For information on our schedule and to give up with the latest history news. Next, nate jones, directory of the National Security archives freedom of information act project talks about his new book, able archer 83. A secret history of the nato exercise that almost triggered nuclear war, he explores ronald s thoughts on Nuclear Energy and jones also discusses ofhe discusses the process declassifying the government materials that were the basis of his book. This hourlong event is hosted by the National Archives in washington, d. C. [captions Copyright National cable satellite corp. 2017] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, mr. Jones the first place people look in a newly published book is the index. At the library of congress and other Research Institutions we look at acknowledgment pages and the bibliography also. Looking for ourselves. If you look at the able archer book, you will see different offices. The large portion of documents upon which the author based his story came from the Ronald Reagan and George Bush Library and from the National Archives and other National Archive holdings. I am very proud of all of our staff. Some of whom are in the audience today. It is gratifying to see others do,eciate the work to whether it is helping people navigate through our holdings or as nate noted, breaking a classification logjam to release a critical document. We help researchers uncover the stories of our past and those stories, like todays story of able archer, remind us that history is not just what happened 100 or more years ago, as more and more records are processed and declassified we learn more about our past, even events that happened in our own lifetime. It is time for the featured speaker to come to the stage. Nate is the director of the freedom of National Information act at the George Washington university. He oversees requests and appeals thousands of freedom of information act and requests and appeals each year in is a twoterm member of the federal Advisory Committee that will be meeting here tomorrow. He is also the editor of the National Security archives log and writes about newly declassified documents and policy. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome nate jones. [applause] mr. Jones thank you very much. It is great to be here at the National Archives where i have spent a lot of time researching but also working on freedom of information and declassification policy. I was here for the first time on this stage about eight years ago talking about declassification. There is a funny story i would like to tell. Nara and the declassification center were just Getting Started and one of the first projects was the the classification of the pentagon papers which had publicly already been leaked and were widely available to the public. At the time, the archivist had made the joke that there were just 11 words remaining classified. I was a bit taken aback and i came on the stage and publicly said, i could solve that madlib, i will just go to my library and compare the missing words. Lots of laughs. The nara people were not happy. Eventually, it may have worked. Because through foia, the Nixon Library released very quickly, through a emailed to superiors, we found there is in fact another edition, and we should probably release them before someone at the National Security archives goes around and parades them around like a politician on the fourth of july. That was my first experience. The National Archives on National Classification center declassified the pentagon papers andthey went on and on declassified hundreds of millions of more pages and they go on doing it. We will talk more about classification later on. Their indexing on demand should be a model for all industries. It is great. Tremendous progress over the past eight years getting the secrets out. With that thank you lets talk about able archer 83. What was able archer 83 . According to the nsa, not the National Security archive where i work, the real nsa. An excellent volume on the cold war that is one of the best declassified reads ive read. 19821984 was called quote the most dangerous confrontation since the cuban missile crisis. Able archer 83 was the crux of it. It was a native Nuclear Exercise exercise thatr caused unprecedented military actions in the soviet union and and may have put us on a hair trigger with them according to a u. S. Analysis. In other words, one of the two most dangerous moments of the cold war is largely unknown to the public. In my book, i argued that able archer 83 brought the world unacceptably closer to nuclear war and had a key effect on our Foreign Policy and its effect on the danger helped Ronald Reagan lead us to the end of the cold war. Speaking of president reagan, here is one of his famous notecards. You may know that he always had notecards. Prepared by his staff. He used them and used them well. This is a great document from the reagan president ial library. Going back to able archer 83, others have downplayed the danger or said it is simply not even worth studying. One cia analyst wrote at the time, there is no real danger and wrote afterwards that the cias analysis of the war since the agency had so many military that soviet military books it could judge confidently when it might be building up to a real military confrontation or just rattling pots and pans. The response to able archer 83 was just potbanging. Another wise cia analyst disagreed. Robert gates, who was Deputy Director for intelligence. He said after going through the experience at the time, then through the postmortem and now through the documents, i do not think the soviets