Could the Able Archer exercise have lead to nuclear war?

I strongly disagree.
Since 5 missiles are not going to do significant damage to the CCCP retaliation possibility, the Kremlin boys would surely have waited for further confirmations


I'm going to quote Reagan here, because in this instance he's completely right.

Ronald Reagan said:
"We had many contingency plans for responding to a nuclear attack. But everything would happen so fast that I wondered how much planning or reason could be applied in such a crisis… Six minutes to decide how to respond to a blip on a radar scope and decide whether to unleash Armageddon! How could anyone apply reason at a time like that?"
 
There is a whole branch of the theory of games (a mathematical branch used to plan strategical initiatives) based on the concept of slow-paced nuclear war.
Common consensus between the experts is that slow pace distruction (keeping most of enemy cities/industrial complex intact, since they are de-facto hostages) it is far more probable than sudden armageddon

Reagan comment applied to an all out attack, not to a 5-missiles one
 

Bearcat

Banned
Yeah, if he had simply followed instructions instead of using his head and ignoring the repeated warnings, given the general state of paranoia at the higher levels of Soviet government, the situation would quite likely have degenerated. The computer kept saying that launches had been detected, and he disabled the alarm every time.

BTW, does anyone know what the strategic plans were regarding China in the USSR and the US as of 1983? Would the Soviets have included it in their first strike "just in case", or would they have left it alone to focus on the US and Western Europe? Conversely, with over a decade's worth of Sino-American rapprochement, would it have been featured in the US war plans in case of nuclear war against the USSR?

Given that the US had some listening posts in China for ELINT by this time, the temptation would have been very strong for the Soviets to see China as the US's strategic partner in any war.

IMHO, it could have gone either way, depending on just how massive the exchange with the US ends up being. If it progresses to most of the ICBMs flying, I sincerely doubt the USSR will choose to leave an intact China on their border. :(
 
Able Archer demonstrated how good the Soviets were at gathering intelligence from the West, but also how bad they were at analysing it and how they saw it through the prism of their own assumptions and ideology.
A perfect example is that the KGB in London noticed that the lights at the MoD were burning late into the night. Moscow assumed this meant that a war was being planned, in fact the lights were left on to allow the cleaners to do their jobs, something that could have been easily found out. :D
 
I think the Soviets would probably include Chinese targets in the event of an all-out nuclear exchange; they were very much in the American camp, Cold-War-wise by then, weren't they? Although I'm sure the US kept their options open...

(I vaguely remember some not-really-funny anecdote from the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, when Kennedy found out that the SIOP plan for a full-on exchange included all sorts of targets in China, who weren't even involved in the crisis. Basically, the DoD and SAC told him that it'd be too difficult to redraw the plan at this short notice, and besides they were all commies anyway... :()

As regards a TL based on an early-80s nuclear war, I agree it'd probably end up being...short... However, I remember in Threads and The Day After, they did continue the stories after the actual exchange, showed martial law etc being put into place. Threads, in particular, showed the effects of the war for years afterwards, with most of the survivors being rounded up and put into work camps, iirc, and it was implied that this eventually became a new form of feudalism. In the last part, which I think was set twenty years after the war, the population of the UK was the same as it had been in 1400, and the survivors were just barely surviving (not for very much longer, perhaps) in a dark, cold world, nearly all of them with either cancer or severe birth defects. Was even this portrayal wildly optimistic, though, I wonder?
 
This thread inspired me to make this response and only this response:


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