The War Scare That Wasn't: Able Archer 83 and the Myths of the Second Cold War
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2020-08
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<jats:p> Did the Cold War of the 1980s nearly turn hot? Much has been made of the November 1983 Able Archer 83 command-post exercise, which is often described as having nearly precipitated a nuclear war when paranoid Warsaw Pact policymakers suspected that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was using the exercise to launch a preemptive nuclear strike. This article challenges that narrative, using new evidence from the archives of the former Warsaw Pact countries. It shows that the much-touted intelligence effort to assess Western intentions and capabilities, Project RYaN, which supposedly triggered fears of a surprise attack, was nowhere near operational at the time of Able Archer 83. It also presents an account of the Pact's sanguine observations of Able Archer 83. In doing so, it advances key debates in the historiography of the late Cold War pertaining to the stability and durability of the nuclear peace. </jats:p>
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Miles, Simon (2020). The War Scare That Wasn't: Able Archer 83 and the Myths of the Second Cold War. Journal of Cold War Studies, 22(3). pp. 86–118. 10.1162/jcws_a_00952 Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/21419.
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Simon Miles
Simon Miles joined the faculty of the Sanford School of Public Policy in 2017. He is an expert on Russia and the Soviet Union whose research focuses primarily on Cold War diplomatic and military history and its relevance to our world today. His first book, Engaging the Evil Empire: Washington, Moscow and the Beginning of the End of the Cold War, published in 2020 by Cornell University Press, uses international archives — from both sides of the Iron Curtain — to explain how and why the US-Soviet rivalry underwent such unexpected and profound change in the 1980s that it has since become a textbook case of adversaries setting aside disagreements and cooperating. Simon is currently working on his second book, On Guard for Peace and Socialism: The Warsaw Pact, 1955–1991, under advance contract with Princeton University Press. Drawing on archival materials from all of the Pact’s eight former members, it examines the ways in which each conceived of and provided for their own security in the nuclear age, individually and as a politico-military alliance. It also holds a mirror up to US and NATO strategy during the Cold War: identifying the real motivations behind Soviet and Warsaw Pact behavior, disaggregating correlation and causation with strategy on the other side of the Iron Curtain. At Duke, Simon teaches courses on grand strategy, military and diplomatic history, Russia, and the Cold War.
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