Declassified: The 1983 Nuclear War That Nearly Killed Us All

The 1983 nuclear war that nearly led to world war 3



Missed warning signs


National security archive reveals how close the world came to nuclear war in 1983
The declassified February 1990 report on the Soviet War Scare of 1983, published by the National Security Archive. The world was dangerously close to World War 3.

Queen’s speech

The threat of nuclear war was taken so seriously that the Queen of England had a speech prepared to read out to the citizens of the UK in the event that war broke out.

Queen's 1983 speech in which she prepared the nation for nuclear war

As NBC News reports,

The address, written in 1983, was made public for the first time Wednesday as part of a tranche of government documents that had been classified for 30 years.

Britain must “prepare itself to survive against great odds,” says the speech, drawn up by U.K. government officials as part of a training exercise designed to work through potential Cold War scenarios.

The recently declassified NATO and US Air Force documents show that the Able Archer 83 exercise included significant provocations, which could have been misperceived by Russia and used an excuse by them to launch a nuclear strike. reports:

“These included: a 170-flight, radio-silent air lift of 19,000 US soldiers to Europe during Autumn Forge 83, of which Able Archer 83 was a component; the shifting of commands from “Permanent War Headquarters to the Alternate War Headquarters;” the practice of “new nuclear weapons release procedures” including consultations with cells in Washington and London; and the “sensitive, political issue” of numerous “slips of the tongue” in which B-52 sorties were referred to as nuclear “strikes,” reads the report.

The PFIAB report also includes additional warming signs that the USSR could easily have misinterpreted, described as “special wrinkles.” These included “pre-exercise communications that notionally moved forces from normal readiness, through various alert phases, to General Alert;” and that “some US aircraft practiced the nuclear warhead handling procedures, including taxiing out of hangars carrying realistic-looking dummy warheads.”

It transpires that the Soviet Union did actually believe that the US was preparing for a real war and mobilized its military in response.

According to the National Security Archive summary of the document, “Warsaw Pact military reactions to Able Archer 83 were… ‘unparalleled in scale’ and included ‘transporting nuclear weapons from storage sites to delivery units by helicopter,’ suspension of all flight operations except intelligence collection flights from 4 to 10 November, ‘probably to have available as many aircraft as possible for combat.”

The US, as it turns out, knew nothing about these activities.

“The US fell victim to the inverse error and didn’t think the Soviets were serious about preparing for war, partly because they didn’t think the Soviets thought the US wanted to launch a nuclear first strike. As a result, US military and intelligence decision-makers didn’t believe that anything out of the ordinary was happening during Able Archer,” reads the manual.

Fortunately “the military officers in charge of the Able Archer exercise minimized this risk by doing nothing in the face of evidence that parts of the Soviet armed forces were moving to an unusual level of alert.”

The decision not to elevate the alert of Western military assets in response was made by Lieutenant General Leonard Perroots while serving as Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence, US Air Forces Europe.


It may just be that the unwitting inaction of the US military actually saved the world.