Able Archer 83, global or theatre nuclear war?

Hi all, this is a very frequent topic of AH, I know. But many questions remain without an answer about the Able Archer 83, the Nato nuclear exercise that was misinterpreted by Soviets as a real attack-preparation in November 1983. Was it a real close-call for nuclear war?
Assume that it was. How the war could unfold? There are, at least, two possible courses of action in AH, if the Able Archer83 incident went wrong.
First: an all-out Soviet nuclear assault on Usa and Europe
Second: a limited Soviet nuclear assault on Germany and other Nato countries in Europe.
We have many indicators for both hypotesis.

All out nuclear strike:
  1. During the Able Archer crisis all Soviet nuclear forces were put on high alert. Cia detected (posthumously) Soviet nuclear forces in Europe put on war footing. But the Strategic Rocket Forces, also, were alerted as witnessed by, at least, one ICBM Soviet officer, colonel Tkachenko
  2. Soviet Northern Fleet was partially mobilized
  3. An all-out nuclear attack on Us central system was consistent with two decades of Soviet military doctrine for war against the West
  4. If you want to achieve a full victory, logically you have to destroy your main enemy (i.e.: Usa) before it could react
Limited nuclear strike:
  1. During the Able Archer crisis, Moscow was not evacuated. Preventive evacuation of Moscow and other main Soviet cities and relocation of main industrial targets, were necessary in case of global thermonuclear war
  2. Soviet boomers were not sent close to Us coasts; that move could have been necessary to achieve the surprise in a decapitating first strike
  3. Soviet doctrine for war against the West was revised by marshall Nikolay Ogarkov, since the late 70s: he prescribed the least possible use of nukes in case of war. See the "Seven Days to the River Rhine" exercise (1979): even France and UK were not targeted
  4. An all-out attack on Usa is a very risky (if not suicidal) business for Ussr. Andropov knew that a Us retaliation could have been inevitable and could have destroyed Soviet Union
What do you think about?
 

BlondieBC

Banned
Global. It may take a few hours but it escalates.

The old saying is right "If one flies, they all fly."
 
Nothing else? Nobody would try to discuss this topic? I think that the "inevitable escalation" dogma was not so inevitable. Maybe I'm the only one, here in this board.
 

CalBear

Moderator
Donor
Monthly Donor
Escalation WAS inevitable. The systems in use around the world more or less guaranteed it, even if the two top powers tried to throttle back.

Launch on warning was real, on both sides. It is a "capital M" Miracle that the world didn't end with moonrise that September evening in '83.

Every living person owes a debt of thanks to Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov.
 
Escalation WAS inevitable. The systems in use around the world more or less guaranteed it, even if the two top powers tried to throttle back.

Launch on warning was real, on both sides. It is a "capital M" Miracle that the world didn't end with moonrise that September evening in '83.

Every living person owes a debt of thanks to Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov.

Yeah. He truly IS one of the unsung heroes of modern history, IMO.

Anyway, if the Able Archer crisis DOES escalate, it may unfortunately become a lot worse than just a few measly nukes lobbed about here and there. While it is interesting to note that, as the OP pointed out, that Ogarkov did take Soviet planning in a rather unexpected direction, it's always still very much possible, IMO, that the Kremlin could get nervous enough to override the scheme and go on with a full-scale nuclear exchange in Europe, and NATO would almost certainly respond in kind. Even in a limited exchange scenario, the damage would almost certainly be quite extensive; Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Antwerp, Copenhagen, Kiel(shipyards), and London, as well as most military facilities would be gone for sure, along with many towns in both Germanys unlucky enough to be within the radius of the many, many, dozens(more like several hundred, at least) of tactical nukes that would be used by both of the Blocs. Long story short; any WarPac-NATO war in the '80s = wrecked Europe. :(
 
Global, and within hours if not minutes. A nuclear attack on US forces in Europe would have been deemed an attack on the United States itself and responded to accordingly. Moreover, I cannot imagine a Soviet nuclear attack upon fellow NATO members as not being deemed to warrant a proportional response from the United States.
 
Global, and within hours if not minutes. A nuclear attack on US forces in Europe would have been deemed an attack on the United States itself and responded to accordingly. Moreover, I cannot imagine a Soviet nuclear attack upon fellow NATO members as not being deemed to warrant a proportional response from the United States.

Sadly you've got a good point there. Just look at how we would react when our allies are attacked today: in the '80s, our response would have been far more forceful.....especially if it happened in Western or Northern Europe....or West Germany.
 
