Able Archer 83 was a ten-day NATO command post exercise starting on November 2, 1983 that spanned Western Europe, centred on SHAPE's Headquarters situated at Casteau, north of the Belgian city of Mons. The exercise simulated a period of conflict escalation, culminating in a coordinated nuclear release.[1] It incorporated a new, unique format of coded communication, radio silences, participation by heads of state, and a simulated DEFCON 1 nuclear alert.
The realistic nature of the exercise, coupled with deteriorating relations between the United States and the Soviet Union and the anticipated arrival of Pershing II nuclear missiles in Europe, led some in the USSR to believe that Able Archer 83 was a ruse of war, obscuring preparations for a genuine nuclear first strike.[1][2][3][4] In response, the Soviets readied their nuclear forces and placed air units in East Germany and Poland on alert.[5][6] This relatively obscure incident is considered by many historians to be the closest the world has come to nuclear war since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962.[7] The threat of nuclear war abruptly ended with the conclusion of the Able Archer 83 exercise on November 11.[8][9]
Then came Exercise Able Archer 83 on November 2, 1983. The exercise involved a few things that really creeped the Soviets out. It was designed to simulate a period of escalation leading to a nuclear exchange. When the exercise started the huge increase in NATO radio traffic, using a new code system that the Soviets ELINT people were unfamiliar with lit a lot of fires inside the Kremlin. This phase of the exercise mimicked what the Soviets knew of the actual upgrade from DEFCON 4 to DEFCON 3. When the NATO forces moved to a simulated DEFCON 2 on November 9th, the Soviets placed their own forces on actual alert, thinking this could be the real deal.
Luckily western observers noticed this and canceled the more provocative elements of the final exercise which was to include top leadership (Ronald Regan, etc) to disappear from public eye and go into a bunker. That last step may have led to a Soviet first strike and we would all be in a much more radioactive millennium.
The accounts are highly contradictory on matters of fact as well as opinion. In relation to that last quote, the Channel 4 documentary showed Reagan flying off to Japan with a briefcase attached to his wrist at the start of the exercise. Thatcher and other EU leaders pulled out at the last minute - various possible reasons are discussed, including the US invasion of Grenada, a British territory, without mentioning it to the UK first, the possibility that they shared the Russians feelings that an attack might be launched over Europe, or that the Russians would misinterpret an exercise and launch a pre-emptive strike.
The linked sources on Able Archer omit discussion, or mislead, of the frame of mind of Reagan and his Generals in 1983. This is where Gore comes in or some of these other accounts -
What you won't find easily is an account of the saga that brings together Reagan's real belief that the end of the world and the destruction of the Evil Empire was imminent, with the chronology and detail of what happened 1983-4. All of the Able Archer accounts that I've read omit or contradict the well known reality. Reagan really seems to have been in a bit of a haze.
Reagan: "We will export death and violence to the four corners of the earth in defense of this great country and rid the world of evil." The other part of the context is Reagan's massive military spending and placing the Pershings in Germany.
Anecdote: I met a couple once who were in the British army based in Germany, and who told me they had married at that time and decided not to have children because of their expectations for the future.
This whole episode one way or another triggered the end of the U.S.S.R., but has not ended the dangerous stand off between the US and Russia.
Guest Guest
Subject: Re: The US Anti Missile Interceptor Shield - Hotting Up the Cold War Thu Aug 21, 2008 8:07 pm
cactus flower wrote:
The US withdrew from the thirty year old Anti Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2002. After six years of debate, planning, diplomacy and pressurising, the US has secured agreements in the last two weeks to put in place radar and anti-missile shields in the Czech Republic and Poland. The deal with the governments has involved payments and incentives. There's been bitter opposition from the public in both countries and in Germany.
It brings back the streets full of people opposed to the war in Iraq. The war still went ahead.
Guest Guest
Subject: Re: The US Anti Missile Interceptor Shield - Hotting Up the Cold War Thu Aug 21, 2008 8:33 pm
On the hunter-gatherer question, I'm not making a case that any stage of our history is better or worse than the present, just the point that it was sustainable (and not so grim as people sometimes assume) and that our current society is not sustainable.
