WarGames for Real: How One 1983 Exercise Nearly Triggered WWIIIhttps://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/11/wargames-for-real-how-one-1983-exercise-nearly-triggered-wwiii/"Let's play Global Thermonuclear War."Thirty-two years ago, just months after the release of the movie WarGames, the world came the closest it ever has to nuclear Armageddon. In the movie version of a global near-death experience, a teenage hacker messing around with an artificial intelligence program that just happened to control the American nuclear missile force unleashes chaos. In reality, a very different computer program run by the Soviets fed growing paranoia about the intentions of the United States, very nearly triggering a nuclear war.
The software in question was a KGB computer model constructed as part of Operation RYAN (РЯН), details of which were obtained from Oleg Gordievsky, the KGB's London section chief who was at the same time spying for Britain's MI6.
Named for an acronym for "Nuclear Missile Attack" (Ракетное Ядерное Нападение), RYAN was an intelligence operation started in 1981 to help the intelligence agency forecast if the US and its allies were planning a nuclear strike. The KGB believed that by analyzing quantitative data from intelligence on US and NATO activities relative to the Soviet Union, they could predict when a sneak attack was most likely.
As it turned out, Exercise Able Archer '83 triggered that forecast. The war game, which was staged over two weeks in November of 1983, simulated the procedures that NATO would go through prior to a nuclear launch. Many of these procedures and tactics were things the Soviets had never seen, and the whole exercise came after a series of feints by US and NATO forces to size up Soviet defenses and the downing of Korean Air Lines Flight 007 on September 1, 1983. So as Soviet leaders monitored the exercise and considered the current climate, they put one and one together. Able Archer, according to Soviet leadership at least, must have been a cover for a genuine surprise attack planned by the US, then led by a president possibly insane enough to do it.
While some studies, including an analysis some 12 years ago by historian Fritz Earth, have downplayed the actual Soviet response to Able Archer,
a newly published declassified 1990 report from the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB) to President George H. W. Bush obtained by the National Security Archive suggests that the danger was all too real. The document was classified as Top Secret with the code word UMBRA, denoting the most sensitive compartment of classified material, and it cites data from sources that to this day remain highly classified. When combined with previously released CIA, National Security Agency (NSA), and Defense Department documents,
this PFIAB report shows that only the illness of Soviet leader Yuri Andropov—and the instincts of one mid-level Soviet officer—may have prevented a nuclear launch."Nuclear Missile Attack" (Ракетное Ядерное Нападение), RYAN PFIAB Report: http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/nukevault/ebb533-The-Able-Archer-War-Scare-Declassified-PFIAB-Report-Released/https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/nukevault/ebb533-The-Able-Archer-War-Scare-Declassified-PFIAB-Report-Released/2012-0238-MR.pdf... According to the declassified PFIAB item, CIA analysts reported that by 1981 the increasing shift in the strategic balance and the deterioration of the relationship between the US and the USSR led the Soviet leadership to believe there was "an increased threat of war and increased likelihood of the use of nuclear weapons." After Reagan took office in 1981, the Soviet leadership pushed on the USSR's intelligence apparatus to make sure they were ready to act if Reagan did the insane and was preparing a surprise attack.
Yuri Andropov, at that time head of the KGB, told a group of KGB officers in May of 1981 that the US was actively preparing for war against the Soviet Union.
He believed in a possible, surprise US nuclear first strike, and his solution was to enhance the RYAN program fast.Development of the RYAN computer model began in the mid-1970s, and by the end of the decade the KGB convinced the Politburo that the software was essential to make an accurate assessment of the relationship between the USSR and the United States. While it followed prior approaches to analysis used by the KGB, the pace of Western technological advancements and other factors made it much more difficult to keep track of everything affecting the "correlation of forces" between the two sides.
Even if it was technologically advanced, the thinking behind RYAN was purely old-school, based on the lessons learned by the Soviets from World War II. It used a collection of approximately 40,000 weighted data points based on military, political, and economic factors that Soviet experts believed were decisive in determining the course of the war with Nazi Germany. The fundamental assumption of RYAN's forecasting was that the US would act much like the Nazis did—if the "correlation of forces" was decisively in favor of the US, then it would be highly likely that the US would launch a surprise attack just as Germany did with
Operation Barbarossa.The forecast that RYAN spit out was, for all the model's complexity, very simple. The system used the US' power as a fixed scale, measuring the Soviet position as a percentage score based on all the data points. RYAN's model was constantly updated with new data from the field, and the RYAN score report was sent once a month to the Politburo. Anything above a 70 was acceptable, but the experts who built the system believed that a score of 60 or above meant the Soviet Union was safe from surprise attack. Anything lower was bad news.
In 1981, the score was dipping below 60, so Andropov pushed for enhanced data points to be added to RYAN to improve its accuracy. In May, he ordered the creation of a special "institute" within the KGB to develop the additional military intelligence input requirements. ...
... However the KGB decided to use these data points, it did not make things better. As soon as RYAN was updated with the new information, it immediately started churning out bad news. This only fueled demand for more and better data to feed the model. In a tasking communique to field officers in the US and Western Europe, KGB headquarters said: ...
... It didn't help much that President Reagan had essentially given the US Navy and Air Force carte blanche ability to screw with the Soviets' heads. Soon after being sworn in, Reagan signed off on a series of psychological warfare operations against the Soviet Union. The Air Force flew bombers up over the North Pole and out of bases in Europe and Asia to come close to Soviet airspace then turn off just as they approached the border. The Navy staged multiple operations and exercises in places where the fleet had never gone before, all in close proximity to major Soviet military and industrial sites.