Both sides held that in the case of any war at all they launch immediately. So yeah, its global within minutes.

End result is the extinction of the human race. Nuclear war isn't about defeating your enemy, its about destroying them. You don't just hit the enemy nation, you hit their allies, you hit their resources, you hit every single location that could serve as a strategic point for your enemy once the shooting stops.

90% of humanity is dead by the end of the first year. The rest probably slowly follows over the next decade.
 
End result is the extinction of the human race.

I'm not so sure about that. There are only so many nuclear weapons: some won't function, a good many will be hitting targets that have already been struck, and others won't have the range to hit everywhere on the planet. The people using them will be trying to get the best value out of them they can, not cooperating in making careful grids to ensure every spot on the planet's surface gets hit.

Europe will get the worst working over in history, and I wouldn't be surprised if it was effectively uninhabitable. The USSR will also get absolutely hammered, and it wouldn't be a good day to be in North America either. But it's hard to believe either side would devote their precious weapons to turning the Brazilian rainforest into a parking lot, for example, and the reasons for nuking every single Pacific Island aren't exactly clear either.
It might be the end of our technological civilisation, but I'm not convinced humanity would be wiped out completely.
 
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The problem here is the opposing and ultimately incompatible mindsets. Soviet military leadership by the late 1970s had convinced itself that not only was a massive nuclear salvo across Western Europe the only effective way to kick off their march to the Rhine, it was also sure that the U.S. would see their actions as a simple theatre nuclear exchange and respond in kind without escalating to global. Thankfully, while the Politburo could be paranoid as hell about NATO trying to get the drop on them at any minute, they at least realized that there was no way in hell that the U.S. would see the launches as anything but an excuse to fling everything they had in Moscow's direction, and kept the generals reined in as a result.

As far as extinction versus survival of humanity goes, we'd be looking at a significant amount of target overlap, not to mention launch failures or misses, so I can't help but think we'd make it through to the other side. Even so, consider Einstein's predictions on how we'd fight World War IV...
 
Humanity would survive even a full-scale nuclear war, we're far too resilient and not everywhere would get nuked. Humanity survived Toba (barely) with far less ways to survive than it has now.
 
Humanity would survive even a full-scale nuclear war, we're far too resilient and not everywhere would get nuked. Humanity survived Toba (barely) with far less ways to survive than it has now.

Yes, but civilization would likely have been largely destroyed, and certainly, life as we knew it would have ended right there and then. :(
 
I don't know if humanity will extinguish or not after a global nuclear war. There is no experience (luckily!) nor a definitive agreement in physicist's community about that. But I really don't know if Soviets or Us really considered a global nuclear war. Both sides, since the 70s, tended to consider a "limited nuclear war" approach to warfare. The Carter doctrine considered it. The Reagan doctrine was the legal heir of the former. The Ogarkov doctrine tended to limit the nuclear war as much as possible. Is the global escalation (emanating from a European exchange) inevitable? Nuclear weapons are not a sort of automatic system. There is no Terminator's "Skynet". And there are no doomsday machines. Generals and presidents are human, after all.
 
I don't know if humanity will extinguish or not after a global nuclear war. There is no experience (luckily!) nor a definitive agreement in physicist's community about that. But I really don't know if Soviets or Us really considered a global nuclear war. Both sides, since the 70s, tended to consider a "limited nuclear war" approach to warfare. The Carter doctrine considered it. The Reagan doctrine was the legal heir of the former. The Ogarkov doctrine tended to limit the nuclear war as much as possible. Is the global escalation (emanating from a European exchange) inevitable? Nuclear weapons are not a sort of automatic system. There is no Terminator's "Skynet". And there are no doomsday machines. Generals and presidents are human, after all.

In practice, it really is a more or less automatic system, particularly with land based missiles, which took about 30 minutes from launch to reach their targets. You can scramble bombers into holding patterns and you can tell subs with SLBMs to hold for further orders, but land-based ICBMs are a use or lose proposition with very little time for reflection and decision-making. Once a possible attack is underway, you've got a scramble to get decision makers to a safe location while at the same time they have to decide how to respond. It's a prescription for chaotic decisionmaking under tremendous stress. The easiest course of action is to let the ICBMs fly. What we don't know about the era is what was prescribed and what options were available in the SIOP war plans of the time and how long it would have taken from launch to determine the actual targets of launched missiles. With MIRVed missiles, I suspect there was little time to figure out what the targets were -- which would make the pressure to simply launch most or all of the arsenal all the greater.
 
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