(Contemporary cartoon of ABLE ARCHER. Image courtesy of The Straight Dope).
It is one of those strange exercise names, vaguely martial but not particularly threatening. There is much discussion about names attached to actual combat operations- no one would like to die for something with a silly name. Hence things like “EAGLE CLAW” (Iran) or “DESERT SHIELD/STORM). They sound much better, suitable for obituaries.
Anyway, I was going to launch off on the subject of the last cruise of the IJN Battleship Nagato this morning. It is a rousing tale of nautical adventure, cast against the mushroom cloud of the Bikini nuclear tests against an entire and quite real fleet.
But I can’t get to it just yet. The real world- or at least the one in which we are currently breathing- has intruded with some ominous portents. A Russian jet-liner that crashed in the Sinai with the loss of more than 200 passengers and crew shows signs that it may have been bombed. We are dispatching at least fifty special operations personnel to Syria, where they will advise the purported moderates in that struggle, even as elite Russian troops and jet are targeting the self-same forces.
It is a recipe fraught with the danger of miscalculation. It makes me a little nervous, because I have been to this movie before, though I did not know how close to the brink we had ventured.
I joined the Navy in the days of the Carter Administration. It was a strange time, and my service began as a sort of protest over the direction I thought the nation was traveling. I hated Communism then, as I despise it now, even though there has been a curious inversion of the roles of America and Russia, don’t you think? Vlad Putin, the old KGB officer masquerading as a conservative, and America masquerading as something else altogether.
We are in another of those directional times for the nation. When Ronald Reagan was elected to bring “morning in America,” we in uniform were heartened that the long malaise was turning around, and we were going to stop doing things like apologizing for building the Panama Canal, and ensure that our military could answer any challenge after the disintegration in material and discipline that impacted the force after the disaster of the American phase of the Indochina conflict.
The Iranians immediately released the hostages in Tehran. Things seemed to be looking up. Strategic forces were being upgraded, and plans were made to guarantee the nuclear umbrella really effectively covered Western Europe regardless of how many Shock Army units poured west through the Fulda Gap. The plan was to introduce Pershing intermediate-range nuclear-tipped missiles and Ground Launched Cruise Missiles (GLCMs) to England and other NATO bases as an effective deterrent that could quickly respond to Soviet aggression.
But of course, that is a knife that cuts two ways. And perception is everything in the nuclear business.
President Carter had been perceived as weak, though in fairness, it was he who began the military buildup credited to his successor. That weakness had contributed to Soviet adventurism in Afghanistan. Reagan was perceived as strong. But that was not the only perception that we did not understand. The periodical Business insider just published a 1990 report, formerly classified, that suggests the two Superpowers nearly lurched into an all-out nuclear exchange.
Here is a link to the article.
I commend it to your attention. This would be the subject of a grand doctoral thesis- contending one way or another about its accuracy. In this timeframe I was far away, but intensely focused on Soviet nuclear forces.
At the Pacific Fleet Ocean Surveillance Information Center at Pearl we were analyzing operations of the Russian boomers (SSBNs) and attack submarines (SSNs) the Operational Level response to what we saw as very bizarre conduct by the Soviets. They flooded the EASTPAC patrol areas with YANKEE-class ballistic missile submarines. They deployed a more advanced DELTA 3 boomer to the waters south of Baja.
(DELTA III SSBN. Photo USN).
This was highly unusual- the more capable platforms were normally retained for patrols in the Bastion area of the Sea of Okhotsk, behind the barrier Kuril Island chain. We had no idea why one of the newest subs they had would be so near, and in such an unusual operating area. It took one of the really smart guys in Washington to tell us the probable reason.
Nuclear doctrine at the time held that unambiguous indications of hostile launch (“dual phenomenology”) had to come from two sources before the President would authorize a response- or the end of the world (as we knew it, anyway).
The Washingtonian said that a ripple-fire launch from south of Baja would not only avoid some of our warning sensors, but with a depressed trajectory flight path, take out San Diego, LA, San Francisco and the boomer base in the Seattle area in very short order- before anyone could do anything about it.
There was reportedly a similar patrol in the Caribbean, with the same threat to the Eastern Seaboard.
(Soviet VICTOR III SSN. Photo USN).
It got stranger. A Soviet surface action group made a clockwise parade around the East Coast. Later, in 1984, the Soviet Pacific Fleet dispatched three VICTOR-III attack subs in a wolf-pack to an area off Cape Flattery, WA, presumably to be in a position to hazard our Ohio-Class boomers based in Puget Sound.
There also was lower echelon (but still disturbing) activity by Russian intelligence ships around Hawaii. Research ships with mini-submarines were conducting operations near submarine cables (as they are again today) and strange operations by Bloc merchant ships in Canadian ports made us confident that something was up about our SSBN deployments being targets of HUMINT collection.
We were amazed. They essentially had just thrown away the remaining YANKEE reactor hours, rendering a component of their nuclear reserve impotent. There were those in our center who were making the case that it was a matter of “use it or lose it.”
We were rational, though, and the smart money thought that it was to punish us for the Pershing IRBM deployments to Europe, forcing us to expend operating funds and disrupt our schedules. A sort of bargaining chip to get the missiles pulled out of Europe.
But we did not consider the essential component of the issue. If the Russians already knew what we did not- that their system was falling apart- they were in an increasingly impossible position.
Action before it became too late might have been a reasonable option.
Blunt and assertive Ronald Reagan may have just scared the shit out of them to the extent that they prepared for the end of the world. As the report notes, it was the ineptitude and American failure to understand how desperate the situation was becoming for the Soviet Leadership that saved us all.
And then there was the matter of the curious thing the dog did in the night. In April and May of 1983, the US Navy sent forty warships, including submarines and three aircraft carriers to conduct a Fleet Exercise in the Northwest Pacific. We were intently monitoring the response from the Kamchatka Peninsula at the FOSIC and were puzzled when nothing happened. Admiral “Sly Bob” Foley, PACFLT commander at the time, decided to drive the big decks closer toward the boomer base at Petropavlovsk.
It looked pretty provocative to us. How could the Soviets know we intended nothing more than a massive show of force? In the end, as the carriers wheeled around to return to port, a single Soviet SSN showed its sail above the water in farewell. “Poor seamanship,” sniffed one of the submariners on the staff. I wasn’t so sure. I thought they might have just been saying good-bye.
ABLE ARCHER followed in November of 1983, and that is why they call 1983 the “most dangerous year.”
The new report suggests we almost went to war over it, without ever intending to do so. But we also know that the Walker Spy Ring had provided the Soviets with the codes that enabled them to read our messages almost as fast as we did. We have talked about what the Code Breakers did to the Japanese at Coral Sea and Midway. The Russians had the same insight into what we were doing, and it did not come to an end fully until Walker and Whitworth were jailed in 1984.
It might be the case that the Kremlin knew we were not going to hit them because they did not see the necessary indications in our internal communications that would have been needed to support a first strike.
(Traitor John Anthony Walker. RIP. Photo DoJ).
I never in this life would have dreamed I would have said it, but thank God for the ineptitude of the American intelligence community, and for the treason of John Walker. The two just might have combined to prevent Armageddon.
Nor would I have ever imagined that I would wax a little nostalgic for an enemy that had self-interest in this world. I do not care for enemies who believe their reward is in the next. I like it here just fine.
Copyright 2015 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303