I'm all in favour of smart incremental adjustments and try and make them in my own life, but I don't believe that incremental voluntary change will sort it out, or that we can necessarily go on consuming resources the way we do now - over 4,000 litres of water a day per person in the UK, according to a post in the Water Shortage thread here.
I actually think that the word sustainable in this context requires parsing out. In the short to medium term our society is sustainable, we could continue to burn resources at present rate for decades, perhaps a couple of centuries (this excludes mass impacts such as climate change and the costs that they will incur in terms of necessity to transport people to safer locations, etc). It's only once we go past that that we run into trouble (and that's not merely a play on words, in the extreme long term nothing is sustainable if we restrict ourselves to this planet). And that's pretty much the approach of conservative/libertarians in the US who believe nothing much is broke and that eventually some technofix, new means of making plastic like substances without petroleum, fusion, whatever will come along. They might be right but I'm dubious about waiting to find out if they're wrong and we wind up in 2200 with a rapidly collapsing society.
I take a different view which is that while in the short to medium term we can carry on regardless in the long term that's - well, unsustainable. So my attitude is let's make the change now, let's try to ameliorate climate change and let's go smart and energy efficient early. The other things will come in time - perhaps (not so sure about fusion). And this will allow us to retain a high standard of living but this time on a global level.
But I actually agree with you, incremental voluntary change isn't the whole story. What it requires is representative government using stick and carrot. And there may be a fair bit of stick. But what I notice is that these changes are being made. As regards the use of water etc, I'm not so sure. It would take relatively minor changes to pull that figure (which seems very very inflated) down.
I'm genuinely not as pessimistic as you about it. Quite the opposite. This is a huge opportunity to wind up with a more pleasant and humane society. That said I could envisage a darker version where very very authoritarian governments come into being in a bid to manage populations and their response to climate change.
....
I don't disagree either re the Soviets that US rhetoric was very strong. My initial query is what evidence is there that the US seriously planned a first strike in the early 1980s? None of the citations you make support that contention with evidence. All support the idea that a paranoid (and expansionist post Afghanistan) Soviet military/political leadership had that perception. A very different thing.
None support any sense that the US political or military leadership envisaged it. Indeed most of the accounts demonstrate just how surprised the US and Reagan were in particular when they discovered the depth of the Soviet perception. They thought that the Soviets were using their rhetoric insincerely when they weren't. And that to me is the real lesson to learn from Abel Archer, that even doing a 'realistic' simulation exercise was quite dangerous. But to then go a step further and say that that was a 'cover' for a nuclear first strike is quite a different matter. Incidentally, in political terms, the US would be a global pariah in the aftermath of such a war - assuming there was much left to pick up afterwards. It would make no sense at all to fight it. As for Reagan's supposed fundamentalist Christian viewpoint, that would raise a wry laugh from most US Republicans (or indeed Christian Conservatives). He was absolutely pandering to the evangelical base, just as GW Bush did. One of the most interesting things in the contemporary period is how the Christian Right feels let down by the Republican party since the 1980s and has even swung away from them to a limited degree.
The idea that Thatcher thought Reagan was about to launch a first strike is simply not apparent in the evidence. And without firm evidence, or any evidence at all, it's simply impossible to assert that the US intended a first strike, was building towards one, or nearly carried one out. If anything it would appear that the Soviets were much more likely (from their stated and acknowledged mindset) to carry one out.
"We will export death and violence to the four corners of the earth in defense of this great country and rid the world of evil."
re the quote above you attribute to Reagan, that's incorrect. It was referenced in Bush at War by Bob Woodward and was made - apparently - by a member of US forces in Afghanistan. Since then it has often been misattributed to Bush, not Reagan.
That's fair enough about that couple, I know people who took a similar view during that period, but what of the hundreds of thousands of US and NATO military personnel right the way up the command chain, or indeed US Republican members and politicians who did have children during this period?
It's a messy messy period, with cynical and revolting actions by all parties, but I'm unsure as to why it is necessary to make out that the US was in some way uniquely malevolent...to the point of planning global extermination.
