1983 able archer

Cecil's Columns/Staff Reports
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I was stationed at Ramstein W.Ge. during the exercise Able Archer and was ECM inspector and was rather intimately involved with what was happening.

The Soviet Union issued Germany an ultimatum about their desire for an oil pipeline through Germany and their intense dislike of seeing Germany reunited. This was mainly through the military GRU units instead of KGB probably since for the most part, the KGB was mostly a police unit and intelligence units not geared for world domination.

Our base went to full alert status, not a part of Able Archer when the Soviets amassed an invasion force from Czechoslovakia and we had a border conflict with them. Our sources of info was that the Soviet Union was going to invade the U.S. and we simply were acting to protect ourselves. That the Soviets claim they thought we were going to invade them is pure rubbish. We had no plans of first striking them. This was and is typical Soviet misinformation.

They in fact invaded us and we implemented our Stealth capabilities and were able to convince them not to come any further (a border conflict I suppose you could say). We were not so sure it would not end in a nuclear confrontation. Even though our superiors assured us we can take the Soviets on without resorting to nuclear weapons.

The truth of the matter is, the Soviets were planning on first striking the U.S. as far as our intelligence networking could ascertain and we simply were protecting against that possibility. The operation Able Archer as far as I know had absolutely nothing to do with any invasion plan formed by the U.S. military.

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Column Operation Able Archer: Were the United States and the Soviet Union on the brink of nuclear war?

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I might shed some light on the situation. I knew a person who emigrated to the U.S., and was in the Soviet intelligence services at that time. He explained that the Soviet Union started to realize they were losing the cold war in the mid-1970s. They realized that Europe and the U.S. were gaining so much ground economically and militarily, that if they didn’t attack right then and there, they might as well raise the white flag. By 1979, this realization was in full panic.

However, my friend mentioned something rather interesting. After a few years of this massive activity and preparation for war, the whole thing suddenly stopped, and rampant corruption grew. It was as though those in power realized that the cause was truly lost and you might as well get it while the getting was good. By the time Brezhnev died in 1982, most people in the Soviet Union pretty much knew that the communist block was dead. The Russians claimed that their country was nothing more than Upper Volta with missiles.

What happened in 1983 may have been the last rumbles of a dying country, but there was no real plan for invasion. Well, sure, there were always plans for invasion. Heck, there had been plans for over a decade. But by then, the Russians knew any plan was impossible to implement.

Rampant drunkenness and desertions were endemic throughout the military by the early 1980s. Most of the officers were poorly trained. Equipment was missing, broken or nonexistent. In fact, most of the countries anti-aircraft facility simply didn’t work. The Russians were literally scanning the sky for enemy planes with their eyeballs (that is, if they weren’t in a drunken stupor). Remember that West German who flew his tiny plane and landed inside the Kremlin back in 1997? My friend (who had come to the U.S. in early 1983) told me that this stunt didn’t surprise him.

Those who claim that Reagan won the cold war simply didn’t know that Reagan didn’t have to do anything because the Soviet Union was going to collapse anyway. In fact, Reagan being president may have keep the Soviet Union alive for a bit longer because the leadership could rally around fighting the evil warmongering Reagan.

So, pretty there was probably never going to be a war. If the U.S. did invade in 1983, there probably had been little resistance because the Warsaw pact military was in terrible shape. Non-Russian solders would have simply surrender en-mass. Soviet solders would be unable to stem any Nato invasion. However, the U.S. wasn’t going to invade and the Soviets knew it. Why should they even bother? And, the Soviets weren’t going to invade because they simply didn’t have the ability. There was some rumblings, but it was more for domestic posture trying to keep the communist party in power than actual war.