How the
world was saved from a nuclear catastrophe
Most people of a certain age will clearly
remember where they were and what they were doing when the Cuban missile crisis
erupted in 1962. We all thought our days were numbered and a nuclear world war was
about to be unleashed. This, though, wasn’t the last time of such a scare. In 1983 the world once again stood
on the brink of a nuclear holocaust, but few realised it. ABLE ARCHER won’t mean anything to most people.
Ronald Reagan was elected president of the USA
in 1980 and ushered in a period of aggressive armaments build-up and crusader
rhetoric against the ‘evil empire’. He, along with his close political ally,
Margaret Thatcher embarked on a new and dangerous confrontational policy. He
surrounded himself with fanatical anti-communist warriors, like Richard Perle
(the Prince of Darkness), Dick Cheney, Caspar Weinberger, Paul Wolfowitz and
George Bush etc who were all determined to confront the Soviet Union. After
years of detente, the Helsinki Accords and a general easing of tension, the
world was once again plunged into a new phase of the Cold War that threatened to become
very hot with these dangerous brinkmanship policies.
Reagan declared peaceful coexistence a dead duck. He gave
the green light to a giant rearmament programme with the idea of forcing the
Soviet Union into an armaments race it couldn’t win and thus tip the
strategic balance in favour of the USA. He announced his SDI (Star Wars)
project and ushered in a new arms race with the aim of bringing about the ruin
of the Soviet economy in the process.
Neo-conservative Perle put in place plans for a
doable and winnable, limited nuclear war against the Soviet Union by means of a
carefully orchestrated, decapitation strike out of the blue. In US neo-con
circles the talk was about knocking out the Soviet command, control and
communications centres (C3), leaving the Red Army ‘running about the farmyard like a headless chicken’ without being able to fire a single missile back. To this end the
Pentagon prepared the stationing of new, highly accurate, intermediate range
Pershing II missiles in Europe, which had the capability of decapitating the
command, control and communication centers of the political and military
leadership of the Soviet Union within five minutes from start in Germany. Thus
this deployment would clearly be a game changer and tip the strategic balance
decisively in favour of the US/NATO. Washington and NATO publicly justified
this planned undermining of the East-West-balance as a necessary reaction to
the new, medium range SS20 missiles the Soviet had just introduced in Eastern
Europe. In contrast to the Pershing II, however, the SS 20 – while augmenting
Soviet options in case of war in Europe –
did not upset the strategic balance, as they could not
hit C3-targets in the USA.
In 1979 as part of its medium range nuclear
modernization programme NATO took the decision to deploy new cruise and
Pershing II missiles in Europe. The first particularly destabilising Pershing missiles were deployed
in West Germany in autumn 1983. Because of this provocative escalation and the
concomitant reduction of launch warning time tensions were stretched to
breaking point. All the more, as the Soviet leadership was absolutely convinced
by then, that the US were seriously planning a nuclear surprise attack under
the cover of a large scale manouevre. In order to gain advance knowledge of
such plans, the KGB and the Soviet Military Intelligence GRU within the
framework of operation RYAN had been ordered already back in 1979 to give top
priority to scan and collect all sorts of information that could indicate
preparation for such an attack and which would allow – if possible – to pre-empt it through a counter attack. Through a series of unfortunate
accidents, world events and other technical developments by autumn 1983 entire
sets of indicators, some true, some by mistake, that fitted the Soviet high
command’s anticipation of how the
lead in scenario of the US/NATO C3 decapitation attack against the USSSR would
look like flashed red alert. And while NATO moved into the field for its giant Able Archer
exercise close to the German-German border, Soviet nuclear weapons were readied
for the preemptive strike. At one time, Soviet nuclear bombers were sitting on
the tarmac in their East German airbases, engines running, waiting for the
order to go. If this order had come, most likely nuclear holocaust, at least
for Europe and the UK would have ensued, if not all-out nuclear war.
We were spared this end largely due to the efforts of one
man: Rainer Rupp, who at the time held a top job in NATO headquarters in
Brussels, but at the same time was secretly working for the GDR foreign
intelligence service HVA. He was not your common or garden spy, but a man who
was prepared to give vital information to the GDR and Soviet Union in order to
help ensure continued peace in Europe and to help prevent an accidental or
deliberate outbreak of hostilities. He was convinced, as he could see from NATO’s own “cosmic top secret”
documents that
the Soviet Union was not planning a deliberate attack or first strike against
the USA nor a conventional invasion of Western Europe.
Rupp had become politically radicalized as a student
after seeing the re-emergence of neo-Nazi forces in Germany and witnessing the
virulent anti-communism that was being whipped up. He was not prepared to sit
idly by and let a third world war take place.
As a highly intelligent and assiduous worker, he soon
rose within the NATO hierarchy to a position of trust and responsibility. He
knew every detail of the plans concerning a potential third world war, whether
it involved a strategy of Massive Retaliation, (Mutually Assured Destruction or
MAD) or Flexible Response. In either case, central Europe would have become a
place of unbelievable destruction, with a massive death toll and widespread
contamination.
A conventionally waged war was not considered an option
by NATO because it felt the Soviet Union would win such a war. Its strategy
involved the early and first use of tactical nuclear weapons, already stationed
close to borders to the Warsaw Pact - the policy was based on the concept of
either ‘fire them or lose them’ if a border conflict flared
up. Massive Retaliation was certainly not an immediate option for either side,
as they both knew that in all likelihood they would both be doomed. Confining
the theatre of war to Europe using the flexible response option was certainly
very much in the interests of the USA.
