At the time, most people were blissfully unaware of it, but 1983 became probably the closest the world got to nuclear war since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. A ‘perfect storm’ of international incidents conspired to raise tensions close to breaking point and it was only thanks to the levelheaded actions of a few individuals that the world survived to reach 1984 … even George Orwell could not have predicted how close it was.
Détente was a thing of the past following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the decline in Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev’s health following a stroke. The chairman of the KGB, Yuri Andropov, eventually succeeded Brezhnev in 1982, but by then, he too was unwell (he would die in February 1984). Andropov was a very paranoid man, convinced that the West (the Americans in particular) were about to launch a pre-emptive ‘first strike’ against the USSR. In 1981, he set up Project RyAN, a KGB led programme to anticipate a ‘nuclear missile attack’ (Raketno-Yaderno Napadenie) on the Soviet Union. Andropov harnessed the considerable resources of the KGB and other Warsaw Pact intelligence agencies to monitor a series of ‘indicators’ that could help predict when the West would strike. As the tensions built during the next year or two, RyAN became the highest priority for Soviet intelligence.
Andropov’s nemesis was US president Ronald Reagan, who won the presidency on the back of a strong anti-détente, anti-communist platform. His hawkish views and willingness to plough money into the US military-industrial complex fuelled Andropov’s paranoia. In response to the Soviet deployment of SS-20 IRBMs to Eastern Europe, NATO adopted its ‘Dual Track’ policy (carrot and stick, negotiation backed with military power) which resulted in the deployment of ground-launched cruise missiles and Pershing II MRBMs in 1983, prompting the so-called ‘Euro-Missile Crisis’.
In March 1983, Reagan announced his Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI, popularly known as ‘Star Wars’), which promised to intercept Soviet ballistic missiles in space before they could threaten US territory. The science behind this announcement was flimsy at best, but caused near-panic in Moscow, who saw the strategic balance shifting dangerously to the West. Reagan amplified his hawkish reputation by calling the Soviet Union an ‘Evil Empire’ in a March 1983 speech.
The Kremlin’s paranoia was also fed by some very provocative moves by the US Navy during FleetEx ’83, a huge naval exercise involving three carrier battle groups worryingly close to sensitive Soviet naval bases. The idea was to provoke the Soviets and see how they would respond, an extremely dangerous strategy with the benefit of hindsight, but by ‘poking the bear’ lots could be learnt. Extraordinarily, it included mock attacks on Soviet naval bases … imagine what the Kremlin made of that! Items were rapidly being ticked off Project RyAN’s list of indicators.
On 1 September 1983, the situation worsened with the shooting down of Korean Airlines flight 007. The civilian Boeing 747 was en route from Anchorage, Alaska to Seoul in Korea when a navigational error sent them over Soviet territory. Unfortunately, it was the very same area that the Americans had ‘violated’ during FleetEx ’83, and a regular destination for US spy planes, given the large numbers of Soviet warships and ballistic missile submarines based there. Soviet Su-15 fighters were scrambled, and despite identifying the aircraft as a 747, as opposed to the 707 used for reconnaissance, they shot the airliner down, killing the 269 passengers and crew on board, including a US Senator. Reagan described the incident as a ‘massacre’, a ‘crime against humanity’, which further ramped up tensions between the superpowers.
Three weeks later on 26 September, alarm bells started ringing at Serbikov-15, a command-and-control bunker outside Moscow for the Soviet’s new air defence satellite and radar early warning system, codenamed OKO. This new computerised system was state-of-the-art, in Soviet terms at least, combining satellite imagery, ground-based radar, and signals intelligence (SIGINT) to detect Western ICBM launches. On duty that night was Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov. Petrov, a forty-four-year-old systems engineer, did not normally run the command centre, but a colleague had called in sick, and Petrov offered to stand in. Knowing the system intimately, he was conscious of its shortcomings, feeling it had been rushed into service at the expense of thorough testing.
Just after midnight, the system detected a launch of an American Minuteman ICBM which was heading straight for the Soviet Union. With every alarm in the building sounding, and desperate controllers seeking orders, Petrov paused for a moment. Why would the Americans attack with just one missile – all the training scenarios had a first strike consisting of hundreds or even thousands of missiles, not just one? It did not make any sense. Ground radar was not picking anything up, which was crucial information to him. Knowing the shortcomings of the new system, Petrov quickly weighed up all the possibilities and concluded that it must be a false alarm. He instructed the operators to hold tight, and his decision was vindicated when no impact was reported.
