Podcast reviews:  Able Archer 83  and Ellis Island

I am not going to review every podcast I listen to – I mean, wtaf. But the two contrasting experiences yesterday are worth recording.

In reverse order – Heather Cox Richardson starts the year’s “Letters from an American” with a typically interesting overview of 19th and early 20th century immigration to the United States (especially New York).  She’s always always worth a listen.

I wish the same could be said for David Olusogo and Sarah Churchwell’s two episodes on one of the straight-up most terrifying episodes of the second Cold War – November 1983’s war game that almost was game over,; Able Archer 83.

There is a lot of padding and repetition as if they were talking to a particularly undermotivated cohort of undergraduates. (Fwiw, I learned about Able Archer when I lived in Bristol (probably 1997 then?) from someone who presumably had seen a 1990 BBC documentary on it (mentioned in the podcast)).

Olusago and Churchwell repeat themselves at great length, giving a vibe of a lecture to bored undergraduates. They are both born 1969/70 (same age as me) and both remember the early 1980s as one of looming nuclear menace (as do I).  As per the Midnight Oil song Read About It –  “Imagine any mix up and the lot would go”

While they point to some reasons the Soviet leadership might be paranoid, they might have toned down the repetition and padding – as if they were doing a course overview to disengaged prospective cashcow students – and pointed to, oh, I don’t know, the 1918-20 incursion, Curtis LeMay in the 1950s trying to get Eisenhower to give permission for Strategic Air Command to just nuke the damn commies etc etc. And they might have highlighted flocks of geese, radar blips from busted microchips (June 1980) and dropped hammers and Titan missiles (September 1980) as part of the general oh my fucking-god-ness of it all.

In between the repetitions and painful “jocularity” as if they were trying to seem human to a bunch of 19 year olds with no shits to give, they make mention of the KAL 007 incident (well, massacre).  But they state that this was down to human error – an engineer punching in the wrong co-ordinates. This is absolute horse-shit, the cover version at the time that was found to be incredibly flimsy. There were all sorts of checks and counter-checks that made this utterly ridiculous.  The best guess is that KAL -007 was sent over not to spy directly on Sakhalin island (there were spy satellites for that) but to force the Soviets to switch on a big new radar array that they were trying to keep off so it couldn’t be included in some arms reductions talks.  There was a helluva a lot of weirdness around KAL-007 (including the false report it had landed safely) and it is important context for Able Archer, imo. (I should reread RW Johnson’s Shootdown, and more recent work).

When they’re not repeating themselves repeatedly and repetitively and padding out something that could have been half as long and twice as good, they mention stuff I didn’t know – the early 1983 war games stuff, and also the role of a US equivalent of Stanislav Petrov – Leonard Perroots.

It’s not really very good, but it does give me an appetite for diving further down the AA83 rabbit-hole. I will probably start with the links below.

Oh, and an advert for Google’s LLM slop machine?  Really? And telling people they will be able to do “research” with it?  I wonder what their professional historian colleagues think of that…

References

State Department erases 15 pages of nuclear history — with no warning – The Washington Post

https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/able-archer-83/2025-11-14/censored-history-able-archer-83

Jones, N. and Blanton, T. (2016). Able Archer 83: The Secret History of the NATO Exercise That Almost Triggered Nuclear War  ISBN: 9781620972618

