The Soviet Union and NATO were on the verge of nuclear war after the latter carried out an important military exercise in Central Europe in the 1983.
This is what emerges from the American declassified documents in the public domain under the Freedom of Information Act.
The "Able Archer" operation and the Soviet response
The United States and NATO, in the 1983, mobilized 40 thousand troops throughout Western Europe. The exercise, coordinated by encrypted communication systems, foresaw a scenario in which the Blue (NATO) forces ran in defense of the allies after sending orange forces (Warsaw Pact countries) to Yugoslavia following political unrest.
Orange forces - according to the wargame - would quickly invade Finland, Norway and eventually Greece. Conventional war quickly resulted in a conflict with chemical and nuclear weapons.
So far nothing strange. The episode has always been known and even in the same year, a successful film was released with a very young Matthew Broderick, "Wargames: war games", inspired by the exercise of NATO.
But the unclassified documents show that the Soviet Union probably exchanged NATO's exercise as a prelude to war. The Kremlin in fact, in response to "Able Archer", deployed a dozen nuclear bombers in eastern Germany and Poland, loaded the targets on 70 missiles SS-20 (5.500 km range, Mirv warhead: perhaps the best Union ballistic missile Soviet) and deployed three ballistic Typhoon-class submarines under the Arctic ice cap, in order to avoid NATO radar detection in the case of 'First' or 'Second Strike'.
A single Typhoon class submarine, launching all twenty SS-N-20 Sturgeon missiles transported, could pulverize a quarter of the world's population.
In the declassified documents, a report drawn up by the British secret services emerges a few days after the end of the exercise.
We cannot rule out the possibility - reads the report - that some Soviet officials / officials may have misunderstood 'Able Archer 83' as a prelude to a Western nuclear attack.
It is a common opinion that the "Able Archer" exercise could have unintentionally triggered the third world war, with nuclear attack capability and a much greater response to the Cuba crisis in the 1962.
Franco Iacch
