‘Arrogance in Foreign Policy Increases the Danger of Miscalculation’

I’ve remembered a few more details about our exchanges in ____ on that evening in _____ ____. I’m sure I mentioned the old description of Britain as ‘America’s unsinkable aircraft carrier’. And there was a similarly humorous effort to explain Russia’s essential role in the world, told to me by a friend in _____.

A buffer-zone which prevents war between Poland and China.

That joke got a laugh when I told it in the preamble to a question at a book festival in Bristol last November. The preceding talk was focused on Pskov, and (maybe because of my special interest in medieval history) I was curious to know about local views of Alexander Nevsky. The speaker incidentally was effectively a Nato cheerleader, and another questioner put it to him that the proxy conflict in Ukraine is ‘the West’s war of choice’ – a sentiment I agree with, though I wasn’t bold enough to say it out loud.

An elderly woman in the seat next to me told me she’d travelled to Moscow in the 1980s to make a BBC TV programme with Canadian broadcaster and former Liberal politician Michael Ignatieff. Ignatieff’s great grandfather incidentally was Count Nikolai Pavlovich Ignatyev; ‘MVP’ of the Great Game who was Russian ambassador to Peking (1859-61) and Constantinople (1864-77). Online I couldn’t find any trace of a 1980s Moscow programme, but I did find an interesting BBC documentary Ignatieff made about Ukraine, called ‘Blood and Belonging’, in 1993. On page 79 of the accompanying book he wrote:

I have reason to take… Ukraine seriously indeed but to be honest I’m having trouble. Ukrainian independence conjures up images of peasant embroidered t-shirts, the nasal whine of ethnic instruments, phony Cossacks and cloaks and boots and nasty anti-semites.

If Ukrainians want to shake off the latter tag, they could start by toning down their hero-worship of Nazi filth like Andriy Melnyk. Last month’s repatriation and state burial was condemned by the Polish president and Lech Walesa as well as by Israel’s foreign ministry. The Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem issued a statement:

Honoring the leader of a movement that supported and collaborated with Nazi Germany during the persecution and murder of millions of Jews undermines the moral integrity essential to Holocaust remembrance.

At a second book festival event, historian Giles Milton discussed wartime diplomacy in Moscow. While he was speaking a thought occurred to me about the decision to host the ‘Big Three’ conference at Yalta in February 1945. I’m sure I read or heard somewhere that Soviet appeals for increased deliveries of equipment and supplies via the Arctic Convoys were specifically linked to the brutal struggle to re-take Crimea, completed in May 1944. Milton was non-committal when I asked his views on this, but the more I think about it, the more certain I am that this was a factor in Stalin’s choice.

[…] I hope I’m not unduly critical of ‘baby-boomers’, but there’s one thing I think they get badly wrong. It concerns the great event everyone associates with JFK, apart from his assassination. Joe Biden set out the conventional wisdom in a speech he gave in October 2022.

We have not faced the prospect of Armageddon since Kennedy and the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Notwithstanding his cognitive decline (as shockingly advanced as that was by 2022), Biden was either ignorant or dishonest on this point. ‘Life as we know it’ teetered on the brink of nuclear annihilation not once but twice during the Cold War. The idea that the world was safe in the autumn of 1983 is a joke as sick and dark as the suggestion that Biden could run for president again, in 2028.

In 1983 the nuclear stand-off was more acutely perilous than almost anyone realised, though of course it did spill over into public consciousness. On 20 November, ABC News dedicated a special discussion programme to the subject, with panellists including Henry Kissinger, Robert McNamara and Carl Sagan. McNamara told the audience that

There are 40,000 nuclear warheads in the inventories of the US and the Soviet Union today with a destructive power roughly a million times that of the Hiroshima bomb.

No less importantly, Kissinger explained:

There's a point that has not been mentioned this evening at all. We are talking as if nuclear weapons cause wars. What will cause wars is political tensions and crisis and uncontrolled ambitions, and unless one is willing to face that fact and unless one is willing to do something about it… if tensions multiply in the world sooner or later there'll be a war, not necessarily a nuclear war, and any war in which we are involved and maybe the Soviets are involved increases the danger of nuclear war… sooner or later it is going to be the political instability that is going to drive us into war not the weapons by themselves [emphasis added].

I’m sure this is old hat as far as you’re concerned, but I must admit I’ve only just picked up on the unique capacity of intermediate-range nuclear missiles to undermine the concept of Mutually Assured Destruction. Mainly, this is because they could be launched relatively quickly, with a high degree of accuracy, over distances the target government didn’t exactly know. Potentially therefore, a ‘first-strike’ could decapitate the civilian leadership of the target country. In addition, in order to be within range of important US or USSR population centres, their ground-based variants typically needed to be launched from the territories of satellite dependencies. As such they automatically widened and/or complicated the scope of superpower confrontation.

Contrary to standard western accounts, the primary cause of the October 1962 crisis was not the Soviet transfer of intermediate-range nuclear missiles to Cuba. Khrushchev’s actions were precipitated by Kennedy’s deployment of Jupiter missiles with similar specifications in Turkey in March of the same year.