I will have a look at this set of references

• Ambinder, Mark: The brink: President Reagan and the nuclear war scare of 1983, Nueva York, Simon & Schuster, 2018.
• Andrew, Christopher, y Gordievsky, Oleg: KGB: The Inside Story of its Foreign Operations from Lenin to Gorbachev, Nueva York, Harper Collins, 1990.
• Andrew, Christopher, y Gordievsky, Oleg: Comrade Kryuchkov’s Instructions: Top Secret Files on KGB Foreign Operations, 1975-1985, Palo Alto, Stanford University Press, 1993.
• Andrew, Christopher: For the President’s Eyes Only. Secret Intelligence and the American Presidency from Washington to Bush, Nueva York, Harper Collins, 1996.
• Azrael, Jeremy: The Soviet Civilian Leadership and the Military High Command 1976-1986, Santa Monica, RAND Corporation, 1987.
• Barrass, Gordon: «Able Archer 83: What Were the Soviets Thinking?», Survival, 58(6) (2016), pp. 7-30.
• Barrass, Gordon: The Great Cold War: A Journey Through the Great Cold War, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2009.
• Blackwell, James: Cognitive Hyper-Dissonance: Nuclear Signaling Through Military Exercises, Alexandria, CNA, 2020.
• Burt, Peter: Thirty years ago: the nuclear crisis which frightened Thatcher and Reagan into ending the Cold War, Reading, NIS, 2013.
• Charles, Elizabeth (ed.): Foreign Relations of the United States, 1981-1988, Volume IV, Soviet Union, January 1983-March 1985, Washington, Department of State, 2021.
• Chancellor, Henry: 1983: On the Brink of the Apocalypse, Londres, Flashback, 2007.
• Cherkashin, Viktor, y Feifer, Gregory: Spy Handler: Memoir of a KGB Officer, Nueva York, Basic Books, 2005.
• Colby, Elbridge, et al.: The Israeli «Nuclear Alert» of 1973: Deterrence and Signalling in Crisis, Alexandria, CNA, 2011.
• Colom, Guillem: «La segunda Guerra Fría y el desplazamiento del balance de fuerzas en Europa», Ayer, 99 (2015), pp. 175-198.
• Colom, Guillem: «Cuando la realidad supera la ficción: la operación RYAN (1981-1991)», Ayer, 112 (2018), pp. 265-293.
• Colom, Guillem: «Haciendo posible lo impensable: opciones selectivas, disuasión a medida y fallos en la disuasión nuclear (1984-1994)», Revista Española de Ciencia Política, 54 (2020), pp. 121-148.
• Department of the Air Force: Exercise Autumn Forge 83, MAC/000XE (30 de enero de 1984).
• Director of Central Intelligence: Implications of Recent Soviet Military-Political Activities, SNIE 11-10-84 (18 de mayo de 1984).
• Director of Central Intelligence: US/Soviet Tension, CR-NIC-03508-04 (19 de junio de 1984).
• Director of Central Intelligence: Soviet Policy Toward the United States in 1984, SNIE-11-9-84 (9 de agosto de 1984).
• Directorate of Intelligence: Soviet Thinking on the Possibility of an Armed Confrontation with the United States, SOV-M-84-10013X (30 de diciembre de 1983).
• Downing, Taylor: 1983: Reagan, Andropov, and a World on the Brink, Londres, Little Brown, 2018.
• Ermath, Fritz: «Observations on the War Scare of 1983 from an Intelligence Perch», Parallel History Project on NATO and the Warsaw Pact (6 de noviembre de 2003), http://www.php.isn.ethz.ch/lory1.ethz.ch/collections/colltopic320b.html.
• Fearon, James: «Signalling Foreign Policy Interests: Tying Hands versus Sinking Costs», Journal of Conflict Resolution, 41(1) (1997), pp. 68-90.
• Fischer, Benjamin: A Cold War Conundrum: the 1983 Soviet War Scare, CS97-10007, Langley, CIA Center of the Study of Intelligence, 1997.
• Fischer, Benjamin: «Anglo-American Intelligence and the Soviet War Scare: The Untold Story», Intelligence and National Security, 27(1) (2012), pp. 75-92.
• Fischer, Benjamin: «Scolding Intelligence: The PFIAB Report on the Soviet War Scare», International Journal of Intelligence and CounterIntelligence, 31(1) (2018), pp. 102-115.
• Fischer, Beth: The Reagan Reversal: Foreign Policy and the End of the Cold War, Columbia, University of Missouri, 1997.
• Garthoff, Raymond: «Soviet Leaders, Soviet Intelligence, and Changing Views of the United States, 1965-91», en Paul Maddrell (ed.): The Image of the Enemy: Intelligence Analysis of Adversaries since 1945, Washington, Georgetown University Press, 2015, pp. 41-80.
• Goodman, Melvin: Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA, Lanham, Rowman & Littlefield, 2008.
• Hersh, Seymour: «The Target is Destroyed»: What Really Happened to Flight 007 and What America Knew About It, Nueva York, Random House, 1986.