Guest Guest
Subject: Re: The US Anti Missile Interceptor Shield - Hotting Up the Cold War Thu Aug 21, 2008 8:56 pm
Pax wrote:
cactus flower wrote:
The US withdrew from the thirty year old Anti Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2002. After six years of debate, planning, diplomacy and pressurising, the US has secured agreements in the last two weeks to put in place radar and anti-missile shields in the Czech Republic and Poland. The deal with the governments has involved payments and incentives. There's been bitter opposition from the public in both countries and in Germany.
It's Hegemony or Survival time again isn't it?
It brings back the streets full of people opposed to the war in Iraq. The war still went ahead.
So, this time they've poked the bear (mangy old bear) with a stick. That should really frighten us.
Well, that illustrates one of the dilemmas of dominance that I had in mind. one problem is how do you control the domestic population. The great beast, as Alexander Hamilton called the people. They're always a problem. The beast is always getting out of control. One of the main problems of governance, I'm sure you study this in all of your political science courses, is how do you keep the great beast in a cage?
When people are beyond fear, have an alternative, and are organised, they get out of their cage.
Guest Guest
Subject: Re: The US Anti Missile Interceptor Shield - Hotting Up the Cold War Fri Aug 22, 2008 8:59 pm
In Wired they are saying this defense shield might not even physically exist it's just something to goad Russia with... Why?
He says it's virtually useless because it's so easily fooled by low-tech; one of the ways of deterring German bombers over London in WWII was a curtain of long, steel cables hung from Zepplins high up in the sky, while radar was still getting developed.
-Couldn't the Russians call their bluff and tell them it's ok to plant the anti missile shield in their territory ... they're all friends around the Security Council table and all now, aren't they?
Guest Guest
Subject: Comparing Hunter-Gatherer to Modern Industrialised Society Sat Aug 23, 2008 1:25 pm
[quote="WorldbyStorm"] Cactus flower saidOn the hunter-gatherer question, I'm not making a case that any stage of our history is better or worse than the present, just the point that it was sustainable (and not so grim as people sometimes assume) and that our current society is not sustainable.
I'm all in favour of smart incremental adjustments and try and make them in my own life, but I don't believe that incremental voluntary change will sort it out, or that we can necessarily go on consuming resources the way we do now - over 4,000 litres of water a day per person in the UK, according to a post in the Water Shortage thread here.
WorldbyStorm said
Quote :
I actually think that the word sustainable in this context requires parsing out. In the short to medium term our society is sustainable, we could continue to burn resources at present rate for decades, perhaps a couple of centuries (this excludes mass impacts such as climate change and the costs that they will incur in terms of necessity to transport people to safer locations, etc). It's only once we go past that that we run into trouble (and that's not merely a play on words, in the extreme long term nothing is sustainable if we restrict ourselves to this planet). And that's pretty much the approach of conservative/libertarians in the US who believe nothing much is broke and that eventually some technofix, new means of making plastic like substances without petroleum, fusion, whatever will come along. They might be right but I'm dubious about waiting to find out if they're wrong and we wind up in 2200 with a rapidly collapsing society.
Sustainability is a completely different concept to "end of oil". Sustainability in the context we are discussing here clearly relates to maintenance of a viable habitat for our species, without societal and species collapse. We can't talk about sustainability whilst "excluding mass impacts such as climate change". Oil supply is an important but secondary factor that contributes to environmental pressures, and upon which we currently depend for food supply.
You describe a society which is dependent on quarrying out burnable resources. You say "in the extreme long term nothing is sustainable if we restrict ourselves to this planet". My point is, that hunter gatherer society was sustainable on this planet as demonstrated by the millions of years it was sustained ( and in fact is still sustained in areas where habitat and land ownership permits it). You're saying that if we carry on as we are - a resource hungry "quarrying" society, that will require either colonising other planets ( a forlorn hope, that would not conceivably meet your tests of society continuing as it is here and now) or a "technofix". Biofuels, bioplastic, fusion - these energy sources are all looking like false dawns as they are themselves dependent on non-renewable sources and have large scale social and environmental impacts (On a side note, why not mention renewables that look far more likely to be viable - wind, tide and solar?). Either way, to achieve an adjustment from our heavily consuming, quarrying and non sustainable society to one with a much bigger population than when hunter gatherers predominated, but sustainable on this planet, would in my view mean a completely different form of society in terms of economy and management.
