This book tells the fascinating story of the year 1983, when the Soviets became convinced the US was about to launch a first strike. For most of the two decades after the Cuban Missile Crisis, both sides knew that they had time to assess an incoming strike and adopt the appropriate response. Mutually assured destruction allowed for an uneasy peace. However, the introduction of short range and submarine launched missiles reduced the time from launch to landing to 6 minutes. Both countries became painfully aware that they really did not have ample time to measure a retaliatory strike. Reagan made bellicose speeches labeling the Soviet Union an 'evil empire' and Yuri Andropov, a particularly paranoid and new General Secretary, was unable to distinguish between policy and bombast in America. The year opened with Andropov demanding of the KGB extensive efforts to observe and report steps toward a nuclear attack. He asked for agents to report the number of lights on in government buildings, to ascertain if leaders were out of town or away from their standard posts, to see if hospitals were preparing for a surge in casualties -- an endless list of absurd idiosyncratic items from which he, as a former KGB Chairman, could determine if America was about to attack. Most of the stations around the world were bemused by the request, concluded it was absurd but fed back doggerel to keep Moscow off their backs. The Strategic Defense Initiative shook the Soviet leadership to their core. They knew they did not have the technology to match whatever the US came up with. The US aggressively pursued psychology operations (PSYOPS) whereby they would send a swarm of planes toward a Soviet border and then pull away at the last minute. We were spending money on rearming, and trying to put the USSR on edge. For all of the noise Reagan made though, he sincerely was frightened by the thought of a nuclear war and dreamed of disarmament. "False alarms were frighteningly common throughout the Cold War. There were accidents, technical failures, computer malfunctions and human errors galore." In August, a Korean Airline plane went 365 miles off course, entered Soviet airspace and was shot down. The Kremlin first denied it had happened and then labeled it a spy flight. Reagan called it a terrorist activity. A month later, a Soviet major who had helped design and install a new computer warning system and happened to be on duty on a night when the computers asserted that the US was attacking, realized it was a false alarm, and literally saved the world by not fighting back. October saw 241 US marines killed in their barracks in Lebanon by a suicide bomber, and the US went on a heightened security level. Both sides were anxiously looking at the other. Complicating matters was that the 69-year-old Yuri Andropov was dying of kidney failure.
That fall, matters came to a head. NATO began its annual war games and one of the first steps was airlifting 19,000 US combat soldiers to West Germany. It was followed by a communications exercise, called Able Archer, which in essence was a rehearsal for the release of nuclear weapons. The Soviets knew that their invasion plans were cloaked under the cover of war games and assumed the west was up to the real thing. As realistic war game communications were heard by the Soviets, they concluded an attack was imminent. On Nov. 6, Moscow Centre advised all posts that an attack would transpire in 7-10 days. The NATO planners then changed their communication codes and the whole exercise went 'black' to the Soviets. They were rattled. Responding to the crisis was a man no longer capable of going to the office. Andropov, growing frailer by the day, was not at the Kremlin, but was ensconced in the Kuntsevo Clinic just outside of Moscow. The military was mobilizing and, for the first time in a generation, did not help with the autumnal harvest. The day the NATO codes changed, Nov. 8, saw the Soviet nuclear missile system on the highest alert level possible. Fighter planes in East Germany and Czechoslovakia were on strip alert: i.e., on the runway, fueled, motors running and ready to take off. Fortunately a Soviet source, Topaz, deep inside NATO headquarters reported that nothing was going on. The Soviets stepped back, Able Archer was over and the normal procedures of the Cold War prevailed.
Only afterwards did the west realize how close it had been to all out war. No one in the west believed that the Soviets could think them capable of such egregious behavior as a first strike. A well placed British spy in London convinced his handlers that the Soviets were petrified of Reagan. Thatcher grasped the issue and eventually Reagan did too. He was concerned about nuclear war and began to tone things down. The year 1984 saw the brief rule of Konstantin Chernenko, another doddering, ill and old Bolshevik, who was succeeded in early 1985 by Mikhail Gorbachev.
Over the next few years, Reagan and Gorbachev were able to overcome Reagan's commitment to SDI and sign the INF Treaty, which removed intermediate range missiles from Europe. It was a high-water mark in US-USSR relations. Gorbachev fully realized that the USSR could no longer afford the Cold War and its ongoing occupation of Eastern Europe. He continued to reform, reduce armaments, decrease military expenditures and saw the Berlin Wall fall in November, 1989. The remains of Stalin's monolithic communism were gone. Two years later, the Soviet Union was dissolved.
This is a superbly written, eye-opener of a book. Many believe that November 1983, not October 1962, was when the Cold War came the closest to mutual destruction.
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