Eric Schlosser - Command and Control

On June 12, 1982, perhaps three quarters of a million people gathered in New York’s Central Park, demanding a different kind of freeze — a worldwide halt to the production of nuclear weapons. The New York Times called it “the largest political demonstration in American history.” The Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign gained the support of mainstream groups like the U.S. Conference of Mayors, the National Council of Churches, and the Roman Catholic Church. Unlike the European antinuclear movement, it called upon both the United States and the Soviet Union to disarm. But the campaign threatened the Reagan administration’s strategic modernization plans, and opponents of the freeze claimed that it was being orchestrated by “KGB leaders” and “Marxist leaning 60’s leftovers.” By the end of 1982, about 70 percent of the American people supported a nuclear freeze. And more than half worried that Reagan might involve the United States in a nuclear war.

NINETEEN EIGHTY-THREE PROVED to be one of the most dangerous years of the Cold War. The new leader of the Soviet Union, Yuri Andropov, was old, paranoid, physically ill, and staunchly anti-American. A former head of the KGB, Andropov had for many years played a leading role in the suppression of dissent throughout the Soviet bloc. The election of Ronald Reagan persuaded him that the United States might seek to launch a first strike. The KGB began an intensive, worldwide effort to detect American preparations for a surprise attack, code-named Operation RYAN. Andropov’s concerns were heightened by the Reagan administration’s top secret psychological warfare program, designed to spook and confuse the Kremlin. American naval exercises were staged without warning near important military bases along the Soviet coastline; SAC bombers entered Soviet airspace and then left it, testing the air defenses. The Soviet Union played its own version of the game, keeping half a dozen ballistic-missile submarines off the coast of the United States.

On March 8, 1983, at the annual convention of the National Association of Evangelicals, President Reagan called the Soviet Union “the focus of evil in the modern world… an evil empire.” Two weeks later, Reagan announced his Strategic Defense Initiative, soon known as Star Wars, a long-range plan to defend the United States by shooting down enemy missiles from outer space. The technology necessary for such a system did not yet exist — and Reagan acknowledged that it might not exist for another ten or twenty years. But Star Wars deepened the Kremlin’s fears of a first strike. An American missile defense system was unlikely to be effective against an all-out Soviet attack. It might, however, prove useful in destroying any Soviet missiles that survived an American first strike. Andropov strongly criticized the plan and warned that it would start a new arms race. “Engaging in this is not just irresponsible,” Andropov said. “It is insane.”

The Pershing II missiles were supposed to arrive in West Germany at the end of November, and anxieties about nuclear war increased throughout Europe as the date approached. On the evening of September 1, Soviet fighter planes shot down a civilian airliner, Korean Airlines Flight 007, killing all 269 of its passengers. The Boeing 747 had accidentally strayed into Soviet airspace, not far from a missile test site, and the airliner was mistaken for an American reconnaissance plane. The Kremlin denied that it had anything to do with the tragedy — until the United States released audio recordings of Soviet pilots being ordered to shoot down the plane. President Reagan called the attack “an act of barbarism” and a “crime against humanity [that] must never be forgotten.”

A few weeks later alarms went off in an air defense bunker south of Moscow. A Soviet early-warning satellite had detected five Minuteman missiles approaching from the United States. The commanding officer on duty, Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov, tried to make sense of the warning. An American first strike would surely involve more than five missiles — but perhaps this was merely the first wave. The Soviet general staff was alerted, and it was Petrov’s job to advise them whether the missile attack was real. Any retaliation would have to be ordered soon. Petrov decided it was a false alarm. An investigation later found that the missile launches spotted by the Soviet satellite were actually rays of sunlight reflected off clouds.

During the third week of October, two million people in Europe joined protests against the introduction of Pershing II missiles — and a team of Army Rangers, Navy Seals, and U.S. Marines led an invasion of Grenada, a small island in the Caribbean. The invasion had ostensibly been launched to protect the lives of American citizens and restore order amid the aftermath of a military coup. It also achieved another goal: the overthrow of a Communist regime backed by the Soviet Union and Cuba. Nineteen American soldiers, twenty-five Cubans, and forty-five Grenadians were killed in the fighting. The Soviet Union condemned Operation Urgent Fury as a violation of international law. But it was enormously popular in the United States, boosting President Reagan’s image as a strong, decisive leader. A long time had passed since Americans had been able to celebrate a military victory.

The invasion of Grenada, however, revealed a number of serious problems with the World Wide Military Command and Control System. The Army’s radio equipment proved to be incompatible with that of the Navy and the Marines. According to a Pentagon report, at one point during the fighting, unable to contact the Navy for fire support, “a frustrated Army officer used his AT&T credit card on an ordinary pay telephone to call Ft. Bragg, NC [the headquarters of the 82nd Airborne Division] to have them relay his request.”

The week after the invasion, NATO staged a command-and-control exercise, Able Archer 83. It included a practice drill for NATO’s defense ministers, simulating the procedures to authorize the use of nuclear weapons. The KGB thought that Able Archer 83 might be a cover for a surprise attack on the Soviet Union. The timing of such an attack — a few weeks before the arrival of the Pershing IIs — seemed illogical. Nevertheless, “the KGB concluded that American forces had been placed on alert,” a Soviet agent later wrote, “and might even have begun the countdown to war.” A number of the Soviet Union’s own war plans called for using military exercises as a cover for a surprise attack on Western Europe. While NATO played its war game, Soviet aircraft in Poland and East Germany prepared to counterattack. Able Archer 83 ended uneventfully on November 11 — and NATO’s defense ministers were totally unaware that their command-and-control drill had been mistaken for the start of a third world war.

On the evening of November 20, American fears of nuclear war reached their peak, as ABC broadcast The Day After , a made-for-television movie. Directed by Nicholas Meyer, starring Jason Robards, and set in Lawrence, Kansas, the film combined melodrama with a calm, almost documentary account of how the world might end in 1983. Some of the most powerful images in The Day After had nothing to do with mushroom clouds, radiation sickness, or the rubble of a major American city. When Minuteman missiles first appear above Kansas, launched from rural silos there and rising in the sky, the film conveyed the mundane terror of nuclear war, the knowledge that annihilation could come at any time, in the midst of an otherwise ordinary day. People look up, see the missiles departing, realize what’s about to happen, and yet are powerless to stop it. About 100 million Americans watched The Day After , roughly half of the adult population of the United States. And unlike most made-for-television movies, it did not have a happy ending.