It turns out the US and USSR came closer to nuclear conflict than previously thought, according to freshly declassified documents detailing a set of American war games called “Autumn Forge,” launched 30 years ago:
A total of 40,000 U.S. and NATO troops were moved across Western Europe, while 16,044 more U.S. troops were airlifted overseas in 170 missions conducted in radio silence. More ominously, U.S. and NATO officers practiced the procedures they would have to follow to authorize and conduct nuclear strikes in an unpublicized exercise called Able Archer 83, shifting their headquarters as the game escalated toward chemical and nuclear warfare. In communications, they several times referred to non-nuclear B-52 sorties as nuclear “strikes” — slips of the tongue that could have been intercepted by Soviet eavesdroppers. …
Even if his intelligence advisers were sanguine, Reagan himself was worried after the exercise that the Soviets genuinely feared the U.S. was preparing to commit nuclear aggression, writing at one point in his diaries that “I feel the Soviets are so defense minded, so paranoid about being attacked that without being in any way soft on them we ought to tell them that no one here has any intention of doing anything like that. What the h–l have they got that anyone would want.”
I love that last line. The same could be said of Iran. But Reagan’s Republicanism has long gone, replaced by militarism and paranoia.
The Dish 