were crying wolf. They may not have thought the nato attack was imminent but they seem to believe the situation was very dangerous. Rattling pots and pans, crying wolf, the advisor to the soviet union in 1984, do you think the soviet leader really care us or fear us or is all of the huffing and puffing part of their propaganda . President reagan identified the key question and i think he answered it for himself way to run which i will talk about later. This and as we talk about today, this is what we need to keep in mind, were the soviets really scared or were they bluffing . So, to answer this question, what is a historian to do . When i first started researching this there was quite a bit of criticism about able archer 83. Some described the research as an echo chamber of Inadequate Research and misguided analysis. Circle reference divinity with an overreliance upon scanty evidence. Now, i think they were talking about some of my early work at the time and also they had a good point. If you were to read a history, one of the best histories of the cold war, if you go to able archer, you will see a note that says it marked the second most dangerous time of the cuban missile crisis, but if you followed the footnotes it would go to one or two memoirs, perhaps the gates quote i just read, and leave it at that. No primary source evidence. What is a historian to do . Get to the archives, the president ial libraries. Get to the Cold War International history project and get documents from nato adversaries and allies. Use the freedom of information act and mandatory declassification review. Turn the ice cap. Get them to break the logjam. Share the filings. This is what my book tries to do. It is a narrative and analysis of able archer 83 but also includes the very best primary sources for people to read said so they can make their own decision and conclusion about the danger. So, let us set the scene. Here we have the data from the bulletin atomic scientists put together kindly by wikipedia about the Doomsday Clock which is an estimation of how dangerous the world is coming to nuclear war, or now, environmental dastardly. Catastrophe. In 1983 and 1984 was dangerous. Some have called it the second cold war. Others call it the air of renewed confrontation. Ough gore job as described gorbachev has said it was the most explosive, difficult, and unfavorable since the second world war. I will say it was geopolitical, ideological on the one hand but also nuclear on the other, and that is key. Geopolitically, there was the soviet invasion in 1979. President carters focus on soviet human rights abuses. The United States tilt towards china. This was manifested in boycotting the olympics in both 1980 in moscow and 1984 in los angeles. As important as the ideological and geological reasons was the nuclear reason. And this started with the soviet decision to deploy new missiles on their western border which could reach europe and it escalated the arms race. Later on they admitted inasmuch in meetings, saying this was a mistake. A colleague of mine published a great book about this. The soviets began the euromissile race. Nato responded, deploying missiles into europe. Which were deployed in late november 1983, days after able archer 83 had ended. This was extremely unbalancing to the relative geopolitical and nuclear stability. The reason was that now these the soviets believed that the pershing could reach moscow within 15 minutes. It probably could not but the u. S. Was not telling the soviets that. The pershings could reach russia and further deploy soviet troops within 15 minutes. The griffin could reach moscow in under an hour and could not be detected by radar. So potentially, the euromissiles on both sides and the pershings and the griffins changed the balance are soviets were genuinely fearful of the possibility that they could be hit by a decapitating nuclear attack. That is, all of the work they had done to build up Nuclear Parity and stay just behind the United States in the arms race would be obliterated when the intermediate range missiles were deployed to europe. This fear, this did decapitating fear was the primary focus of able archer 83 and also drove on both sides of the consideration of possible application of strategy known as launch on warning. Today in the United States the American Nuclear posture review, unclassified and available on the web, our current posture launch under attack, scary to talk about. If an adversary launches Nuclear Weapons against us, when they are in the air we will launch arts to retaliate and a 1983 with the intermediate range missiles and Response Time of just minutes, both sides considered using an may have used lunchtime warnings, that is, good intelligence, to figure out when your opponent will launch an attack and then preempt the opponent so that you can maybe possibly survive and possibly even win the war. There are many interviews cited. Soviet and american scientists after the cold war, joking with each other that if you say that you did not study that then you are lying and the other side agreed. Launch of warning is another key driver. A lot about u. S. Nuclear drills today but there is one other famous was which the soviet union practiced in 1983 and according to a member of the general staff, this was the First Time Since world war ii the soviets actually practiced a drill of obtaining information stating the adversary was going to attack and the soviets practiced this preemptive strike it included a Preemptive Nuclear strike so this was on the minds and being practiced. This leads me to what i will like to discuss, something r. Y. An. , aation