Exercise Able Archer 83

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A NATO command post exercise practising the procedures for authorising nuclear release in a deteriorating European conflict. It was an exercise of communications and command, involving no movement of weapons, but it used new procedures and unusually realistic message traffic, and it took place at the end of a year of extreme mutual suspicion. Soviet intelligence had been running Operation RYAN since 1981, a standing tasking to look for indicators of a surprise Western nuclear attack, and reporting from a KGB officer working for British intelligence indicated that parts of the Soviet apparatus read the exercise as possible cover for the real thing. The scale of the alarm is disputed by historians: a declassified American intelligence review completed in 1990 concluded that the danger had been greater than understood at the time, while more recent work using Warsaw Pact archives argues that Soviet military behaviour during the exercise does not show a leadership expecting war.

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