ON OCTOBER 10, 1983, REAGAN and several advisors watched a private screening of an ABC television drama about the struggle to survive in post-nuclear-war Kansas City. The Day After cost $7 million to make, even after many of its stars decided not to take a salary. Highly graphic in its depiction of both the physical and emotional suffering experienced by a group of families, it left Reagan depressed. Conservatives thought the movie was inflammatory, and the White House was bracing for backlash after the movie’s air date in November, but Reagan wrote in his diary that night that “My own reaction: we have to do all we can . . . to see that there is never a nuclear war.”1 Death weighed on the president’s mind for the rest of the month.
Congress had grown skeptical of the Marine peacekeeping mission in Beirut, which had lasted for more than a year and had a very nebulous mission.2 Two Marines had been killed in August after taking a direct hit from a Lebanese army mortar round. On October 17, Reagan had tearful conversations with the parents, and then the young widow of one of them.3 On October 18, he called Thomas Dine, the executive director of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, to thank him for pressuring Congress to give the president flexibility to keep the troops in the country.
“You know, I turn back to your ancient prophets in the Old Testament and the signs foretelling Armageddon, and I find myself wondering if—if we’re the generation that is going to see that come about,” Reagan told Dine. “I don’t know if you’ve noted any of those prophecies lately, but, believe me, they certainly describe the times we’re going through.”4
That day, Reagan held a National Security Council meeting where intelligence about a potential terrorist attack against the Marines in Lebanon was high on the agenda. In late September, the NSA had intercepted a call from the Iranian ambassador in Damascus confirming that he had passed along permission to attack the US Marines barracks. The US didn’t know when and where.
All the while, Reagan was wrestling with his personnel problems. His best friend, Judge Clark, was on his way out as National Security Advisor. Chief of Staff James Baker wanted the job. Conservatives on his team, including Edwin Meese, resisted. The White House settled on Bud McFarlane as a compromise, and Reagan had to tell Jeane Kirkpatrick, the firebrand conservative who was his emissary to the United Nations, that she would not be getting the job she coveted. He offered her a counselor position in the White House. She declined. Reagan told her he would not accept her no.5
And then, on October 23, a massive truck bomb destroyed the Marine mission, killing 249 American soldiers. Reagan was awakened with the news. The death toll rose throughout the day. US bases around the world upgraded their readiness condition.
The next day, the US sent an invasion force into Grenada, a tiny pearl-shaped island in the southern Caribbean. For years, conservatives had watched warily as Marxist dissidents on the island began a slow creep toward militancy. The Soviet and Cuban military had established beachheads there already. In mid-October they drove the island’s prime minister, Maurice Bishop, from office. Reagan had promised to keep the Western Hemisphere free from Soviet influence. Kirkpatrick, at the United Nations, had taken charge of this promise, and urged Reagan to intervene if Grenada’s government appeared in jeopardy.
There was a technicality: Grenada was a British colony. Queen Elizabeth was the head of state. The Marxist coup had not upset Thatcher; she barely knew where Grenada was. And its leaders had reassured the British foreign office that they would do no harm to British citizens there. Thatcher’s Foreign Secretary said as much in Parliament, insisting that the situation was under control.6
What about the large US Navy presence in the region? Was this a prelude to an invasion? No—the US reassured the British through formal channels that the fleet was there to rescue American citizens, just in case.
Reagan intended to keep the mission a secret from Thatcher to protect the lives of the forces who would secure the island. He sent a last-minute missive to the prime minister suggesting that he was considering an invasion and asked for her thoughts. A few hours later, before she could reply, he gave the execute order. When Thatcher found out, she called Reagan and chewed him out. One Reagan advisor recalls hearing Reagan’s baleful attempts to mollify her. But only “Margaret . . . but Margaret . . .” was able to come out of his mouth.7
Reagan chose to invade Grenada, although the coup’s timing was not his. The consequences of his failure to consult with Thatcher proved costly. On the eve of the deployment of cruise missiles, he had undercut her authority, teaching her the lesson, as one critic told her, “that no undertakings that may be offered by the United States—either as to the use that it might make of missiles stationed in this country or as to the consultations that would precede such use—ought to be relied upon.”8
Relations between the British and the United States, and between Reagan and Thatcher, had reached a new low. The number of antinuclear protestors at a later march in London reached a new high: 400,000. Public opinion was turning against deployment.
In Europe General John R. Calvin had taken command of the Army’s VII Corps in July of 1983. If the Soviets attacked, his 73,000-man infantry, supported by a 100,000-strong logistics army, would be NATO’s first line of defense along West Germany’s border with East Germany and Czechoslovakia. Calvin had served in the infamous Fulda Gap, too, and had a fuller understanding of NATO’s strengths and weaknesses than just about any commander in the field at the time. “We had not done much thinking beyond the first battle of a campaign, believing that we would be reinforced, or we could go nuclear,” he observed. He pushed for more exercise time; the turnover in his unit was so rapid that he had no way to know whether his units understood their wartime responsibilities. He had 5,000 tactical nuclear weapons under his “janitorial” umbrella, as he liked to say, including the custodial units of the 59th Ordinance Brigade. If those warheads were needed in battle, he’d be on the phone to request them.
He would often think about the dilemma he would face if there were ever pressure to “go nuclear.” Here is how he put it later: “Such a decision would have to be political, and in my opinion, would be an impossible choice: if nuclear weapons were not to be used but only threatened, we would be faced with the question of how to survive a massive conventional attack that we believed the Warsaw Pact was capable of mounting. Without timeline political guidance to conduct one form of defense or another, we would not stand a good chance.”
He worried that NATO political leaders did not know enough to know whether they would ever want to use nuclear weapons. He was convinced that the Soviets seemed “distant and enigmatic,” which made them seen more dangerous than they were up close. He resolved to try and meet his counterparts more often. 9
Two weeks before Able Archer, Captain Lee Trolan was summoned to NATO school in Oberramergau, a pastoral village near Munich. SHAPE had revised its nuclear weapons release procedures, and all the custodial commanders had to be taught the new system. Over four days, in between pleasant breakfasts and cocktail hours, he took a refresher course on the NATO nuclear operations policy, learned about the new procedures, and participated in a tabletop exercise. Even decades later, Trolan would not discuss the content of what he learned; he had no reason to believe that the nuclear weapons employment procedures were still classified, but he had sworn an oath to protect this information for life, regardless.
An unclassified syllabus given to Trolan shows that the class was important enough for SACEUR Rogers to have spent time recording a filmed greeting to them. Representatives from all the NATO nuclear commands were there, and the exercise time was quite extensive.10
Two other participants provided a bit more information. One, who asked for anonymity even decades later, said: “The message formats changed from about 30 characters to around 60 or 70. That was for security reasons, because we knew the Soviets had figured out the old format, and because the Pershing deployments meant that we had to be able to convey more information in the message body about targets, especially because they were going to be used for selective strikes.”
The new procedures would be exercised for the first time during the nuclear release phase of Able Archer 83.