rather than the new format he had just learned in October. When he queried his higher headquarters, they denied sending the messages and later collected the messages he had received. Trolan’s account helps explain the CIA’s 1985 assessment that Warsaw Pact planners thought they could understand encrypted Emergency Action Messages- at least at some point during the 1980s they may have had access to the encryption. Yet at least during Able Archer 83 the Warsaw Pact did not have the current message format, and probably recognized the NATO communications change. In the context of both general Soviet fears and the specific events of 1983, including the downing of KAL 007, it seems probable that, in keeping with the doctrine described above, the Warsaw Pact increased readiness of its forces in response to the change.

However, increased readiness does not by itself constitute a nuclear crisis. Much depends on the nature of the change. Here the new documents provide some additional information. According to Perroots:

At 2100Z on 04 November NSA issued an electrical product report G/00/3083–83, entitled “SOVIET AIR FORCES, GSFG, PLACED ON HEIGHTENED READINESS, 2 NOVEMBER 1983.” I saw this message on the morning of 5 November and discussed it with my air analysts. It stated that as of 1900Z on 02 November the fighter-bomber divisions of the air force of Group Soviet Forces, Germany had been placed in a status of heightened alert. All divisional and regimental command posts and supporting command and control elements were to be manned around-the-clock by augmented teams… In addition to the directed command and control changes the fighter-bomber divisions were also ordered to load out one squadron of aircraft in each regiment (if this order applied equally across GSFG the result would have been at least 108 fighter-bombers on alert). These aircraft were to be armed and placed at readiness 3 (30 minute alert) to “destroy first-line enemy targets.”

Perroots then described a subsequent such message “entitled ‘SOVIET 4th AIR ARMY AT HEIGHTENED READINESS IN REACTION TO NATO EXERCISE ABLE ARCHER, 2–11 NOVEMBER 1983.’ This report stated that the alert had been ordered by the Chief of the Soviet Air Forces, Marshal Kutakhov, and that all units of the Soviet 4th Air Army were involved in the alert ‘which included preparations for immediate use of nuclear weapons.”

This new information on increased readiness has been cited as a key indicator of the genuine crisis nature of Able Archer 83. Yet closer inspection suggests the opposite. According to the 1985 CIA assessment, readiness level 3 was the lowest level of alert (above normal readiness) for strike aircraft. Pilots of the aircraft were only required to be at the airfield, not even in the ready room much less the aircraft. Moreover, contrary to Perroot’s recollection of the message he received, aircraft at readiness 3 were not armed (or at least not armed with nuclear weapons). This was reserved for readiness level 2, which required launch in 10 minutes and pilots to remain in the ready room. If this readiness change were intended to allow for true and literal “immediate use of nuclear weapons,” it would have shifted to readiness level 1, which required launch in 5 minutes, with pilots in armed aircraft and ground crew stationed by the aircraft.

In addition, the CIA assessment noted “NATO’s clearest sign of Pact preparations for a nuclear attack… would be a mass reconnaissance sortie directed primarily against deep nuclear targets. Although Pact strategists have debated the wisdom of such a sortie- because of its potential to warn NATO of imminent attack- it remains an integral part of Soviet planning and training. Writings consistently show that the highest Soviet authorities believe they must conduct an intensive final reconnaissance before a mass nuclear strike.”

Finally, those “highest Soviet authorities” remained firmly in control of any nuclear use. Both formerly classified and unclassified sources confirm that the Soviet political leadership, despite some discussion of the possibility in the 1960s, resolutely refused to delegate nuclear release authority to the military. Indeed, the entire point of the Soviet Perimetr (aka “Dead Hand”) contingency nuclear command and control system was to ensure retaliation under certain conditions if the highest authorities were killed- without simply pre-delegating nuclear release authority to military commanders. No Soviet leader at this highest level, military or civilian, has indicated any concern at their level about Able Archer 83. As Simon Miles and Mark Kramer have observed, no emergency Politburo meeting was held during the exercise, as was done in the case of the downing of KAL 007 and the first meeting held after the exercise makes no mention of it.

