How 1983 war games took world to brink of nuclear armageddon – and the US didn’t realise

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NATO armoured vehicles move through a village during the 1983 war games that had Moscow convinced the US was poised to launch a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union. Photo: National Security Archive

Published: 10:00am, 27 Oct 2015Updated: 10:00am, 27 Oct 2015

NATO war games in 1983 inadvertently put the West on the brink of nuclear war with the Soviet Union, and US officials underestimated the seriousness of the situation, according to a newly declassified document.

The incident came during a period historians now refer to as the “war scare” at the height of the Cold War, when the Soviet Union was concerned about a sudden and decisive nuclear attack from the United States and its NATO allies.

During this time, in November 1983, NATO conducted a 10-day training exercise called Able Archer that involved NATO forces across Western Europe.

US President Ronald Reagan and Soviet counterpart Yuri Andropov were Time magazine's Men of the Year in 1983; the escalating tensions between Washington and Moscow were well appreciated at the time, but just how close the world came to nuclear war was not. Photo: Time

According to a top-secret intelligence review conducted in 1990 and declassified this month, the Kremlin reacted with “abnormal” military and intelligence measures.

It namely placed Soviet air forces in Germany and Poland on heightened alert and carried out extra reconnaissance flights.

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