The Brink

President Reagan and the Nuclear War Scare of 1983

Marc Ambinder

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781476760391
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

"An informative and often enthralling book…in the appealing style of Tom Clancy" ( Kirkus Reviews ) about the 1983 war game that triggered a tense, brittle period of nuclear brinkmanship between the United States and the former Soviet Union. What happened in 1983 to make the Soviet Union so afraid of a potential nuclear strike from the United States that they sent mobile ICBMs (intercontinental ballistic missiles) into the field, placing them on a three-minute alertMarc Ambinder explains the anxious period between the United States and the Soviet Union from 1982 to 1984, with the "Able Archer '83" war game at the center of the tension. With astonishing and clarifying new details, he recounts the scary series of the close encounters that tested the limits of ordinary humans and powerful leaders alike. Ambinder provides a comprehensive and chilling account of the nuclear command and control process, from intelligence warnings to the composition of the nuclear codes themselves. And he affords glimpses into the secret world of a preemptive electronic attack that scared the Soviet Union into action. Ambinder's account reads like a thriller, recounting the spy-versus-spy games that kept both countries—and the world—in check.From geopolitics in Moscow and Washington, to sweat-caked soldiers fighting in the trenches of the Cold War, to high-stakes war games across NATO and the Warsaw Pact, "Ambinder's account of a serious threat of global annihilation…is spellbinding…a masterpiece of recent history" ( Publishers Weekly, starred review). The Brink serves as the definitive intelligence, nuclear, and national security history of one of the most precarious times in recent memory and "shows the consequences of nuclear buildups, sometimes-careless language, and nervous leaders. Now, more than ever, those consequences matter" ( USA TODAY ).

PART I

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DECAPITATION

CHAPTER 1

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Détente’s Rise and Fall

IN THE EARLY 1970S, COLONEL General Andrei Danilevich, then in the research of the Soviet General Staff (the equivalent to the US Joint Chiefs of Staff), had overseen the Soviets’ first large-scale quantitative and computer assessment of a nuclear war. In cold, hard numbers, in the best of circumstances:

• The Soviet military would be virtually powerless after a first strike.

• At least 80 million Soviet citizens would be dead.

• It would be virtually impossible to quickly rebuild and reconstitute critical infrastructure because more than 80 percent of the country’s heavy industry would be destroyed.

• Europe would be a nuclear wasteland for years.

Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev, the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, watched this happen. He was “visibly terrified,” Danilevich remembered.

During the exercise, three launches of ICBMs with dummy warheads were scheduled.

To enhance realism, Brezhnev was given an actual button to push.

Three years before this exercise, in June 1973, Brezhnev had visited the White House. The enduring image from the summit was that of a Russian premiere playfully whispering into Richard Nixon’s ear. Brezhnev was ebullient that day. Nixon was his equal. The American president’s secret friendly gestures to China had given the Kremlin a chance to counter with open overtures to the United States, and so, Nixon and Brezhnev had agreed in May 1972 to the first treaty that limited the use of strategic weapons in the nuclear age: the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT).

They had also signed a measure to limit the development of defenses against nuclear missile attacks, reasoning that if mutual vulnerability were ratified into the framework for further reductions, the actual advent of war would be a remote possibility at best.¹

Just a few months after Brezhnev returned to Russia, détente was tested by reality.

Israel had armed its Jericho missiles with nuclear weapons, desperate to force a reluctant Nixon to reprovision their military after a preemptive attack by Syria and Egypt. The blackmail worked, and the United States provided guns, ammunition, and intelligence that allowed Israel to save itself. Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger had worried that US involvement in this conflict would give cause for oil-producing countries to withhold supplies as a bargaining chip, which would push the US to menace those countries, which would spark a heated response from the Soviet Union.

And that, they believed, would threaten the vitality of détente. After Israeli forces started to tighten the noose around Egypt’s Third Army, despite the US having promised the Soviets Israel would not do so, Egypt asked for, and obtained, direct assistance from Moscow. But the Soviets decided to go further. They readied their bomber squadrons in Moscow and made sure that the US knew about it. A heavily fortified column of Soviet ships carrying armaments moved into the narrow slit of water between Black Sea and the Mediterranean.² On October 24, a telegram from Brezhnev announced his intention to intervene unless a ceasefire was brokered immediately. Nixon had fallen asleep, possibly drunk.³ (Watergate was in its end game. He had just fired the special prosecutor he had earlier appointed to absolve himself.)