Given this context, it is clear the change in readiness by some Soviet forces during Able Archer 83 was unusual. It is likely this increase in readiness was a response to the events of 1983 and especially, per Warsaw Pact doctrine, the NATO nuclear communications change of October. Yet Soviet readiness was still apparently nowhere near that needed for actual nuclear use. A subset of strike aircraft were at the lowest level of heightened alert, none of the necessary pre-strike reconnaissance had taken place, and the high level authorization required for use was absent. The most senior official known to have been involved, Chief of the Soviet Air Forces Kutakhov, did not have the authority to order nuclear use, so this change in readiness could not have, by definition, led to nuclear use.

Yet the interest of Soviet intelligence in the exercise has come to be regarded as evidence that it was in fact a crisis. This is principally due to the claim of Oleg Gordievsky that during Able Archer 83 a “flash telegram” went to all Soviet intelligence stations warning of a U.S. alert that might be a precursor to a nuclear strike. While this telegram has not been found (it was not apparently among those Gordievsky retained when he defected) it is very possible that it was a reflection of indicators such as the NATO nuclear communications change and other events of 1983.

However, it was almost certainly not an indication of concern about the exercise in the Kremlin sufficient to merit the term “nuclear crisis.” Sergei Akhromeyev, who was first deputy chief of the Soviet General Staff during Able Archer 83 and would have known about any significant military moves including preparations for nuclear employment, was withering in his assessment of Gordievsky during a 1991 interview:

Oleg Gordievsky’s revelations about the RIaN [sic] crisis of 1983 were self-serving falsifications. I’ll explain why... The KGB and CIA have more in common and more exchanges than do the General Staff and KGB… Gordievsky did not know what the General Staff was doing. He told such stories to improve his standing in the West. War was not considered imminent.

While perhaps not as sharp in tone about Gordievsky, no other senior Soviet leader from the 1980s has offered a different assessment of Able Archer 83.

Our Brand Is Crisis: Lessons of Able Archer 83 for Policy and Social Science

The new documents on Able Archer 83 do offer lessons for policymakers and scholars. For policymakers, the documents highlight the importance of ensuring intelligence officers are aware of U.S. and allied activity. Ben Fischer has observed this previously, noting that U.S. intelligence analysts were unaware of certain sensitive U.S. military activities that probably had significant effect on Soviet perceptions in the early 1980s. The same seems likely to be true in the case of Perroots and the NATO nuclear communications change. It is unlikely Perroots, as an intelligence officer, would have been aware of the change, much less that it could and likely was detected by the Soviets. This likely gap in his knowledge led him to grasp at the subsequent explanation offered by Gordievsky.

Able Archer 83 also highlights the importance of not overreacting to nuclear readiness or posture changes by either side. Perroots worried “What might have happened that day in November 1983 if we had begun a precautionary generation of forces rather than waiting for further information?” It seems likely, based on what is now known, that the answer is “not much, at least initially.” It is possible U.S. generation might have triggered additional Soviet readiness increases, potentially even meriting notification of the senior Soviet leaders. But much would have depended on the nature of U.S. generation and how it was perceived by the Soviets. In any case, it is extremely unlikely U.S. generation would have led immediately to Soviet nuclear use- at a minimum Andropov would have to have been roused from his sick bed and briefed first.

Finally, Able Archer 83 points to the importance of social science and particularly understanding what evidence would falsify a hypothesis about a rare but important event. As noted, the lens that there were genuine Soviet fears is important to understanding the events of 1983, but equally important is the understanding that much of what the Soviets did and said at the time was intended to influence as well as inform. Unfortunately, the dominance of that first lens in some accounts, means that the hypothesis that Able Archer 83 was a genuine nuclear crisis has become for its proponents unfalsifiable. Evidence, such as the new documents, is immediately taken to fit the hypothesis, without due regard for the context or discrepant evidence. This is unfortunate, as it blinds us to real lessons of 1983.