My answer is this reference in Wikipedia:
Able Archer 83.
It's a pretty good article, but it doesn't tell you how scary it really was.
I was in Headquarters, Strategic Air Command at Offutt AFB, NE, at the time, actually on the Strategic Air Combat Operations Staff (SACOS). Every fall, SAC held its annual two-week nuclear war exercise. I'd "played" in three of them by then.
The first week of the exercise was the "build up" phase of the scenario--basically, the Soviets rattling sabers in Europe, then invading West Germany. At the mid-point, the "war" goes tactically nuke on the NATO side, then threatens to go strategically nuke on the Soviet side...at which time the National Command Authority (i.e., the president) orders execution of the Major Attack Option (the big one).
At that point, the CINCSAC (the 4-star commander) stands up and says to the other generals, "Gentlemen, time to go airborne" and they get up and scurry out of the underground command post through a special tunnel to the runway where the Airborne Command Post was parked.
Being among the SACOS staff that was left behind, my role in the exercise always ended 30 minutes after the MAO was executed because we estimated the Soviets had 25-30 warheads targeted for the spot I was sitting.
In 1983, some whiz kid in the Pentagon had the bright idea of
combining the annual nuclear war exercises of the Air Force, the Navy, and the Army in Europe. In fact, they even included the NCA (with Warren Christopher playing the role of the president). The idea was to exercise all the communication that would go on between all the nuclear forces and the NCA in the buildup toward a nuclear war...for the first time ever.
That was scary enough. But what we didn't know then--and would not know until the mid-90s--was that Yuri Andropov had already come to the conclusion that the US had won the Cold War (what the Soviets called the "correlation of forces") and had the ability to launch a nuclear strike that would destroy the Soviet Union while suffering only "acceptable" casualties.
That's "acceptable" from the viewpoint of a Soviet hardliner who had been through WWII and had engineered a couple of invasions himself. Moreover, he firmly believed Reagan was the US president who would do it.
We had no idea at the time the Soviets were as edgy as they were....
Anyway, that year we got to the point where the NCA (Warren Christopher) ordered the execution of the MAO, around noon that day. Thirty minutes later, I left the underground command post to do a little work at my regular desk before going home. But then I got a sudden call: Report back to the underground command post immediately.
The message when I got back: "The Soviets have 'reacted' to the exercise." They were opening silo doors and had flushed their SSBN fleets from their naval ports.
Oh, sh&t.
Of course, the Soviets could not break the encrypted US communications, but they did know which channels carried what kinds of messages, and turning an purported exercise into a surprise attack was a trick out of the book Yuri Andropov himself wrote.
I suppose someone somewhere was trying to convince Yuri that the US wasn't really planning to attack them.
But at SACOS, we had to operate under the possibility that the Yuri would not be persuaded. We
were planning to attack, and working as furiously at it as we could. Everything that we'd done the previous week as an exercise we were suddenly doing
for real.
I myself didn't leave the underground for four solid days. I'd never seen the generals so grim faced--they were the color of concrete. It was a scary freaking four days.
The closest to humor anyone came was in the first hour when a colonel remarked, "Damn, I just bought a house." After that, there wasn't even gallows humor.
I was praying, "Jesus please
stop us."
Going back to those days isn't funny, either.
