The public has heard of the Cuban missile crisis in October 1962.
The USA and the USSR came close to nuclear war.
Twenty-one years later it happened again. Twice.
On September 1, 1983, Korean Airlines flight 007 disappeared over
Soviet air space. The official report on both sides of the Iron Curtain was
that a Soviet fighter had shot it down. On board was Congressman Larry
McDonald, a friend of mine. In May 1976, he told Ron Paul that I was available
to work on his staff, and Paul hired me in June. The untold story of KAL 007
is here.
It was written by the son-in-law of a victim on the plane.
This story has been
suppressed for over 15 years. It was dropped down the memory hole.
The next incident came on September 26. This is from Wikipedia.
On 26 September 1983, Stanislav
Petrov, a lieutenant colonel in the Soviet Air Defense Forces, was the officer
on duty at the Serpukhov-15 bunker near Moscow which housed the command center
of the Soviet early warning satellites, code-named Oko. Petrov's
responsibilities included observing the satellite early warning network and
notifying his superiors of any impending nuclear missile attack against the
Soviet Union. If notification was received from the early warning systems that
inbound missiles had been detected, the Soviet Union's strategy was an
immediate nuclear counter-attack against the United States (launch on warning),
specified in the doctrine of mutual assured destruction.
Shortly after midnight, the bunker's computers reported that one
intercontinental ballistic missile was heading toward the Soviet Union from the
United States. Petrov considered the detection a computer error, since a first-strike
nuclear attack by the United States was likely to involve hundreds of
simultaneous missile launches in order to disable any Soviet means of a
counterattack. Furthermore, the satellite system's reliability had been
questioned in the past. Petrov dismissed the warning as a false alarm, though
accounts of the event differ as to whether he notified his superiors or not
after he concluded that the computer detections were false and that no missile
had been launched. Later, the computers identified four additional missiles in
the air, all directed towards the Soviet Union. Petrov again suspected that the
computer system was malfunctioning, despite having no other source of
information to confirm his suspicions. The Soviet Union's land radar was incapable
of detecting missiles beyond the horizon, and waiting for it to positively
identify the threat would limit the Soviet Union's response time to a few
minutes.
It was subsequently determined that the false alarms were caused
by a rare alignment of sunlight on high-altitude clouds and the satellites'
Molniya orbits, an error later corrected by cross-referencing a geostationary
satellite.
In explaining the factors leading to his decision, Petrov cited
his belief and training that any U.S. first strike would be massive, so five
missiles seemed an illogical start. In addition, the launch detection system
was new and in his view not yet wholly trustworthy, while ground radar had
failed to pick up corroborative evidence even after several minutes of the
false alarm.
The second incident came in November. The USA had begun a
sophisticated war game called Able Archer 83. It began on November 7. The
USSR's military began to think this was not a war game, that it was preparation
for war. This is from a recent article in Slate. It was
co-authored by a man who wrote a 2016 book on the incident.
Multiple high-level Soviet
officers have confirmed in interviews that Soviet nuclear missile forces were
placed on "raised combat alert" during Able Archer 83. At least one
account claimed that the alert reached the highest levels of the Soviet
military and that Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov, chief of the general staff,
monitored events from a bunker outside of Moscow. And the U.S. technical
sergeant says he received daily briefings showing that the Soviets were
increasing their level of military readiness and upping the operational tempo
of their forces: "Their posturing [was] rising in some cases by the hour
if not the minute." The United States and the Soviet Union had started
climbing the escalatory ladder toward war. The question is why they stopped.
This is where the role played by Leonard Perroots, a military
intelligence officer, was so critical. At the time of Able Archer 83, the West
Virginia native with almost 30 years of service was assistant chief of staff
for intelligence for the U.S. Air Force in Europe. While overseeing Able Archer
83, he noted that Soviet forces (the real ones, not the simulated ones) were
raising their alert levels. But, instead of responding in kind, Perroots did
nothing. Had he elevated the alert level of Western military assets--which
would not have been an unreasonable thing to do--the Soviets might well have
concluded that the exercise was indeed cover for an attack. Instead, Perroots,
acting on instinct, saw that doing nothing would halt any climb up the escalatory
ladder. It ended what would become known as the "war scare" and
possibly averted a nuclear exchange.
His calm response aside, Perroots was shaken by the episode. So,
in January 1989, just before retiring as head of the Defense Intelligence
Agency, he wrote a letter recalling the danger he experienced during Able
Archer 83 and outlining his disquiet that the U.S. intelligence community did
not give adequate credence to the possibility that the United States and Soviet
Union came unacceptably close to nuclear war during Able Archer 83. He sent
this letter to the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, which was
shocked into action. Its comprehensive report was based on hundreds of
documents and more than 75 interviews with American and British officials.
The PFIAB authors wrote that they hoped their report would prompt
"renewed interest, vigorous dialogue, and rigorous analyses of the [war
scare]." But the report's high level of classification, and the U.S.
government's sluggish declassification process, meant that we have just started
to appreciate its conclusions about the dangers of nuclear war through
miscalculation. When Perroots died this January, his letter to the PFIAB was
still classified--28 years after he had written it.
Two men, Petrov and Perroots, had the good sense to do nothing.
They honored this traditional law of bureaucracy: "Don't just do
something! Sit there!" It is a good thing that they did.
These stories are not in the textbooks. They should be.
