I remember the fall of 1983 well. I was in twelfth grade. The dreary ordeal of high school would finally end in the spring. I didn’t pay much attention to the world beyond my small town, didn’t know much about the world beyond.
Aside from the routine of schoolwork, I was engrossed in the pop culture of the moment—music, movies, the occasional book. The Second British Invasion was underway, and the airwaves buzzed with synthpop. But there was one artist who dominated the radio and a nascent cable network called Music Television that year. We had heard the first singles from Michael Jackson’s Thriller the previous fall, and subsequent tracks would keep hitting through the end of the year. We had watched MJ’s electrifying performance of “Billie Jean” on the Motown 25 television special a few months before. We eagerly anticipated the first airing of the video of the title track, which would finally arrive in December. That year’s yearbook would even feature a small section devoted to the Thriller phenomenon.
But there was a larger world beyond mine and that of my classmates. Although we were aware of the ongoing Cold War, it did not register as important to us. Our teachers never discussed it save for a passing reference toward the end of our required U.S. history class. We were required to view the TV movie The Day After, which would air that November. I admit it scared the hell out of me, but it quickly faded from memory as smaller concerns again filled my mind (such as the “Thriller” video). Looking back, I should have taken a good look around.
That fall brought a number of incidents which should have driven home the precarious nature of the U.S.-Soviet standoff other than a network TV special with cheesy special effects. These went beyond the boilerplate rhetoric emanating from Washington and Moscow. That fall saw events that exacerbated tensions to the point where the world came closer to a thermonuclear war than it had at any time after the Cuban Missile Crisis.
There was the stuff that was reported in the news. In September a Soviet fighter shot down a Korean Air 747 that was off course due to a navigational error; Congressman Larry McDonald of Georgia was among the dead. The following month, U.S. forces invaded Grenada, whose pro-Cuban, pro-Soviet revolutionary regime had descended into a factional coup. (This came on the heels of the unrelated truck bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut.) In protest of the Grenada intervention, a fringe group called the May 19th Communist Organization planted a bomb in the Senate chamber at the U.S. Capitol. It detonated after the Senate had adjourned for the day; no one was hurt.
Then, there was what wasn’t reported until much later. The truly scary stuff. At the end of September, the duty officer at the Serpukov-15 nuclear control center near Moscow was alerted to incoming NATO ballistic missiles. Tensions had been building for the past two years as the U.S. expanded its nuclear arsenal in West Germany; the first Pershing II missiles would be fielded by year’s end. The duty officer, Stanislav Petrov, noticed the suspected attack indicated only a handful of incoming missiles rather than the expected full onslaught. Petrov correctly deduced a malfunction of the Oko early warning satellites and did not order a retaliatory response. This decision earned Petrov a reprimand and effectively ended his military career. It would be many years before he would receive the recognition he deserved.
That wasn’t the only close call. November saw that year’s NATO Able Archer exercise. Able Archer 83 was a command post exercise that simulated the precipitating events which would in turn lead to DEFCON 1 and the opening moves of a nuclear war. The Soviet leadership watched what they misconstrued as an actual ramp-up to an actual nuclear attack. Operation RYAN had been stood up in 1981 at the behest of then-KGB chief Yuri Andropov to monitor NATO war preparations. Signals intelligence through RYAN led Andropov, by then the General Secretary, and the rest of the Soviet leadership to believe Able Archer was the precursor of a surprise attack.
Later revelations would help explain their apprehensions. It seems that nearly 20,000 U.S. troops were airlifted into Europe ahead of Able Archer, an airlift which required 170 aircraft flying under radio silence. NATO headquarters moved into its wartime bunkers. Intelligence also indicated that NATO was modifying its nuclear release procedures.
Several factors may explain why Able Archer 83 didn’t touch off World War III. There was some skepticism within the KGB, according to double agent Oleg Gordievsky and other KGB officers who published memoirs well after the fact. Andropov was in poor health—he would die three months later—and may have been hesitant to mount a preemptive attack despite his longtime suspicions of Western intentions. Or it might have been that the U.S. Air Force commander in the theater advising NATO leaders not to respond to the reactive Warsaw Pact military buildup. Some of the decision process on both sides may remain unknown to both historians and the public.
Much of this did not come to light for years, though subsequent releases of classified documents have expanded our understanding. I can only express relief that nothing escalated to the point of war. And that I was blissfully ignorant of it all at the time.
©
2023 The Unassuming Scholar
