Martin Folly - Historical Dictionary of U.S. Diplomacy during the Cold War

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Historical Dictionaries of Diplomacy and Foreign Relations

Jon Woronoff, Series Editor

U.S. Diplomacy from the Civil War to World War I, by Kenneth J. Blume, 2005.

United StatesChina Relations, by Robert Sutter, 2006.

United StatesLatin American Relations, by Joseph Smith, 2007.

United StatesJapan Relations, by John Van Sant, Peter Mauch, and Yoneyuki Sugita, 2007.

United StatesMiddle East Relations, by Peter L. Hahn, 2007.

U.S. Diplomacy since the Cold War, by Tom Lansford, 2007.

United StatesSoutheast Asia Relations, by Donald E. Weatherbee, 2008.

United StatesRussian/Soviet Relations, by Norman E. Saul, 2009.

United StatesAfrica Relations, by Robert Anthony Waters Jr., 2009.

AngloAmerican Relations, by Sylvia Ellis, 2009.

U.S. Diplomacy from World War I through World War II, by Martin Folly and Niall Palmer, 2010.

Chinese Foreign Policy, by Robert Sutter, 2011.

U.S. Diplomacy from the Revolution to Secession, by Debra J. Allen, 2012.

British Foreign Policy, by Peter Neville, 2013.

U.S. Diplomacy during the Cold War, by Martin Folly, 2015.

Historical Dictionary of U.S. Diplomacy during the Cold War

Martin Folly

ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD

Lanham Boulder New York Toronto Plymouth, UK

Published by Rowman & Littlefield

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Copyright 2015 by Martin Folly

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Folly, Martin H., 1957

Historical dictionary of U.S. diplomacy during the Cold War / Martin Folly. p. cm. -- (Historical dictionaries of diplomacy and foreign relations)

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 978-0-8108-5605-9 (cloth : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-4422-4215-9 (ebook) 1. United States--Foreign relations--1945-1989--Dictionaries. 2. Cold War--Diplomatic history--Dictionaries. I. Title.

E744.F74 2015

327.73009'04503--dc23

2014023391

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

The war scare that developed around the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) exercise code-named Able Archer 83 has been seen by some analysts as one of the points when the Cold War came closest to escalating into a nuclear exchange. The background to the crisis was the program of the Ronald Reagan administration called Psyops. This involved using aircraft and ships to get very close to the defended airspace of the bloc controlled by the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), triggering Soviet defense protocols, which could then be observed. Together with the harsh anti-Soviet rhetoric of the early years of the administration, the large and very public increase in the size and modernization of U.S. armed forces, the deployment of Pershing II missiles to Western Europe, and the public announcement of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), the aging leadership in the USSR was increasingly apprehensive that the United States might be in the process of abandoning the stability of mutually assured destruction and arms limitations of the dtente era, and might actually be contemplating a first strike. Overseas agents of the Soviet intelligence service (KGB) were alerted to report any signs that this might be happening.

Able Archer 83 was a sophisticated simulation exercise involving U.S. and European forces and leaders, mimicking the processes involved in moving to the highest level of defense readiness below actual war, known as defense condition 1 (DEFCON 1). It began on 2 November 1983. This was reported by KGB agents, who themselves understood that it was an exercisebut Soviet practice was for their agents to report data but not their own analysis, which would be done at the center in Moscow. Consequently, there was some panic in Moscow for the days of the exercise, only relaxed when the exercise ended on 11 November. British agent Oleg Gordievsky, one of the KGB officers making the reports, told Great Britain and the United States of the misinterpretation that had taken place in the Kremlin. There is some evidence to suggest that Reagan was surprised to hear that the Soviet leaders seriously thought that the United States would attack, but that the revelation, and other indications he had at the time of Soviet jumpiness, had an influence on the shift in his policies from the start of 1984 toward reviving arms limitation discussions and seeking to defuse the nuclear tensions that could quite easily have escalated dangerously in November 1983. See also .

Creighton Abrams graduated from West Point in 1936. He distinguished himself in World War II as a tank unit commander in the Third Army in the European theater. He served on the Army General Staff (19451946) and at Fort Knox as head of the tactics department of the armored school (19461948) and commanded a tank battalion, followed by a regiment, in Western Europe (19491952). He attended the Army War College in 1953. He served in Korea from 1953 to 1954. He then had a series of postings in the United States, at Fort Knox and the Pentagon, rising to be major general in 1960, when he became commander of Third Armored Division.

Abrams was deputy chief of staff for operations in the Pentagon (19621963), then commanded V Corps in Europe (19631964). Promoted to general, he then became vice chief of staff of the army and then was appointed deputy to General