KGB Software Almost Triggered War In 1983 (arstechnica.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Who here remembers WarGames? As it turns out, the film was a lot closer to reality than we knew. Newly-released documents show that the Soviet Union's KGB developed software to predict sneak attacks from the U.S. and other nations in the early 1980s. During a NATO wargame in November, 1983, that software met all conditions necessary to forecast the beginning of a nuclear war. "Many of these procedures and tactics were things the Soviets had never seen, and the whole exercise came after a series of feints by U.S. and NATO forces to size up Soviet defenses and the downing of Korean Air Lines Flight 007 on September 1, 1983. So as Soviet leaders monitored the exercise and considered the current climate, they put one and one together. Able Archer, according to Soviet leadership at least, must have been a cover for a genuine surprise attack planned by the U.S., then led by a president possibly insane enough to do it." Fortunately, when the military exercise ended, so did Soviet fears that an attack was imminent.

Comments

Re:There were TV documentories on this

[Crowd Computing]

The news is about the downloadable partly declassified document that pertains to the event. So the difference is like watching a CNN news report about a government scandal and then reading for yourself the Wikileaks source. Of course in this case it's not a leak but an official release:

National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 533
Edited by Nate Jones, Tom Blanton, and Lauren Harper
Posted - October 24, 2015

Gorbachev's off the cuff comment I heard live

[raymorris]

I was at an event where someone asked Gorbachev about the major economic changes in the early 1990s as the Soviet states re-organized into various coalitions after the USSR dissolved. In his reply, Gorbachev's main point was that it took longer for private industry to ramp up than had been hoped. I don't remember the exact words from the meat of his response; it was an "unimportant" preface clause that caught my attention. He replied:

"After Reagan defeated us Perestroika wasn't moving as quickly as we had anticipated and ..."

"After Reagan defeated us", that's how Gorbachev thinks of the fall of the Soviet Union. I'm no expert on US-Soviet relations in the 1980s, but Gorbachev certainly is. He knows the private discussions of the Politburo that historians can only guess about. And his four-word summary of the Soviet Union's fall is "after Reagan defeated us". Very interesting, I thought.