In the Situation Room, the National Security Council deliberated in Nixon’s absence; after a discussion that included the possibility that this cascading crisis could lead to global war, the council decided to raise the Defense Condition (DEFCON) level to 3, around midnight. ICBM missileers in their silos across the Midwestern United States strapped themselves into chairs to brace for incoming nuclear explosions.⁴ The Soviets noticed immediately, because the message (the length of a tweet, as is the launch order) was transmitted over an unsecured telephone network called the PAS (Primary Alerting System) that used commercial landlines, which they could easily monitor.⁵ Victor Israelyan, a senior minister at the time, recalls that Yuri Andropov, then the chairman of the KGB, recommended raising the Soviet alert status. The Defense Minister, Andrei Grechko, wanted to move 70,000 troops toward the battlefield. “The participants realized that the central issue was whether the Soviet Union was prepared to confront the US and engage in a large-scale war.” Fortunately, the Soviets decided not to respond at all, assuming that it was Nixon’s jitters and penchant for provocative action that had generated the American change in nuclear status.⁶

It later emerged that the Soviets could not muster the same type of public display that accompanied the DEFCON changes. They were, as Israelyan said, “unprepared.” The crisis abated because one side chose not to act (or simply could not).

But the president of the United States was barely involved in these decisions. As his Watergate crisis grew, Nixon’s new Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger, worried that Nixon was increasingly paranoid and self-protective, almost childlike at times, and not in the right frame of mind to make military decisions. He secretly investigated what would need to happen if a president wanted to order US troops to fortify Washington so that he could keep himself in office. Schlesinger kept a gimlet eye on the Commandant of the Marine Corps, General Robert D. Cushman Jr., a Nixon loyalist who had helped the CIA meddle in domestic politics. He ordered the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to notify him if Nixon or anyone else at the White House ordered any major military action; Schlesinger had no confidence that he would be informed beforehand.⁷ In essence, Schlesinger prepared an unconstitutional counter-coup against a possible hypothetical unconstitutional coup from the duly elected president. This nuclear crisis had little to do with direct geopolitical conflict escalation and everything to do with messy domestic politics and human psychology. Brezhnev was in the middle of it. It scared him.

Danilevich stood beside the Soviet leader and watched him contemplate the decision to push the button.

Visibly shaking, and pale, Brezhnev turned toward the head of his general staff, and asked, for clarification: would there be any real-world consequences?

“Andrei Antonovich, are you sure this is just an exercise?”

His hands, Danilevich remembered, trembled.⁸

That was the first and last time that Brezhnev would participate in a nuclear exercise. His health was in decline. He had recurring bouts with amnesia and forgetfulness after a massive heart attack in 1976. The Politburo barely functioned then, consisting of a cadre of central committee members who were, in the words of one Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) analyst, “doting, ineffectual sycophants.” Many were old; some were senile. But they did not force Brezhnev to relinquish power after he ceased to function as an effective president because his pliability was seen as much less threatening to the ruling oligarchy than new blood would be.⁹

Into this leadership vacuum stepped four ambitious, canny men. Together, they ruled the country’s military, intelligence, and nuclear institutions during the next ten years.

Andrei Gromyko was the acerbic, hard-headed minister of state, in office since 1957. Dmitry Ustinov was the chief of the central committee’s military and defense policy committee and the patron of the Soviet defense industry. Yuri Andropov was the chairman of the KGB, responsible for intelligence gathering at home and abroad. But most interesting, for our purposes, was Nikolai Vasilyevich Ogarkov, by 1977 the chief of the General Staff, the Soviet equivalent of the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs.

Though the massive Soviet state drifted for years, plodding with ponderous but powerful momentum in whatever direction compromises among powerful organizational and bureaucratic interests might take it, it had a nuclear vector. Gromyko and others in the Politburo believed that the future of the Soviet Union lay in the application of détente across all parts of its empire. The outspoken Ogarkov chafed under the political constraints imposed upon him by both the tone and substance of Brezhnev’s negotiations with the Americans.¹⁰ He believed that the 1972 Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT) had consigned the Soviet nuclear deterrent to history because it so severely limited the Soviet ability to catch up with American missile technology. He accused the US and NATO, and (remarkably) “NATO apologists” within the Politburo of seeking to undermine the principles of détente by changing the rules midstream: the US and NATO would not consider cruise missiles based in Europe to be “strategic” weapons but had insisted that the new generation of supersonic Soviet fighter bombers be so designated, regardless of what kind of armament they carried or how long they could stay airborne without refueling.¹¹

