1983 – THE BRINK OF APOCALYPSE

[dipsydoodle]

Documentary shown on UK TV's Channel 4 tonight. I believe it may already have been shown in the USA under the name
SOVIET WAR SCARE 1983 last autumn.

“This was more dangerous than the Cuban Missile Crisis” declares an interviewee in Flashback’s dramatic new Cold War drama-doc airing on Discovery Times on September 19th.

This major film represents 18 months extensive research into the events of November 1983 when leading figures in the Soviet Union thought they were about to come under nuclear attack from the West. And it follows the Soviets as they prepared for a full scale nuclear retaliation against an unsuspecting United States and western Europe.

“We may have been at the brink of nuclear war and not even known it,” declares Robert Gates, a key interviewee for the programme. Gates was deputy director of intelligence of the CIA at the time. The interview with him was recorded by Flashback in October 2006. In the following month Gates replaced Donald Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense and is now one of the most powerful figures in the United States.

http://www.flashbacktelevision.com/productions/1983-Apocalypse.html

Further background information on preceeding events, September 26th that year, was provided by the Dail Mail.

The alert on September 26th, 1983 had been a false one. Later, it was discovered that what the satellite's sensors had picked up and interpreted as missiles in flight was nothing more than high-altitude clouds.
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The year was 1983 and - as a history documentary in a primetime slot on Channel 4 next weekend vividly shows - the next six weeks would be the most dangerous the world has ever experienced.
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'We were ready for the Third World War,' said Captain Viktor Tkachenko, who commanded a Soviet missile base at the time. 'If the U.S. started it.'

Robert Gates - then the CIA's deputy director of intelligence, later its head and now defence secretary in George Bush's government - recalled: 'We may have been on the brink of war and not known it.'
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=505009&in_page_id=1770

more here too : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Able_Archer_83 I have a feeling that's been carefully edited.

The real spooky bit was hearing that each of the Russian missiles carried a mulitutude of warhead , either seven or ten I think , targeted at all of the USA's major cities. They came quite closing to launching them.

[Itchinjim]

1. It probably didn't help matters any that Reagan was banging the war drums.

The Russians had every reason to be paranoid.