By the early 1970s, the Soviets had realized that a nuclear war would not be winnable in any meaningful sense. Some American weapons would survive any attack, and even one modern thermonuclear warhead could obliterate Moscow. At the same time, the Soviets saw an advantage, however Pyrrhic, to striking first—the more enemy weapons that one could destroy, the fewer that could be used against them. A U.S. National Intelligence Estimate written in 1987 and recently made public for the first time, put it this way: [...]
The KGB tasked an internal think tank with detecting Western preparations for a first strike. The result was a massive spy effort dubbed Operation RYaN—“RYaN” being the Russian acronym for “nuclear missile attack.” RYaN tasked some 300 operatives with examining 292 different indicators—everything from the location of nuclear warheads to efforts to move American “founding documents” from display at the National Archives. According to declassified Stasi documents, the resulting data was then fed into a primitive computer system, which attempted to calculate whether the Soviets should go to war to pre-empt a Western first strike. [...]
Instead of trying to reassure the Soviets, the Reagan administration had been using the American military to keep them off balance. U.S. warships had been sneaking close to Soviet shores and then launching aircraft that would head toward Soviet airspace, only turning back at the last minute. The Soviets would be forced to scramble their own jets in response. According to a once-classified Cold War history written by the National Security Agency, “[T]hese actions were calculated to induce paranoia, and they did.” [...]
Air Force personnel worried that all this realism might give the impression that NATO was preparing a real attack. According to Tod Jennings, who, as a staff sergeant, spent Able Archer 83 in a bunker outside Oslo, relaying nuclear orders via teletype, the exercise was realistic enough that he and his fellow airmen began asking, “What if the Soviets actually think we’re going to launch nuclear weapons and we’re disguising it as an exercise? What if they launch against us?”
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