In 1974, at Vladivostok, the United States and the Soviet Union had essentially agreed to table those issues, capping the number of strategic bomb delivery vehicles—subs, missiles, bombers—at 2,400 each, with 1,320 weapons allowed to contain multiple warheads. Because the size and reach of the Soviet ICBM force was the foundation of its deterrent, the Soviets would reject proposals that would chop the numbers of deployed ICBMs in any form without extracting qualitatively equivalent concessions from the United States. The 1979 SALT II treaty proposals, which Gromyko, Ustinov, and Brezhnev supported, would have allowed the Soviets to retain their numerical edge in the ICBM forces, but would, in just about every other arena, kneecap the development of nuclear technology. It would cap the number of “delivery vehicles” at 2,250. But SALT II never went into effect; the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan convinced President Carter to pull the treaty from its probable ratification by the US Senate. The US would adhere to its limits, grudgingly; it meant, for certain, that the future of nuclear warheads would be to pack more on one missile—to MIRV them up. (MIRV stood for Multiple Independently Targetable Reentry Vehicle.) “A lot of people looked at arms control as a way to get more nuclear weapons, rather than fewer nuclear weapons,” an American defense analyst said.¹²

Ogarkov understood well that he was fighting a rear-guard battle to modernize the Soviet military. His solution, which had won the backing of the General Staff by the time Reagan was inaugurated, was to shift the entire focus of the Soviet defense posture away from nuclear conflict and toward the development of a massive, effective, technologically agile conventional force. Ogarkov, too, had concluded that a nuclear war might be survivable. He believed that the doctrine of mutually assured destruction—MAD—had an expiration date, particularly as both empires developed the capacity to carry out swift, surgical, surprise decapitation strikes against the other. Ogarkov believed that both the US and the Soviet Union had interlocking interests that might lock them into a confrontation in a theatre, or region, without letting it spill over onto the rest of the globe—and the European continent would be ground zero.¹³

The Soviets believed that the US Department of Defense was always on the prowl for ways to get ahead of the politicians who ran it, in much the same way as the Soviet military had developed a momentum of its own within the tighter confines of its own political system. For all intents and purposes, the Soviets had determined that both sides had real and visible vulnerabilities, intractable weaknesses that made the prospect of losing a nuclear exchange more viable. The Soviets worried, for example, that their own political system of central control made it easier for the US to plan a decapitation strike.¹⁴

As the arms race accelerated, Soviet war plans evolved. No longer did they anticipate responding to a first strike from the US. Instead, all plans for major wars assumed that the Soviets would find a way to attack first, because, quite simply, the side that did attack first would have the best chance to win.¹⁵ The Soviets would pound their chests and bluff, when they had to, to prevent the US from assuming that it had achieved strategic superiority. Priority would be given toward sabotage of the nuclear command and control system and then toward aggressive espionage, not only to steal US secrets but to find ways of discrediting US strategic doctrine as well. Soviets would stress their advantages: silo hardness, throw weight (heavy weapons), mobility, leadership continuity and survivability.¹⁶ Skepticism about limited nuclear strikes—for the US, limited meant “in Europe” and to the Soviets, Europe was home—advances in silo hardening and of multiple warheads on missiles—had persuaded the general staff to conclude that the enemy would have enough nuclear weapons left after a first strike to retaliate.¹⁷ Like the US, the General Staff also began to develop plans to launch nuclear weapons on warning—a “retaliatory meeting strike” is what they called it. But the technology to accurately detect missiles and their trajectories didn’t exist for the Soviets in the 1970s.¹⁸ The system was glitchy. Only human spies and signals could determine whether the US was about to strike. This was one reason why more emphasis was placed on human intelligence until Soviet satellite and technical intelligence technology caught up with the rest.

Marshal Ogarkov and his budding revolution found resistance in several corners. Ustinov was responsible to the politicians, who were overwhelmingly concerned with nuclear politics and had short-term imaginations.¹⁹ The politicians, even in the Soviet Union, were accountable to some degree to the Soviet populace, whose support was essential. The Soviets had their guns versus butter debate. too. Revolutionizing the Soviet military would take a lot of money away from economic development.²⁰ The Russian military engineer Viktor Kalashnikov had foreseen early in the Cold War that the United States would try to force the Soviet Union to commit the maximum resources to nuclear and other weapons in order to squeeze its economy. When Ogarkov became the chief of the general staff, the Soviet Union was committing 60 percent to 70 percent of its industry to defense needs, and its economy was fragile. Real GDP declined yearly.

By the late 1970s, the Soviets determined tha...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Author’s Note on Sources and Quotations
• Cast of Characters
• Major Acronyms and Programs
• Prologue
• Introduction
• Part I: Decapitation
• Part II: To the Brink
• Part III: Endgame(s)
• Epilogue
• Postscript
• Photographs
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Sources
• Select Bibliography
• Notes
• Index
• Copyright