How A War Game Brought The World To The Brink Of Nuclear Disaster

1983: Once-classified documents show how close Soviet Union came to launching nuclear war

“Chilling new evidence that Britain and America came close to provoking the Soviet Union into launching a nuclear attack has emerged in former classified documents written at the height of the cold war… Cabinet memos and briefing papers released under the Freedom of Information Act reveal that a major war games exercise, Operation Able Archer, conducted in November 1983 by the US and its Nato allies was so realistic it made the Russians believe that a nuclear strike on its territory was a real possibility…”

(Jamie Doward, The Observer, 10/02/13)

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