WorldbyStorm said
Quote :
I take a different view which is that while in the short to medium term we can carry on regardless in the long term that's - well, unsustainable. So my attitude is let's make the change now, let's try to ameliorate climate change and let's go smart and energy efficient early. The other things will come in time - perhaps (not so sure about fusion). And this will allow us to retain a high standard of living but this time on a global level.
But I actually agree with you, incremental voluntary change isn't the whole story. What it requires is representative government using stick and carrot. And there may be a fair bit of stick. But what I notice is that these changes are being made. As regards the use of water etc, I'm not so sure. It would take relatively minor changes to pull that figure (which seems very very inflated) down.I'm genuinely not as pessimistic as you about it. Quite the opposite. This is a huge opportunity to wind up with a more pleasant and humane society. That said I could envisage a darker version where very very authoritarian governments come into being in a bid to manage populations and their response to climate change.
Are you familiar with the IPCC science on climate change? The science-based view is that we can't carry on regardless. Oil prices are also dictating that and investment in renewables is growing exponentially and we may find from here on in we have big problems with harvests in Ireland. The biggest problems we are facing are food, water and loss of top soil. End of oil is good for the environment, but there is nothing to say that we will succeed in keeping our populations alive without it -as I said, mainly because of food production issues. These things have already brought millions of people out onto the streets around the world over the last 12 months.
The most destructive way of dealing with this is to fight resource wars and a plan for a trip to Mars. I don't think this is clever or likely to succeed and agree with you that governments need to drive these changes. We have the best wind and wave potential in Europe. We could make a start in Ireland by setting high quotas for use of renewables for ESB supply.
............
WorldbyStorm said [quote]I don't disagree either re the Soviets that US rhetoric was very strong. My initial query is what evidence is there that the US seriously planned a first strike in the early 1980s? None of the citations you make support that contention with evidence. All support the idea that a paranoid (and expansionist post Afghanistan) Soviet military/political leadership had that perception. A very different thing.
Quote :
None support any sense that the US political or military leadership envisaged it. Indeed most of the accounts demonstrate just how surprised the US and Reagan were in particular when they discovered the depth of the Soviet perception. They thought that the Soviets were using their rhetoric insincerely when they weren't. And that to me is the real lesson to learn from Abel Archer, that even doing a 'realistic' simulation exercise was quite dangerous. But to then go a step further and say that that was a 'cover' for a nuclear first strike is quite a different matter. Incidentally, in political terms, the US would be a global pariah in the aftermath of such a war - assuming there was much left to pick up afterwards. It would make no sense at all to fight it...The idea that Thatcher thought Reagan was about to launch a first strike is simply not apparent in the evidence. And without firm evidence, or any evidence at all, it's simply impossible to assert that the US intended a first strike, was building towards one, or nearly carried one out. If anything it would appear that the Soviets were much more likely (from their stated and acknowledged mindset) to carry one out.[/..
I can see no basis for your belief that the USSR was more likely than the US to carry out a first strike. I do agree that there was a serious risk of one or other party hitting the button based on a mistaken alert - in fact we know that that almost happened. The US was prepared to run that risk and relentlessly put the pressure on regardless. There is no question that under Carter the US strategy moved away from containment and Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) to an agressive first-strike capabilty aimed at the USSR. There was a massive increase in arms spending under Carter and then Reagan and the Pershing IIs went in 4 minutes flying time from the USSR command centre. The legislation to permit a first strike and preparations for dispersed post-first-strike government (The Continuity of Government Plan) were put in place under Reagan at the beginning of the 1980s.
Sources are a problem for three reasons: firstly, there is a very large volume of published material on this and it is contradictory; secondly, a lot of it was produced by those personally involved, and with an incentive to misrepresent; secondly, much of the key material is classified and won't be realised until 2013, if ever. As I've dug into the available material, the picture has become more detailed and clarifies best imo when its seen in the context of the new US strategy in the early 1980s for ending the USSR.
