The exercise attracted public attention after a 1990 President's Intelligence Advisory Board report on the exercise was declassified and released by the National Security Archive in 2015. Historians such as Thomas Blanton, Director of the National Security Archive, and Tom Nichols, a professor at the Naval War College, have since argued that Able Archer 83 was one of the times when the world has come closest to nuclear war since the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. The declassification of related documents in 2021 lent additional credence to this notion. However, research by Simon Miles, an assistant professor of Public Policy and Russian and Eurasian Studies at Duke University’s Sanford School, has disputed that Able Archer 83 almost led to nuclear war.