The Bomb: Presidents, Generals, and the Secret History of Nuclear War

by Fred Kaplan

American intelligence agencies were watching these Soviet moves, just as Soviet agencies were watching the Americans. Ordinarily, when the Soviets took such actions, the agencies would notify the Joint Chiefs or the secretary of defense or, if things looked particularly dicey, the president—and onward and upward the escalation might spiral. But a three-star general named Leonard Perroots, the deputy chief of staff for intelligence at the U.S. Air Force’s European headquarters in Germany, decided to do nothing. He’d been apprehensive about Able Archer 83, viewed it as needlessly provocative, and so interpreted the Soviets’ actions not as a threat but as a rational, defensive response to what they saw as an American threat. Six weeks earlier, Lieutenant Colonel Petrov, the Soviet air defense officer who decided not to report the detection of an apparent U.S. missile attack, might have averted war by violating protocol. Now Lieutenant General Perroots, the American intelligence officer monitoring Able Archer, may well have done the same.