The day the US and USSR simulated ‘WarGames’ and almost destroyed the world
On November 8, 1983, there were two earthquakes, a plane crash... and the world was on the brink of nuclear annihilation.
Everyone experiences days when staying in bed would have been a better choice. The events of November 8, 1983, serve as a vivid illustration of this saying, as this date marked a time when the world came perilously close to nuclear war, arguably even closer than during the 13 days of the Cuban Missile Crisis, according to some experts.
It was a day that had already started on the wrong foot.
At the stroke of midnight in Europe, an earthquake measuring approximately 6.4 struck the Gansu region of China, causing dozens of deaths. Two hours later, there was another earthquake, this time in Belgium?! Measuring 5.0 in the Liège area, with two dead, several injured, and serious material damage. It hadn’t even reached dawn in Europe when a plane crash in Angola killed all 130 people on board... And the worst was yet to come.
A film that predicted similar events...
It’s curious that just a few months earlier, in June, the film War Games was released, which depicted with disturbing accuracy the kind of misunderstandings that could lead to nuclear war. In it, a teenage video game fan accidentally hacks into a military computer and initiates a nuclear attack, thinking it’s a game.
There is another key precedent. A month earlier, on September 26, the Soviet air defense system detected five US nuclear missiles launched toward the USSR. Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov, who was on duty, decided not to follow protocol, which was to report the attack and launch an immediate nuclear response. He reasoned that if the US had launched a nuclear attack, it wouldn’t have done so with just five missiles. Furthermore, the Soviet early warning system, called Oko, was not very reliable. It was eventually confirmed that it had been a false alarm caused by a reflection of the sun in the clouds, but the Soviet government panicked because of the vulnerability of its detection systems.
The incident intensified the already existing paranoia among the Soviet leadership, which had long been convinced that the US was planning an attack. US President Ronald Reagan had called the USSR the “Evil Empire” and announced on March 23 the “Star Wars” missile shield, which was supposed to prevent the Soviets from responding to a potential nuclear attack. The USSR was ruled by Yuri Andropov, who had been head of the KGB for 15 years.
NATO carries out DEFCON 1 preparation exercises
Against this backdrop, NATO had been engaged in military exercises dubbed ‘Able Archer 83’ since November 2. These were maneuvers carried out annually, simulating the escalation of tensions leading to a nuclear conflict, but that year, NATO commanders had decided to take realism to the extreme.
New encryption codes were introduced, 19,000 US troops were deployed in Europe, and an escalation to DEFCON 1, the highest level of military alert, indicating imminent nuclear war, was simulated. The participation of Margaret Thatcher and Helmut Kohl, the top leaders of Great Britain and West Germany, was also simulated, and even the US president’s authorization for a large-scale nuclear attack was rehearsed...
The USSR, on high alert
And of course, the Soviets figured that if something smells like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it probably is a duck. And they immediately put their nuclear forces in East Germany and Poland on alert, armed their nuclear-capable bombers, and started discussing whether to launch a preemptive strike.
Meanwhile, at the Allied Forces Europe Headquarters in Belgium, just a few miles from where the earthquake had struck in the early hours of the morning, they continued playing war games, unaware of the “fire” brewing on the other side of the Curtain. They were all traveling to the end of the world due to a misunderstanding.
A double agent saved the world
The hero who saved the day was Oleg Gordievsky, a double agent who was a senior KGB officer but was working for MI6. He informed his contact in London about the Soviet preparations to repel the imminent NATO nuclear attack. At the same time, US intelligence detected an increase in military activity behind the Iron Curtain. A shiver ran down the spines of Western leaders, who immediately ordered a reduction in the intensity of the exercise. There was no simulated nuclear weapons launch, DEFCON 1 was avoided, encrypted communications were eliminated, and troop mobilization ceased... From the peak of tension on the 8th to the end of the maneuvers on the 11th, everything seemed like what it really was: a drill.
The scare was so great that Ronald Reagan changed his policy towards the USSR, which went from confrontation to rapprochement, and culminated in negotiations with Mikhail Gorbachev in 1987, in which both countries significantly reduced their nuclear arsenal.
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