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Last Updated: Jan 4, 2008 - 12:28:54 PM |
A documentary titled 1983: The Brink Of Apocalypse is to be shown in Britain on Channel 4 on Saturday January 5, at 7.30pm, the Daily Mail reports. The paper looks back at the real events in 1983 covered in the film when six weeks in September and October were the most dangerous the world has ever experienced. A false nuclear strike alert on September 26, 1983 was caused by nothing more than high-altitude clouds that had been picked up by a satellite's sensors and interpreted as missiles in flight. Stanislav Petrov, a lieutenant-colonel in the military intelligence section of the Soviet Union's secret service, may have prevented all out nuclear war between the US and the USSR, the paper marks. Instead of calling an alert that within minutes would have had Soviet missiles launched in a retaliatory strike, Petrov decided to wait and the warning lights went off.
Convinced of Washington's evil intentions, Soviet leader, Yuri Andropov, stepped up Operation RYAN, during which KGB agents around the world were instructed to send back any and every piece of information they could find that might add to the 'evidence' that the US was planning a nuclear strike. A routine ten-day exercise codenamed Operation Able Archer to test NATOs military communications in the event of war, beginning on November 2, 1983, was the event that nearly triggered catastrophe, The Daily Mail writes. Top priority 'flash telegrams' went to Gordievsky and others in KGB stations around the world demanding 'evidence' that this exercise was a disguise for a real nuclear first-strike.
What saved the situation were two spies, one on each side, the paper points out. Gordievsky, the KGB man in London, who was really a double agent working for British Intelligence, warned MI5 and the CIA that Able Archer had put Soviet leaders in a dangerous frame of mind. Meanwhile, an East German spy, Topaz - real name Rainer Rupp – who had infiltrated the NATO hierarchy at a high level, was asked by Moscow urgently to confirm that the West was about to go to war. His message back was that NATO was planning no such thing.
Source:Ocnus.net 2007
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