russian acronym. Nuclear missile attack and russian. This document is one of the ones that get your heart beating. It is a kgb document that actually discusses the creation of the operation and it is quote to strengthen our intelligence work in order to prevent a possible sudden outbreak of war by the enemy. What the operation was was a shift from military satellites and other intelligence towards human intelligence with the aim of possibly preempting a Third Nuclear war. It began in 1979 and was announced in 1981 when the head of the kgb announced it. He said it was because the west was actively preparing for nuclear war. The primary accounts of operation r. Y. A. N until recently were from a highranking soviet kgb official, at one point the number one official that the affected in place and gave a lot of good information to the United States and britain. For a long time he was the primary source about able archer. Now, thanks to the work of the Cold War International history project, there is a very good web hosting of hundreds of documents about the intelligence of operation r. Y. A. N. So what do we know about this . It involved over 300 new positions created in the kgb and even more and satellite countries. These positions monitored indicators that their spies abroad reported. Essentially, there was a binder full of 292 indicators that i will talk about in one second. Spies abroad, in addition to their other duties, had to report back on. Some of these were probably smart, like monitoring Nuclear Missiles sites. Monitoring political figures. Others were probably farfetched. Monitoring blood banks, monitoring priests. The thinking was that if you had enough data, big data as early as 1981, you can input this data and determine what would happen. The soviets also, according to the reports credible reports, had a rudimentary Computer System to track this data and what this meant was there was more work for the agents. They did not complain. They reported. One of the interesting things they reported applies do today. They were tasked with monitoring the state of the constitution declaration and other founding documents at the u. S. National archives. The thinking being that if the imperial elect was going to west would launch a Nuclear Strike they would hide their documents first. That is not unprecedented and it did happen during world war ii. These r. Y. A. N. Watchers going through the documents also, two things you can tell. You can tell where they had good sources and agents within the u. S. Government because there is much better reporting. You can tell from the early point they did a good job reporting on continuity of government operations. Essentially, the plane the president would be entering a nuclear war. Ominously, it includes several indicators that would have been included during able archer 83. This Nuclear Exercise. We will talk about it. Including troop mobilization, changes in communication, used to watch Nuclear Weapons and new methods of transmitting weapons. Of course, r. Y. A. N. Was searching for something that did not exist. Plans for a strike were not in the making. Possible reasons for this were bureaucratic expansion, this would not be the first time in Intelligence Agency created a threat for more work or itself. Possibly socialist dogma. Maybe they believed that socialism was going to lose to capitalism and they should go out with a last gasp. Or maybe it was a scheme to inject r d into espionage because soviets were not having Great Success making computers otherwise. But i think the best explanation was coined by a man who called ofa vicious circle intelligence election assessment were soviet operatives were required to report a large amount of information even if they themselves were skeptical of it. After the Moscow Center received these inflated and incorrect but requested reports, they became duly alarmed by what had been reported and demanded more. The day after. Does anybody remember this . Shifting from secret fear of nuclear war to very public fear of nuclear war. The 1980s, i am sure many here remember clearly. It was not just private fear. It was very public fear. This is an american item i chose to symbolize from 1983. This was a very realistic movie about nuclear war that aired on national television. Ronald reagan actually watch this days before it aired. In his diary, he wrote that it was a very well done movie and left him feeling very depressed. I have spoken with reagan watchers and they say it is probably the only or one of the few i could not find any more instances of him writing fear. He also watched a movie that is a little bit more uplifting than this. Matthew rodericks wargames. And he greatly enjoyed that one as well. Talking about movies, there is another one from the committee from 1983 called threat from the u. K. That was also actually based on parliamentary british about what would actually happen after a nuclear war. Essentially, five generations lost. This fear of nuclear war was widespread in the United States. It was also manifested in protest movements that worked well and largely received the achieved the objective, the Nuclear Freeze movement which also had an effect on president reagan. Here is the president speaking to the evangelical association in orlando. So, the president s rhetoric also mattered. He address the British Parliament and said it would put them on the ash heap of history. He gave this one on speech in orlando in march of 1983 although not cleared by the state department or anyone outside of the white house. It was focused on domestic policy. It had a huge impact on Foreign Policy. He