ADULT- Idiots:(0) World:(2) ARE WE DUMB OR WHAT!
MISSED TOTAL DESTRUCTION BY...
THAT MUCH!
THE WORLD came much, much closer to a nuclear conflict in the final stages of the Cold War than was previously thought, according to evidence from former Soviet bloc archives.

Kremlin was poised to launch nuclear strike…

The Kremlin was so alarmed by Ronald Reagan's plans for the Strategic Defence Initiative (SDI) - "Star Wars" - and his deployment of cruise missiles in Europe during the early 1980s that it planned a pre-emptive nuclear strike against Britain and other American allies.
Documents unearthed in former East German military archives reveal the depth of Soviet paranoia at the hawkish stance of Reagan and Margaret Thatcher during the early 1980s in the wake of Russian military success in Afghanistan.
Among the papers are minutes from a meeting of the Warsaw Pact military committee in April 1983 at which Soviet generals warned that there was a real possibility of nuclear conflict. "They said they were heading for war," said Beatrice Heuser, a military historian from King's College, London, who has seen the documents. "It had moved beyond cold war rhetoric."
The minutes are from a series of volumes called the War Diaries. The grey-bound documents were so secret that East German generals interviewed by Heuser and other researchers from King's College were not aware of their existence.
The evidence is expected to feature in a landmark documentary from the makers of the 1970s series The World at War, the definitive small-screen account of the second world war. Cold War is produced by Sir Jeremy Isaacs and financed by Ted Turner, the billionaire founder of CNN. The researchers from King's College are acting as consultants. It will be first screened on the BBC.
The television series has been in production for several years and draws on eyewitness accounts from the Yalta conference of 1945 to the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989. Interviewees include former American presidents George Bush and Jimmy Carter. Isaacs hopes to secure the co-operation of Baroness Thatcher.
The East German papers reveal how in November 1983, as peace protesters broke into the Greenham Common military base where the Americans stationed cruise missiles, the Soviet military was planning a possible strike. It appears that the world was in fact closer to nuclear war on November 2, 1983 than during the Cuban missile crisis.
Barely 800 miles from London, England aircraft ready to deliver nuclear strikes were placed on standby at East German air bases. To understand the nature of these times it is critical to remember than from the early 1970s on, the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) was the global reality. The Nuclear forces of each superpower had to be launched on warning of attack. This was because it was assumed that if the retaliating side took too long make up its mind and get its missiles launched, the other side might achieve a pre-emptive nuclear strike and destroy the capability of the other side to effectively respond.
With this hair-trigger policy there were only a few minutes available to decide the fate of civilization. The window of response was in fact between 15 and 20 minutes — and out of that time, you need to subtract the time needed to communicate commands, perform the launch sequences, launch aircraft and get the missiles clear of the blast zone. Going to war wasn't decided after discussion, consultation with experts and allies — and after careful review of many facts… it had to be decided in about the amount of time it takes to have a cigarette break — and by a handful of people!
On November 9, KGB stations in Europe were warned that American bases had been put on alert status. The KGB suspected that a NATO exercise, Able Archer '83, could be in fact be a full-scale nuclear assault.
The cold war had reached boiling point. Before November, there had been signs of mounting tension. In 1981, Leonid Brezhnev, then Soviet president, put his intelligence services on an unprecedented state of alert because of concern about SDI/Star Wars and inflamed anti-communist rhetoric in the West, including the famous misbroadcast "evil empire speech by Reagan. Fear on both sides reached new heights when Soviet air defence forces shot down a Korean airliner, KAL-007, in September. Initially the KGB maintained this was a Western spy plane and ordered that all Soviet bases be secured against imminent Western attack. On September 8, Andrei Gromyko, the Soviet foreign minister, warned: "The world situation is now slipping towards a very dangerous situation." Few, until now, knew just how dangerous.
According to Heuser, Thatcher was warned by MI6 that the game of brinkmanship in late 1983 risked a disastrous outcome. The American deployment of cruise missiles was intended to give NATO the opportunity of fighting a limited nuclear war in Europe, rather than risk an immediate escalation to global destruction. But, according to Heuser, it was interpreted in Moscow as evidence of a more belligerent strategy which implied that the West believed it could win a nuclear exchange. In the spring of 1984, Thatcher convinced Reagan that he had to defuse the crisis and open meaningful talks with Moscow about arms limitation.
According to some historians, the real threat of war exceeded that of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis in which Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet president, ordered the deployment of between 80 and 85 nuclear warheads on the island. At that time the US leaders had a high-placed internal spy in Soviet missile command and were very well informed of the fact that the Soviets wouldn't have a reliable nuclear attack force with which to act. This therefore allowed the Americans to force the Soviets to back down. This type of insider knowledge didn't exist on November 2, 1983.
The Able Archer '83 test was intended to exercise the complete chain of command, the code verification and validation right through to the launch sequence — with the purpose of conducting and "end-to-end" test all the sufficient and necessary orders, steps and events from initiation to arming and firing nuclear weapons systems. In much the same way as when Orson Welles and the Mercury Theater broadcast H. G. Wells' War of the Worlds, Soviet missile command was unsure if this was in fact an attack in the making and only the failure to complete the final launch on the Soviet side is believed to have prevented the start of World War III. Professor Lawrence Freedman, professor of war studies at King's College, said that the events of November 1983 would force a total reinterpretation of the true threat to global peace posed during the closing years of the cold war.
Click here to play the actual atomic war emergency broadcast message which was prepared by Canadian Defense Department for broadcast.