A recent catalogue of clashes between Russian military ships and aircraft and Nato forces has raised tensions to the most dangerous levels since the Ukraine crisis blew up. 

Even former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachov at the fall of the Berlin Wall celebrations took the opportunity to warn the West about demonising Russia instead of seeking negotiated settlements. 

The people of Europe are once again sleepwalking into a new cold war that can very easily slip into a hot one by accident or design.

In this context it is worth looking back at a moment in history where the world stood on the edge of a nuclear catastrophe. 

The older among us will remember where they were and what they were doing when the Cuban missile crisis erupted in 1962. We all thought our days were numbered and a nuclear world war was about to be unleashed. 

This, though, wasn’t the last such a scare. In 1983 the world also stood on the brink of a nuclear holocaust, but few realised it. Able Archer won’t mean anything to most people.

Ronald Reagan was elected president of the US in 1980 and ushered in a period of aggressive armaments build-up and crusader rhetoric against the “evil empire.” 

He along with his close political ally Margaret Thatcher embarked on a new and dangerous confrontational policy. He surrounded himself with fanatical anti-communist warriors, like Richard Perle (the Prince of Darkness), Dick Cheney, Caspar Weinberger, Paul Wolfowitz and George Bush who were all determined to confront the Soviet Union. 

After years of detente, the Helsinki Accords and a general easing of tension, the world was once again plunged into a new phase of the cold war that threatened to become very hot with these dangerous brinkmanship policies.

In 1979 as part of its medium-range nuclear modernisation programme, Nato began the deployment of Cruise and Pershing II missiles in Europe. 

The first particularly destabilising Pershing missiles were deployed in West Germany in autumn 1983. Because of this provocative escalation and the reduction of launch warning-times, tensions were stretched to breaking point. 

All the more, as the Soviet leadership was absolutely convinced that the US were seriously planning a nuclear surprise attack under the cover of a large-scale manoeuvre.

While Nato moved into the field for its giant Able Archer exercise close to the east-west German border, Soviet nuclear weapons were readied for a preemptive strike. 

At one time, Soviet nuclear bombers were sitting on the tarmac in their East German airbases, engines running, waiting for the order to go. 

If this order had come, if not all-out nuclear war, a nuclear holocaust, at least for Europe and Britain, would have ensued.

We were spared this end largely due to the efforts of one man — Rainer Rupp, who at the time held a top job in Nato headquarters in Brussels, but at
the same time was secretly working for the GDR foreign intelligence service HVA. 

Richard Perle, state secretary in the Pentagon for planning and policy, was of the opinion that a limited nuclear war against the Soviet Union could be fought and won without massive damage to the US. 

Back in the early 1980s, the US knew that the Soviet Union had an advantage in terms of conventional weaponry as well as the large size of its armed forces and would prevail in a non-nuclear war scenario. 

In the autumn of 1983 the worst-case scenario looked as if it was about to unfold. 

Reagan’s crusader rhetoric and his Star Wars programme, together with the decision to station Pershings in Europe, had raised tensions. 

The Soviet Union now had only minutes of warning in the event of a nuclear attack. It considered that Nato’s previous policy of defence preparation had now been transformed into one of waging a pre-emptive war. 

Recent Russian history gave the Soviet leadership sound reason to fear such an attack. It had already experienced surprise invasions into its territory during the second world war, which cost the USSR 27 million lives, and it didn’t wish to be caught out again.

Able Archer took place in that context. The planned combined Nato exercises for the autumn of 1983 were viewed by the Soviets as a pretext for a first strike. 

They were not prepared to wait for a first strike to hit them and they desperately needed to know urgently if such a plan was indeed about to be put into practice. 

The exercises were carried out under very realistic conditions and the scenario from Moscow’s perspective appeared to be a preparation for a first nuclear strike. 

The manoeuvres took place over 10 days, beginning on November 2 and involved all Western Europe. The aim was a simulation of a co-ordinated deployment of nuclear weapons and their use. 

What was particularly alarming were the new elements in the exercise — middle-range nuclear weapons were brought onto the field for the first time and absolute radio silence was maintained, and a new code format was introduced for communications. 

For the first time, leaders of all Nato countries were involved, which also alerted Moscow to the unusually high political significance of the exercises. 

Moscow also thought, wrongly, that the US had put its troops on the highest alarm stage, Defcon 1. In reality Defcon 1 was only simulated during the exercise.

Convinced of an imminent US attack, the Soviet Union put its own strategic nuclear forces on red alert. The smallest mistake would have unleashed a catastrophe. 

Even Gorbachov later declared that the situation at the time was as dangerous as the Cuban missile crisis, but with an even greater nuclear potential.

Years later, at a conference on international espionage in 2005 in Berlin, the former CIA head for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, Milton Bearden, congratulated the former head of East German foreign intelligence HVA, the legendary Markus Wolf, saying that thanks to his excellently placed source in Nato HQ in Brussels, peace had been saved in 1983, as he had “been able to calm the recipients in Moscow” and in this way, avoid a nuclear war.