• Heuser, Beatrice: «Military exercises and the dangers of misunderstandings: the East West Crisis of the Early 1980s», en Beatrice Heuser, Tormod Heier y Guillaume Lasconjarias (eds.): Military Exercises: Political Messaging and Strategic Impact, Roma, NDC, 2018, pp. 113-140.
• Hines, John; Mishulovich, Ellis, y Shull, John: Soviet Intentions 1965-1985, McLean, BDM Federal, 1995.
• Joint Intelligence Committee: Soviet Union: Concern About a Surprise NATO Attack, JIC-84-N-45 (23 de marzo de 1984).
• Joint Intelligence Committee: The Detection of Soviet Preparations for War Against NATO, JIC-84-5 (15 de junio de 1984).
• Jones, Nate: «Soviet “Huffing and Puffing”, “Crying Wolf?”, “Rattling Pots and Pans?” or “A Real Worry That We Could Come into Conflict through Miscalculation?”», The 1983 War Scare: «The Last Paroxysm» of the Cold War (16 de mayo de 2013), https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB426/.
• Jones, Nate: Able Archer 83: The Secret History of the NATO Exercise That Almost Triggered Nuclear War, Nueva York, New Press, 2016.
• Jones, Nate, y Hoffman, David: «Newly released documents shed light on 1983 nuclear war scare with Soviets», The Washington Post, 17 de febrero de 2021.
• Kramer, Mark: «Die Nicht-Krise um “Able Archer 1983”: Fürchtete die sowjetische Führung tatsächlich einen atomaren Großangriff im Herbst 1983?», en Oliver Bange y Bernd Lemke (eds): Wege zur Wiedervereinigung: Die beiden deutschen Staaten in ihren Bündnissen 1970 bis 1990, Múnich, Oldenbourg, 2013, pp. 129-149.
• Levadov, L. V.: «Itogi operativnoy podgotovki Ob“yedinonnykh sil NATO v 1983», Voennaya mysl’, 2 (1984), pp. 67-76.
• Liddle Hart Centre for Military Archives [LHCMA]: Brink of Apocalypse, KCLMA GB-099, Londres, King’s College London.
• Mastny, Vojtech: «How Able Was “Able Archer”? Nuclear Trigger and Intelligence in Perspective», Journal of Cold War Studies, 11(1) (2009), pp. 108-123.
• Ministerium für Staatssicherheit: Merkmale zur Erkennung der gegnerischen Vorbereitung auf einen überraschenden Raketenkernwaffenangriff (26 de noviembre de 1984).
• Ministerium für Staatssicherheit: Über die Entwicklung und den erreichten Stand der Arbeit zur Früherkennung gegnerischer Angriffs- und Überraschungsabsichten (Komp1ex RJAN) (23 de abril de 1986).
• Migliucci, Darío; Martínez, Ferran, y Benecke, Katharina: «La crisis Able Archer (1983): un caso ejemplar de misperception», Historia Actual Online, 42(1) (2017), pp. 23-34.
• Miles, Simon: «The War Scare that Wasn’t. Able Archer 83 and the Myths of the Second Cold War», Journal of Cold War Studies, 22(3) (2020), pp. 86-118.
• Miles, Simon: «The mythical war scare of 1983», War on the Rocks (16 de marzo de 2021), https://warontherocks.com/2021/03/the-mythical-war-scare-of-1983.
• Ministerium für Nationale Verteidigung: Aufklärungsmeldungen, 32672b (7 de noviembre de 1983).
• National Intelligence Council: Why is the World So Dangerous (30 de noviembre de 1983).
• National Intelligence Council: Regarding the influence of Oleg Gordievsky’s Reporting on President Reagan, CR-NIC- 90T00435R (16 de diciembre de 1988).
• Oberdorfer, Don: The Turn: From the Cold War to a New Era, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991.
• President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board: The Soviet «War Scare» (15 de febrero de 1990).
• Pry, Peter: War Scare: Russia and America on the Nuclear Brink, Nueva York, Praeger, 2000.
• Reagan, Ronald: An American Life: The Autobiography, Nueva York, Simon & Schuster, 1990.
• Rhodes, Richard: Arsenals of folly, Nueva York, Knopf, 2007.
• Schaefer, Bernd: «The Warsaw Pact’s Intelligence on NATO: East German Military Espionage against the West», Parallel History Project on NATO and the Warsaw Pact (28 de octubre de 2016), http://www.php.isn.ethz.ch/lory1.ethz.ch/collections/coll_stasi/intro_schaefere6c7.html.
• Schelling, Thomas: The Strategy of Conflict, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1960.
• Scott, Len: «November 1983: the most dangerous moment of the Cold War?», Intelligence and National Security, 35(1) (2020), pp. 131-148.
• Seventh Air Division: Exercise ABLE ARCHER 83 After Action Report (1 de diciembre de 1983).
• Shvets, Yuri: Washington Station: My Life as a KGB Spy in America, Nueva York, Simon & Schuster, 1994.
• Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe: Able Archer 83, Mons, OTAN, 2013.
• Winger, Anna, y Winger, Jörg: Deutschland 83, Colonia, RTL-UFA, 2015.