The U.S. State Department has deleted an important appendix on the Russian response to the 1983 NATO nuclear war exercise called Able Archer, which had previously been published but has now been censored. Nate Jones, who worked at the National Security Archive for more than ten years and wrote a book on Able Archer, reported his discovery of the deletion in an analysis published Nov. 13 in the Washington Post. The appendix was originally published in the second volume of the State Department’s official history of U.S.-Soviet relations during the Reagan Administration, covering the period January 1983 to March 1985 which was released in 2021. The volume was then withdrawn in 2022, and reissued in January 2025, just before Trump took office, but with the 15-page appendix completely redacted. Other references to Able Archer in the volume were also downplayed.
The offending appendix is, nonetheless, readily available on the internet and elsewhere. The 15 pages at issue deal in part with a 1990 President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB) report on Able Archer, which was the product of an effort by the intelligence community to try to figure out what actually happened. The National Security Archive published that report in 2021 along with other documents related to Able Archer.
The appendix includes the following quote from the PFIAB report: “We believe that the Soviets perceived that the correlation of forces had turned against the U.S.S.R., that the U.S. was seeking military superiority, and that the chances of the U.S. launching a nuclear first strike—perhaps under cover of a routine training exercise—were growing. We also believe that the U.S. intelligence community did not at the time, and for several years afterwards, attach sufficient weight to the possibility that the war scare was real. As a result, the President was given assessments of Soviet attitudes and actions that understated the risks to the United States. Moreover, these assessments did not lead us to reevaluate our own military and intelligence actions that might be perceived by the Soviets as signaling war preparations.”
This is a damning admission of how close the world had come to nuclear war at that time.