Just when they thought it was safe to resume normal operation, a further four missile launches were detected by the system, plunging the command centre back into pandemonium. Petrov still did not believe this was the attack all the computers were telling him it was. The ground radar still had not seen anything, and with anxious staff staring up at the control room pleading for orders, and colleagues screaming down the phone at him, Petrov did what years of training and conditioning had failed to stifle – he thought for himself. Under extraordinary pressure, he did not see any reason to change his assessment from only a few minutes ago. A four-missile attack made no more sense than a single-missile attack – there was no logic to it, and with conflicting information and his in-depth knowledge of the system, he concluded it had to be another computer glitch, told the team over the intercom to stand down again, and called his superior to report another false alarm. This engineer, taking the shift for a sick colleague, showed extraordinary courage and presence of mind to stand his ground when the consequences of an error were incalculable.
The whole situation was hugely embarrassing for the Soviet authorities. Their brand-new state-of-the-art system had proven to be unreliable – it was later found that the satellites picked up sunlight glinting on clouds and misinterpreted it as a missile launch – and their iron-clad command and control system had failed at a crucial point after Petrov used his common sense. The whole incident was quickly hushed up, and the authorities had to decide what to do with Petrov. Rather than congratulate him on his clear thinking and brave decision, he was disciplined for failing to keep a proper log of events during the crisis. Disillusioned by his treatment, Petrov left the military the following year and moved into academia – it was not until the fall of the Soviet Union that the story got out, and Petrov became a reluctant hero, receiving several accolades from Western institutions ... nothing from Russia
The drama that year was not over. In October, the US invaded the small Caribbean island of Grenada (Operation URGENT FURY) to put down a communist led insurgency, which added a new layer of tension. The following month, the NATO command and control exercise, ABLE ARCHER ‘83, threatened to trigger a full-on conflict. ABLE ARCHER was an annual event which tested NATO processes for escalating a conventional conflict into a nuclear conflict. It was intended to be realistic and rigorous, and intelligence sources in NATO reported everything that was going on back to Moscow. The exercise had been planned for a long time and had a lot of moving parts including moving troops around, mobilising NBC assets, and even practice-loading theatre nuclear weapons – just what Moscow had been looking for. No-one in authority considered that after the succession of incidents that year and the building of tensions, this final exercise could be the straw that breaks the camel’s back, prompting a military response from the Soviets. No one joined the dots. Thankfully, the exercise reached its planned conclusion, and the units involved stood down, and went back to their normal routine. Although Soviet forces remained on high alert, the root cause of official paranoia, Yuri Andropov, died the following February, succeeded by Konstantin Chernenko, who lasted just over a year – Project RyAN was quietly forgotten. Chernenko’s successor, Mikhail Gorbachev, was the reformer the country needed, and he helped bring the Cold War to a peaceful conclusion, while at the same time causing the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the great Communist experiment.
To speculate on what could have happened if Petrov had not used his common sense and blindly followed protocols quickly descends into a world of nightmares. He should have reported the alert as a real attack, and the USSR would then have launched an immediate pre-emptive strike in retaliation of the American’s phantom missile launch. In turn, the more sophisticated Western early warning systems will have detected the very real Soviet missile launches and launched their own pre-emptive retaliatory strike, the so-called, and very controversial, ‘launch-on-warning’ policy, rather than wait for the missiles to arrive. The nuclear holocaust that would ensue is far too terrible to imagine …
Stanislav Petrov died on 19 May 2017 at the age of 77 in Fryazino, a suburb of Moscow suburb, where he lived alone in a small flat, surviving on a pension. He received no official recognition for his brave decision from his own country.
Stanislav Petrov’s story is told in the 2014 documentary ‘The Man Who Saved the World’, available on Amazon Prime, while ABLE ARCHER ’83 forms the background to the excellent German Cold War TV series 'Deutschland 83'. The dangers of automated systems controlling nuclear weapons are entertainingly illustrated in the 1983 techno-thriller 'WarGames'.
The Cold War Conversations podcast (www.coldwarconversations.com) has several episodes covering the events of 1983 and is highly recommended.
Article written for All about History magazine, September 2024
Comments