43 years ago, on 2^nd June 1983 veteran US diplomat Averell Harriman met with Soviet leader Yuri Andropov. Following on from 1980’s ‘The Empire Strikes Back’, George Lucas’s ‘Return of the Jedi’ was released in UK cinemas on the same day. Very clearly, Reagan intended to jump on the bandwagon when he used the incendiary term ‘evil empire’ in a speech to Evangelical ministers on 08 March. To borrow a phrase used by Taylor Downing in his book ‘1983: Reagan, Andropov, and a World on the Brink’, Reagan was

…striking the populist chord that got him elected.

This is confirmed by his announcement of the ‘Strategic Defense Initiative’ in the same month. That it instantly came to be nicknamed ‘Star Wars’ could not have surprised anyone, least of all the US president who understood the ‘military entertainment complex’ better than anyone else.

Yet according to Taylor Downing, even Nancy had advised him against this type of inflammatory rhetoric. Harriman too, on the eve of his audience with Andropov, told Secretary of State George Schultz:

I do wish the President could be more careful.

Reagan’s announcement of ‘Star Wars’, hard on the heels of his turbo-charged dog-whistling, delivered a body-blow to superpower relations that were already in big trouble. Hence Andropov’s earnest warnings to Harriman about the dangers of miscalculation. In an 80-minute audience, the Soviet leader referred four times to his belief that nuclear war could be in prospect; notably in his observation that Reagan was ‘moving towards a dangerous red line’.

With the following words to Texas A&M University students on 15 April 2019, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo set out the basic problem whenever the US stakes a claim to the moral high ground.

I was the CIA director. We lied, we cheated, we stole. It’s — it was like — we had entire training courses. It reminds you of the glory of the American experiment.

On 1^st September 1983 it was just the luck of Korean Airlines Flight 007 to stray hundreds of miles off course into Soviet airspace, past a careless US reconnaissance aircraft loitering in the same area. KAL-007’s shoot-down, to howls of ‘pre-meditated murder’ from western capitals, was the stunt Nato needed to force through the deployment of Pershing II intermediate-range missiles in Germany. Exacerbated by the arrival of cruise missiles in Britain and elsewhere, Mikhail Gorbachev would later describe the new WMD landscape as

a gun pressed against our temple.

Taylor Downing provides chapter and verse on the diagnostic tools which the Kremlin used to assess the likelihood of an imminent ‘first strike’. Jill Kastner’s synopsis is from her 31 May 2018 review of Downing’s book in The Nation.

[On 26 September] a software glitch at a Soviet early-warning station reported five separate launches of American ICBMs. Thanks to the cool head of [Stanislav Petrov], no retaliation was ordered, but the malfunction stoked Soviet fears that their early-warning systems might not be up to the task.

On October 23, [in response to] a massive truck bomb at the US Marine barracks in Beirut, US embassies and military installations across the globe went on heightened alert.

This ticked an important box in Moscow’s ‘first-strike’ checklist; as did the US invasion of Grenada two days later, since it caused

a dramatic spike in cable traffic between London and Washington—prompted by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s fury at the American move.

Meanwhile, NATO had begun Autumn Forge, a massive annual war game stretching from Norway to Turkey that involved approximately 100,000 NATO personnel, including 19,000 American troops airlifted across the Atlantic under radio silence. The finale was Able Archer, in which NATO practiced procedures for launching nuclear weapons at Warsaw Pact forces. Although it was designed to be a command-post exercise, involving no troops, there were enough troops on the ground to sow confusion.

Downing’s book makes the most compelling case yet that the Soviet reaction to Able Archer was extraordinary. Cables coming into the London KGB residency warned that NATO forces had gone on alert and might be preparing for the long-awaited first strike, possibly beginning in seven to 10 days. KGB officers were urged to go all-out in their search for signs of preparations for war. Roughly 50 percent of the [Soviet] SS-20 missiles were deployed to their secret field stations. The MiG-23 fighters on East German runways were placed on 30-minute alert. After the players in the war game moved to Defense Readiness Condition (DefCon) 1, the highest level of military alert, NATO did what it had never done before, changing the codes used in every other Able Archer exercise to something totally new for the most sensitive part of the game.

The commander of an SS-20 unit [was ordered to] stay in his bunker in constant radio communication, on the highest state of alert, waiting for orders to launch. He was in contact with Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov, the chief of the Soviet general staff, who had descended into the bomb-proof bunker outside Moscow, from where he could launch an attack should the leadership in the Kremlin be wiped out in a decapitating first strike. An assistant commander on a Delta-class nuclear submarine describes how his sub moved to its battle station under the Arctic ice and remained in a continuous state of combat alert, the only such instance in his 18-year career. In an SS-19 ICBM silo, a two-man team was joined by the dreaded ‘third man,’ a presumed KGB officer, assigned to ensure that any orders to launch would be followed.

[…] The lessons of 1983 are clear. Arrogance in foreign policy increases the danger of miscalculation. Dialogue with our adversaries, whether in Pyongyang or Tehran or Moscow, is essential. Given the renewed nuclear sab[re] rattling on the world stage, we would be wise to remember a time when a toxic cocktail of threats, fear, and misunderstanding nearly led us down the path to Armageddon [emphasis added].