The edge of oblivion
MATTHEW JONES is swept along by a gripping analysis of how close the US and the USSR came to nuclear war
1983: The World At the Brink by Taylor Downing Little, Brown, 400 pages, £20
It has almost become a truism that the most dangerous moments of the Cold War were reached during the 13 days of the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962, when the world stood on the brink of thermonuclear war. In recent years, however, historians have also fastened on the final few months of 1983, when US-Soviet tensions hit renewed highs, and only the vagaries of chance prevented a disastrous Third World War from breaking out.
Particular attention has been drawn to ‘Able Archer’ in November 1983 – a Nato command-post exercise simulating nuclear-release procedures, which may have been misinterpreted by Soviet leaders as cover for an actual plot by the Reagan administration to launch a devastating strike against them. This, in turn, could have prompted the Soviet Union to launch its own pre-emptive nuclear attack, triggering a nuclear apocalypse costing millions of lives.
It is against this broad canvas of a world spiralling toward catastrophe during the so-called Second Cold War, that Taylor Downing’s pacy popular history is set. This was a time when President Reagan was happy to describe the Soviet Union as the “evil empire”, and Nato embarked upon a major augmentation of its nuclear strength in response to the build-up of Soviet SS-20 missiles.
Clearly accessible to a wide audience, Downing’s authoritative and wellresearched narrative charts the growth of US-Soviet antagonism from Reagan’s arrival in office in January 1981 to Able Archer. It deftly takes the reader from the White House to the skies over the Kamchatka peninsula, the streets of Beirut and the corridors of the Kremlin, where anxieties over confrontational US rhetoric were rising in the geriatric leadership of the Communist Party.
He is, however, on less secure ground when arguing that we are now in a position to really know how close we came to war in November 1983. Western intelligence analysts undoubtedly thought that Soviet leaders might have mistaken Able Archer for preparations for a real attack. However, a great deal of their understanding of what had occurred derived from just a few sources, including Oleg Gordievsky, a KGB officer working in London during the exercise. Recent scholarship on Warsaw Pact intelligence archives, and the less
Only the vagaries of chance prevented a disastrous Third World War from breaking out
alarmist recollections of former Soviet military officials, suggest that, though precautions against a surprise strike were taken, there was no general expectation that Nato would take the plunge into nuclear war. For one thing, the key western leaders were still going about their regular business as Able Archer ran its course. Moreover, the missiles with which Nato might have carried out a nuclear strike were only just starting to arrive in western Europe in late 1983. Why would the US start a war without the weapons that could give it a decisive edge in the European theatre?
By contrast, there is good evidence to show that US-Soviet tension actually
Reagan and new Soviet leader Gorbachev forged a collaborative relationship
peaked a couple of months before Able Archer, in early September 1983, when a South Korean flight was downed by Soviet aircraft after having strayed into their airspace – a tragic incident related by Downing in gripping fashion.
None of this diminishes the importance of the Able Archer episode. It was because some western leaders (above all, Reagan himself) believed that they had gone to the nuclear brink in 1983 that they then took positive steps to reassure their Soviet adversaries that they had no aggressive intent. Of course, it also required a leader with Mikhail Gorbachev’s determination and courage to accept this position, and to sell his own vision of a world free from the threat of nuclear war. From 1985 to 1987 the two leaders found a way to forge a collaborative relationship that would help bring hostilities to an end.
This a remarkable story, which Downing tells in sparkling prose and in a feat of compression that many authors will envy.