Comrade Kryuchkov’s “War Scare” (1983), or the Bureaucratic Origins of the “Able Archer” War-Scare Thesis

Abstract

Many historians argue that the world came to the brink of nuclear war during the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s Able Archer nuclear-release exercise in November 1983. This war-scare thesis originated with Soviet defector Oleg Gordievsky, who made this assertion based on several telegrams that he had seen at the State Committee for Security (KGB) residency in London in 1983. The article contextualizes and analyzes the telegrams based on the statements of leading officers of the KGB’s First Chief Directorate (FCD), responsible for foreign intelligence, to their Soviet-bloc colleagues in the years 1981 to 1983. Based on this analysis, the telegrams that Gordievsky cited had not “created a vicious spiral which was steadily and dangerously raising tension in Moscow,” as he later asserted. Instead, they reflected the bureaucratic strivings of the head of the FCD, Vladimir Kryuchkov, to finally develop an early-warning system against Western military attack, which he had narrowed down to potential nuclear-missile attack (Raketno-Yadernoe Napadenie).