During the third week of October, two million people in Europe joined protests against the introduction of Pershing II missiles — and a team of Army Rangers, Navy Seals, and U.S. Marines led an invasion of Grenada, a small island in the Caribbean. The invasion had ostensibly been launched to protect the lives of American citizens and restore order amid the aftermath of a military coup. It also achieved another goal: the overthrow of a Communist regime backed by the Soviet Union and Cuba. Nineteen American soldiers, twenty-five Cubans, and forty-five Grenadians were killed in the fighting. The Soviet Union condemned Operation Urgent Fury as a violation of international law. But it was enormously popular in the United States, boosting President Reagan’s image as a strong, decisive leader. A long time had passed since Americans had been able to celebrate a military victory.
The invasion of Grenada, however, revealed a number of serious problems with the World Wide Military Command and Control System. The Army’s radio equipment proved to be incompatible with that of the Navy and the Marines. According to a Pentagon report, at one point during the fighting, unable to contact the Navy for fire support, “a frustrated Army officer used his AT&T credit card on an ordinary pay telephone to call Ft. Bragg, NC [the headquarters of the 82nd Airborne Division] to have them relay his request.”
The week after the invasion, NATO staged a command-and-control exercise, Able Archer 83. It included a practice drill for NATO’s defense ministers, simulating the procedures to authorize the use of nuclear weapons. The KGB thought that Able Archer 83 might be a cover for a surprise attack on the Soviet Union. The timing of such an attack — a few weeks before the arrival of the Pershing IIs — seemed illogical. Nevertheless, “the KGB concluded that American forces had been placed on alert,” a Soviet agent later wrote, “and might even have begun the countdown to war.” A number of the Soviet Union’s own war plans called for using military exercises as a cover for a surprise attack on Western Europe. While NATO played its war game, Soviet aircraft in Poland and East Germany prepared to counterattack. Able Archer 83 ended uneventfully on November 11—and NATO’s defense ministers were totally unaware that their command-and-control drill had been mistaken for the start of a third world war.
On the evening of November 20, American fears of nuclear war reached their peak, as ABC broadcast The Day After, a made-for-television movie. Directed by Nicholas Meyer, starring Jason Robards, and set in Lawrence, Kansas, the film combined melodrama with a calm, almost documentary account of how the world might end in 1983. Some of the most powerful images in The Day After had nothing to do with mushroom clouds, radiation sickness, or the rubble of a major American city. When Minuteman missiles first appear above Kansas, launched from rural silos there and rising in the sky, the film conveyed the mundane terror of nuclear war, the knowledge that annihilation could come at any time, in the midst of an otherwise ordinary day. People look up, see the missiles departing, realize what’s about to happen, and yet are powerless to stop it. About 100 million Americans watched The Day After, roughly half of the adult population of the United States. And unlike most made-for-television movies, it did not have a happy ending.
The Pershing II missiles arrived in West Germany, and the Soviet Union’s response was purely diplomatic. Its negotiators walked out of arms control talks and didn’t return. The relationship between the two superpowers had reached its lowest point since the dangerous events of 1962. And while billions of dollars were being spent on new strategic weapons in the United States, the safety problems with older ones continued to go unaddressed. Earlier in the year, another B-52 had caught on fire on a runway at Grand Forks Air Force Base. It was undergoing a routine maintenance check, at 9:30 in the morning, when fuel suddenly ignited, created a large fireball, destroyed the plane, and killed five young maintenance workers. No nuclear weapons were involved in the accident. But similar B-52s were being loaded with Mark 28 bombs and Short-Range Attack Missiles every day.