Richard Perle, State Secretary in the Pentagon for
planning and policy, was of the opinion that a limited nuclear war against the
Soviet Union could be fought and won without massive damage to the US. Back in
the early 1980s they knew that the Soviet Union had an advantage in terms of
conventional weaponry as well as the large size of its armed forces and would
prevail in a non-nuclear war scenario. Therefore the nuclear ‘beheading’
option appealed
to the criminal warmongers in the Pentagon as it seemed to present a realistic
chance of succeeding.
In the autumn of 1983 the worst case scenario looked s if
it was about to unfold. Reagan’s crusader rhetoric and his Star Wars
programme, together with the decision to station Pershings in Europe had raised
tensions. The Soviet Union now had only minutes of warning in the event of a
nuclear attack. It considered that NATO’s previous policy of defence
preparation had now been transformed into one of waging a pre-emptive war. It
had already experienced surprise invasions into its territory in the Second
World War, which cost the USSR 27 million lives, and it didn’t wish to be caught out
again.
The political tension had been further sharpened in that
same year by the downing of the Korean airliner KAL 007 on 1 September. The
full story, why that passenger plane deviated by almost 90 degrees from its
course to deeply penetrate a highly sensitive Soviet defence area where
strategic missile were hidden, has still not been adequately explained. But the
incident took place at a time when the USA had been actively provoking Soviet defence
reactions at different places along its long borders in order to assess the
reaction of the air defence systems, monitor communications, identify and
locate the respective C3 centers. The inexplicable straying of Korean Airlines
007 into Soviet airspace over the sensitive region of Kamchatka and the refusal
of the Korean pilots to respond to calls to change course made the Russians
doubly fearful. Rupp has serious doubts that the deviation of the Korean
Airlines plane over Soviet airspace was a genuine mistake, all the more, as he
has seen months later a secret assessment about the Soviet C3-centers in the
Far East, which had been sent by the US-military intelligence Agency DIA to the
Situation Centre in NATO where Rupp served on a rotating basis as Chairman of
the Current Intelligence Group. In this document the DIA called the successful
identification of the C3 centers in der Soviet Far East as “a windfall gain”
of the downing
of KAL007
Many years later, Rupp’s suspicion war corroborated,
at least indirectly, by statements from a former high-ranking CIA officer and
subsequent official CIA-historian Ben Fisher. He admitted that after Reagan’s assumption of the presidency in 1980 a highly dangerous period
began with extremely provocative violations of Soviet borders on land, sea and
air in order to test its responses.
ABLE ARCHER took place in that context. The planned
combined NATO exercises for the autumn of 1983 were viewed by the Soviets as a
pretext for a first strike. They were not prepared to wait for a first strike
to hit them and they desperately needed to know urgently if such a plan was
indeed about to be put into practice. They were convinced that ABLE ARCHER was
not simply an exercise but a ruse to initiate a first strike. The Soviets knew
that after the stationing of new US missiles in Europe they would only have a
warning time of around 5 to 8 minutes if they wished to retaliate in the case
of a pre-emptive strike. Any misunderstanding on either side could lead rapidly to a
nuclear catastrophe.
The exercises were carried out under very realistic
conditions and the scenario from Moscow’s perspective appeared to be
a preparation for a first nuclear strike. The manoeuvres took place over ten days,
beginning on 2 November and involved all Western Europe. The aim was a
simulation of a co-ordinated deployment of nuclear weapons and their use. What
was particularly alarming was that there were new elements in the exercise:
middle-range nuclear weapons were brought onto the field for the first time and
absolute radio silence was maintained; a new code format was introduced for
communications. And, for the first time, leaders of all the NATO countries were
involved which also alerted Moscow to the unusual high political significance
of the exercises. Moscow also thought, wrongly, that the USA had put its troops
on the highest alarm stage, DEFCON 1. In reality DEFCON 1 was only simulated
during the exercise.
Convinced of an immediate US attack, the Soviet Union put
its own strategic nuclear forces on red alert. The smallest mistake would have
unleashed a catastrophe. Even Gorbachev later declared that the situation at
the time was as dangerous as the Cuban missile crisis, but with an even greater
nuclear potential.
The US had already been holding its missile forces in a
state of high alert preparedness since 1981. Rupp, because of his inside
knowledge, felt the Soviet concerns were unfounded. After all, he himself was
involved in the NATO-Situation Center (War Room) at the highest level in the
NATO exercises and would have known if Able Archer had been used as a cloak to
lunch a surprise attack against the USSR. Moscow was informed of this, but
still remained extremely suspicious. They demanded firm proof that this was the
case. So Rupp, at great danger to himself, was able to provide it and by doing
so was able to reassure the Soviet military leadership and head off the start
of an accidental nuclear holocaust.
As a result of his later exposure as a spy, due to the
defection of a top GDR counter intelligence officer in 1989, he was given a 12
years jail sentence in his home country of Germany. At the same time a former
Nazi guard from Auschwitz who was co-responsible for the deaths of thousands
was handed down a three and a half year sentence. West German agents who had
been imprisoned
in the GDR were all released immediately.
Years later, at a conference on international espionage
in 2005 in Berlin, the former CIA-head for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe,
Milton Bearden, congratulated the former Head of East German foreign
intelligence HVA, the legendary Markus Wolf, saying that thanks to his
excellently placed source in NATO-HQ in Brussels peace had been saved in 1983,
as he had ‘been able to calm the recipients in Moscow’
and in this way,
avoid a nuclear war.
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