It is widely recorded that the Pentagon Generals of the day believed a first strike could be fought and won. Important players held the position that the US should be prepared to use a first strike against the USSR. No one contests that Able Archer was at least a very exact and detailed "enaction" exercise of a NATO first strike that was qualitively different from previous exercises. Gorbachev believed that the USSR was threatened with a first strike and the direction he subsequently took the USSR was predicated on that.
The likelihood that it was all bluff is imo small. It was a very high risk strategy to push the USSR to the wall, by military terror and the extraordinary economic pressures of trying to match US arms spending. There was not a uniform view in the White House or Pentagon on the winnability of a nuclear first strike war with Russia. There were certainly advocates of it. The US also engaged for the same ends in psyops, in propoganda, in diplomacy, in provocations, in regime change (e.g. Grenada, 1983), in fueling Muslim groups and the Contras, and in spying and in 'turning' individuals: for example, they appeared to know what was going on in the Politburo. (This is not to say that there weren't profound underlying reasons for the end of the USSR, that I'm keen to explore).
National Security Decision Directive 75, completed in January, 1983, laid out a strategy of "contain[ing] and over time revers[ing] Soviet expansionism by competing effectively on a sustained basis with the Soviet Union in all international arenas." The contest would range from buildups in nuclear and conventional weaponry through new and openly discussed war-fighting strategies, economic sanctions, the aggressive promotion of human rights, overt and covert support for anti-Soviet resistance movements in Eastern Europe and Afghanistan as well as for opponents of Marxist regimes in Angola, Ethiopia, and Nicaragua, and the vigorous employment of rhetoric as an instrument of psychological warfare, a trend which culminated in the President's March, 1983, claim that the Soviet Union was "the focus of evil in the modern world."
I don't make a definitive claim that Able Archer was definitively an aborted first strike operation, but I do think that it can't be ruled out. The idea that the US/Reagan or anyone else was surprised by the very panicky USSR reaction is ludicrous, although it is repeated often in the literature. That story serves to normalise Able Archer as a routine exercise, something it clearly was not. You only have to remember that at the same time the US was engaged in constant psyops incursions onto USSR territory and airspace to 'spook' them. There were mass demonstrations against the US threat of "super-fast first strike" and the dogs in the street knew about it.
You say that the US would have bee a pariah, but don't forget that they bombed two Japanese cities and went on to be seen as the representatives of truth, freedom and democracy with no difficulty.
Quote :
As for Reagan's supposed fundamentalist Christian viewpoint, that would raise a wry laugh from most US Republicans (or indeed Christian Conservatives). He was absolutely pandering to the evangelical base, just as GW Bush did. One of the most interesting things in the contemporary period is how the Christian Right feels let down by the Republican party since the 1980s and has even swung away from them to a limited degree.
Every account of Reagan from people who met him and knew him at this time say that he had a belief in and fear of Armageddon. They also say (including John Gaddis) that his grasp of the boundaries between movies and life was fuzzy. But I don't think that anyone gets to be President of the US without very considerable abilities of one kind or another.
"We will export death and violence to the four corners of the earth in defense of this great country and rid the world of evil."
Quote :
re the quote above you attribute to Reagan, that's incorrect. It was referenced in Bush at War by Bob Woodward and was made - apparently - by a member of US forces in Afghanistan. Since then it has often been misattributed to Bush, not Reagan.
It is entirely consistent with Reagan's speeches of the day, and also with Bush's. I don't suppose the US soldier dreamed it up for himself. He was on-message.
Quote :
That's fair enough about that couple, I know people who took a similar view during that period, but what of the hundreds of thousands of US and NATO military personnel right the way up the command chain, or indeed US Republican members and politicians who did have children during this period?
It's a messy messy period, with cynical and revolting actions by all parties, but I'm unsure as to why it is necessary to make out that the US was in some way uniquely malevolent...to the point of planning global extermination.[
b]
The US made the running with nuclear arms from day one and the USSR was playing catch up. If you think any differently I would be interested to see what your belief is based on. They didn't of course plan global extermination, they planned to end the main global pole of opposition to US economic and political dominance. They were successful, and nuclear compulsion in my opinion played an important part.
Portal 