1 янв 1983 г. - ABLE ARCHER AND THE WAR SCARE

Описание:

In early November of 1983 the world may have come closer to nuclear war than at any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis. NATO was conducting what it considered a routine exercise named Able Archer, a simulation designed to train and test the procedures for shifting from conventional to nuclear war.

However, the Soviet Union interpreted the exercise as a prelude to a first strike by the United States. Much remains classified about what came to be known as the War Scare of 1983. But the National Security Archive has amassed and published a large collection of documents that are available online. Included in this library is a 100-page report by the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board from February of 1990 entitled The Soviet “War Scare.” Declassified in 2012, the moderately redacted report concludes that the intelligence community did not “attach sufficient weight to the possibility that the war scare was real”, and as a result “the President was given assessments of Soviet attitudes and actions that understated the risks to the United States.” The Board further concluded that the US had “inadvertently placed our relations with the Soviet Union on a hair trigger.”