In 1983, the United States and the Soviet Union came dangerously close to nuclear war. That was the conclusion of a highly classified report issued in 1990 by the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, or PFIAB.
The board, which conducts oversight of the U.S. intelligence community for the White House, interviewed over 75 American and British officials and examined scads of intelligence assessments and other official documents from the early 1980s. The report it produced, entitled “The Soviet ‘War Scare,’ ” served as a retrospective assessment of what many believe was the most dangerous period of the Cold War since the Cuban Missile Crisis.
The PFIAB’s analysis of the war scare begins by discussing Soviet strategic vulnerabilities. By the early 1980s, the Soviets had developed new over-the-horizon radars and launch detection satellites that were capable of giving them 15 to 30 minutes warning in the event of a U.S. nuclear attack. However, the impending deployment of U.S. intermediate-range Pershing-2 missiles to Europe created a new vulnerability for the Soviet Union because the Pershing-2s had the ability to strike hardened targets in the western USSR in as little as eight minutes, too little time for the Soviet leadership to react.
There were also concerns among many in Moscow that the nation’s political turmoil left it vulnerable. The death of ailing Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev in 1982 and the poor health of his successor, Yuri Andropov, who died in early 1984, raised doubts about whether or not the nation’s political leadership would be up to the task of making a timely decision about how to respond if a U.S. nuclear attack were detected. According to the PFIAB report, “Soviet nuclear release authority during the war scare period (1980-1984) was held captive to the tumultuous series of leadership successions at the very top.”
The board’s assessment also discusses the Soviets’ reliance on VRYAN, a computer program created in 1979 intended to provide an empirical assessment of the risk of a U.S. first strike based on a broad array of military, political, and economic indicators.
The acronym VRYAN stands for Sudden Nuclear Missile Attack in Russian. The underlying belief was that if the United States were ever to achieve “decisive, overall superiority” against the Soviet Union, it could be tempted to launch a first strike against the USSR.
The program’s designers assessed a value of 100 to U.S. economic, military and political power, and they believed that as long as Soviet geopolitical power was 60 or higher, the USSR would be safe from attack. However, VRYAN’s conclusions indicated that Soviet power was declining rapidly relative to that of the United States and was projected to fall to 45 by 1984.