By: Gordon Barrass
Over the past 30 years, there has been much debate over how close the world came to nuclear war in 1983, as US–Soviet relations became increasingly fraught. Were we at the brink of Armageddon and, if so, why? Or was the so-called war scare part of a Soviet propaganda campaign to thwart the deployment of cruise and Pershing II missiles to Western Europe, throwing the NATO alliance into disarray? This haunting problem is part of a much bigger story – a story about the rivalry between NATO and the Warsaw Pact from the early 1970s to the late 1980s, as they each struggled to enhance their own security and boost their political clout by exploiting the revolution taking place in military technology.1
The debate over what happened in 1983 – in particular, the Soviet reaction to NATO’s Able Archer exercise that year – received a new lease of life in October 2015 with the release of a top-secret review of the issue written in 1990 under the auspices of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB). The review concluded that ‘we may have inadvertently placed our relations with the Soviet Union on a hair trigger’, in response to which the Kremlin ‘might have launched a pre-emptive strike against the US in response to a perceived but non-existent threat’.2
Several informed observers have expressed their reservations regarding this conclusion.3 A principal reservation concerns how much the authors of the PFIAB report did not know at the time the report was written. Since the end of the Cold War, there has been a flood of new material: from Soviet and East European archives; from extensive interviews US officials conducted with Soviet military commanders, scientists and intelligence officials immediately after the end of the Cold War; and from British interviewers in 2005–06 preparing for a TV docudrama entitled 1983: The Brink of Apocalypse. In addition, there are many memoirs by former Soviet leaders, officials and officers.4
This material makes it possible to take a fresh look at what really happened and reassesses how serious the risk of war had been in late 1983. Even so, the old rules of evidence still apply: we must give priority to what actors said at the time versus what they said later, when people often wish to portray themselves as having been more insightful or effective than they were; we must consider how well placed the source was to know about what was happening; and we must take into account the need of generals and heads of intelligence services to show their bosses that they have not missed a trick and are keeping their staff on their toes.
We also need to keep in mind that there was not one Soviet view; rather, there were several, reflecting the structure of the regime, the tight control over information and the persistent use of propaganda in the Soviet Union itself. In particular, we should remember the historic institutional rivalry between the KGB and the GRU, the Soviet military-intelligence service, with the former believing they could see things the GRU could not, and the GRU full of contempt for the KGB’s ignorance of the realities of military matters.
http://www.iiss.org/en/publications/survival/sections/2016-5e13/survival--global-politics-and-strategy-december-2016-january-2017-4557/58-6-02-barrass-5ba9
