The Brink: President Reagan and the Nuclear War Scare of 1983'

Home , Able Archer 83, Andrei Gromyko, RYAN, Stanislav Petrov

H-War Kuechler on Ambinder, 'The Brink: President Reagan and the Nuclear War Scare of 1983'

Review published on Thursday, December 12, 2019

Marc Ambinder. The Brink: President Reagan and the Nuclear War Scare of 1983. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018. xx + 364 pp. Ill. $27.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-4767-6037-7.

Reviewed by Peter Kuechler (Air University)Published on H-War (December, 2019) Commissioned by Margaret Sankey (Air University)

Printable Version: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=54691

The Brink (2018) presents a detailed analysis of the nuclear brinkmanship between the United States and the Soviet Union from 1982 to 1984, with emphasis on the 1983 NATO exercise Able Archer 83. The author, Marc Ambinder, claims that the world was never closer to a nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union than during this exercise. To support this thesis, Ambinder notes that he had interviewed about a hundred people, including former intelligence officers with firsthand information and soldiers who took part in the Able Archer 83 exercise.

The author begins by describing the challenges of the US nuclear command, control, and communication structure in the seventies and early eighties. Ambinder points out the challenge of short reaction times during this period resulting from a response time as little as three minutes between the detection of an enemy-launched missile and its impact. Not only was the decision-making process challenging, so was the fragile peace between the United States and the Soviet Union. Both superpowers were primed to interpret each other’s actions as preparations for a nuclear first strike.

Shortly after Ronald Reagan’s inauguration as president in 1981, he was the victim of an attempted assassination that left him with a punctured lung. The incident led Reagan to conclude, post-surgery, that the US nuclear command and control structure was insufficiently organized and in need of revision. Furthermore, the attack strengthened Reagan’s religious, pessimistic worldview. His religious faith and the influence of his advisors led Reagan to conclude that the United States could only win or survive a nuclear war if it were to strike first. This mind-set influenced Reagan’s foreign policy, including his view of the Soviet Union as an “evil empire,” and led to faulty conclusions about Soviet intentions and behavior. In the USSR, the majority of the Politburo assumed that the United States was vigorously planning a nuclear first strike. With this in mind, General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev and his intelligence chief, Yuri Andropov (a future general secretary), ordered a significant intelligence operation called RYAN (RJaN in Russian stands for “Nuclear Missile Assault”).

Operation RYAN made activities related to nuclear warfare within NATO the top priority of the two Soviet foreign and military intelligence agencies, respectively the KGB and GRU. For the first time in the USSR’s history, both agencies had to cooperate. The KGB tasked the East German intelligence agency (STASI) with assisting it in this mission. The STASI began detailed surveillance of the Fulda Gap, an area of strategic importance where NATO expected a possible Soviet conventional attack. In this area, the STASI surveilled the small, nuclear-equipped American 501st Army Artillery

Citation: H-Net Reviews. Kuechler on Ambinder, 'The Brink: President Reagan and the Nuclear War Scare of 1983'. H-War. 12-12-2019. https://networks.h-net.org/node/12840/reviews/5545688/kuechler-ambinder-brink-president-reagan-and-nuclear-war-scare-1983 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 1 H-War

Detachment. At the same time, concerns in the United States arose that Soviet forces might move into Poland to end the pro-democracy movement there. Fortunately, a Polish colonel, a CIA source, convinced the CIA that there was no such Soviet plan.

During Ivy League 82, a nuclear command post exercise, Reagan learned more about the Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP). The SIOP was the US plan for fighting a nuclear war at the time. He experienced in-depth how unreliable the nuclear warning and response system was and came to believe that the Soviets would most likely succeed if they attempted a decapitating first strike. In 1982, the nuclear struggle between the US and the USSR remained at a consistently high level. In January 1983 Reagan met with the Soviet ambassador to the United States, Anatoly Dobrynin, to discuss the possibility of a meeting with General Secretary Yuri Andropov to ease the tensions between the states. Reagan’s attempts at deescalation, however, were not taken seriously by the Soviets. The reason for this may have been Reagan’s “Evil Empire” speech and the US FleetEX 83 exercise in which US aircraft repeatedly overflew a Soviet naval base to gather intelligence. From the Soviets’ perspective, a meeting between Andropov and a former US diplomat looked promising but became overshadowed by an incident in which a Soviet fighter shot down a Korean passenger aircraft, killing 269 civilians.

Shortly after this incident, Soviet lieutenant colonel Stanislav Petrov prevented World War III. The ground command and control center he was stationed at received an early warning alarm on the “Okos” system, indicating the launch of five ICBMs from the Francis E. Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming. Soviet officials had sixteen minutes to respond. Petrov was part of the engineering team of the Okos system and was able to identify the alarm as a malfunction.

Two months later, in November 1983, Able Archer 83 took place. In the exercise, NATO forces trained and rehearsed how to employ nuclear weapons. Soviet and East German intelligence agencies closely monitored the exercise, and, as a reaction to the exercise, the Soviet Union increased the readiness level of its forces. Two factors led Soviet leaders to the conclusion that NATO was using Abel Archer 83 as a cover-up for a nuclear first strike on the Soviet Union. The first was the participation of US B-52 bombers that had never previously been involved in the exercise. The second was a last-minute change in NATO’s encryption format. This change shocked Soviet intelligence officers, because suddenly they were no longer able to decrypt NATO communications. Fortunately, additional pre-attack indicators from NATO were missing, and Soviet leaders did not escalate any further. On the US side, the information provided by the British KGB source, Col. Oleg Gordievsky, prevented further escalation. A step toward a better understanding between the Soviet Union and the United States would be made in September 1984, when Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko talked with Reagan during his visit to the United States. The talks between Reagan and Gromyko established the foundation for further talks between Reagan and the new general secretary, Mikhail Gorbachev. The slowly growing relationship between the two leaders finally led to a real deescalation, and eventually to the end of the Cold War.

Ambinder provides a detailed understanding of the brinkmanship between the Soviet Union and the United States in the early eighties, and the role of Ronald Reagan in this brinkmanship. He persuasively emphasizes the danger of human error as well as technical malfunction within nuclear command, control, and communications systems. Perhaps this study's only weakness is that the narrative sometimes jumps between scenes and characters, which makes parts hard to read. To its

Citation: Peter Kuechler. Review of Ambinder, Marc, The Brink: President Reagan and the Nuclear War Scare of 1983. H-War, H-Net Reviews. December, 2019.URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=54691

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.