In the summer of 1981, the aircraft carrier USS Eisenhower and an accompanying force of 82 US, Canadian, Norwegian, and British ships used a combination of deceptive lighting and other practices, radio silence, and electronic warfare to sneak through what is known as the Greenland-Iceland-United Kingdom (GIUK) gap and into the North Sea. The initiative even took advantage of cloud cover to evade Soviet satellites. When Soviet maritime patrol planes finally found them, the carrier's fighter wing staged simulated attacks on the "Bear" patrol planes as they were performing in-flight refueling.
All of these details were fed into RYAN, and they made the Soviet Politburo very, very nervous. This sense of dread filtered down. Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov, the chief of the general staff of the Soviet military, called for moving the entire country to a "war footing" in preparation for a complete military mobilization. A lieutenant colonel acting as an instructor at Moscow's Civil Defense Headquarters told civilians that the Soviet military "intended to deliver a preemptive strike against the US, using 50 percent of its warheads," according to the PFIAB report. And the KGB issued an order to all departments of its foreign intelligence arm to increase collection efforts even further, all because there was information indicating NATO was preparing for "a third world war."
With Brezhnev's death on November 10, 1982, the RYAN number likely slipped into the red. ... In the Soviet military, no one was sure who had nuclear release authority until Andropov was named as Brezhnev's successor on November 15.
Andropov had a fever for more RYAN, and the KGB responded by creating an entire new workforce in its stations at Soviet embassies in the West dedicated to feeding it. In February of 1983, KGB headquarters sent a cable to its London section chief, telling him that he was being sent a new agent with one job—feeding RYAN military data.
London
Comrade Yermakov
[A. V. Guk]
(strictly personal)
Permanent Operational Assignment to Uncover NATO Preparations for a Nuclear Missile Attack on the USSR ...
... Pretty much everything the Reagan administration and the US military did in 1983—along with some of the things the Soviets thought that they had done—pushed the buttons on RYAN. ...... read the list
And starting in September, NATO staged its annual series of elaborate war games known as Autumn Forge,
culminating in a nuclear war game called Exercise Able Archer '83. It began with a massive airlift of 16,000 US troops to Europe on 139 flights, all under radio silence. The Soviets had never seen anything like it.
As if all the tension wasn't enough,
on September 26, 1983 the Oko early warning system reported twice that US ballistic missiles had been launched. Lt. Colonel Stanislav Petrov, the watch officer in the Soviet Air Defense Forces' command bunker outside Moscow that night, made a gut call that the launch warnings were a malfunction. (It was later determined the warnings were caused by the way the sun bounced off high-altitude clouds). If Petrov had followed procedures in place, Andropov would have been alerted of a nuclear launch and an immediate launch of ICBMs would have been ordered.
During this period, the RYAN score dropped precipitously.
A report from early in 1984 placed the RYAN score at 45; it may have dipped even lower during the fall of 1983. Any numbers in this range would have likely pushed Soviet paranoia to the edge.Some KGB operatives objected to the analyses that they kept getting back from headquarters of the situation—being more familiar with how the West operates, they believed there was no evidence that there was an actual plan to launch a surprise attack. "None of the political reporting officers who concentrated on RYAN believed in the immediacy of the threat—especially a US surprise attack," the PFIAB report records.
In fact, the demand for "raw" intelligence rather than analysis—in a system that placed political incentive for even more alarming raw data—was at the root of the "war panic" that reached its peak with the beginning of Able Archer '83, the culmination of the Autumn Forge exercise. Over 40,000 NATO troops were on the move across Europe under command using encrypted communications and often operating under radio silence.
... the Politburo ultimately decided that Able Archer was, in fact, a cover for an actual surprise nuclear attack. They began acting accordingly.
... Helicopters ferried nuclear warheads to be loaded into weapons and aircraft. Missile and air forces were put on a round-the-clock 30-minute alert. Soviet strike fighter-bombers in East Germany and Poland were loaded with nuclear weapons. About 70 SS-20 missiles were put on ready alert with warheads loaded. And ballistic missile subs were ordered to disperse from port beneath the Arctic ice cap in preparation for an incoming attack.But the next day, Andropov (already in questionable health) became seriously ill and dropped out of the public eye. Three months later, he would die of renal failure. As Andropov became incapacitated, there was near panic that this would be the moment the US was waiting for to strike. At the same time, there was confusion over who could actually order a pre-emptive nuclear strike in his absence.
On November 11, after testing new procedures for signaling authority to launch a nuclear attack and walking NATO forces up from normal readiness to a simulated General Alert (DEFCON 1) and a full-scale simulated release of nuclear weapons, Able Archer '83 concluded. Thus, the Soviets ended their alert
...
RYAN is a dramatic example of how analytic systems can lead their users astray. It adds resonance to the types of fears that WarGames (and Terminator a year later) tapped into—that artificial intelligence connected to weapons of war could be a very bad thing.While we haven't exactly hooked up a WOPR or Skynet to the ballistic missile network quite yet, the intelligence community of the US has increasingly turned to machine learning, expert systems, and analytics to drive its identification of targets of interest.
Recent artificial research by Google has demonstrated how machine learning systems can go wrong when fed random data, finding patterns that aren't there—a behavior they called "inceptionism." Imagine, then, if an artificial intelligence system started looking into the emptiness of its data feed and started seeing enemies everywhere.https://ai.googleblog.com/2015/06/inceptionism-going-deeper-into-neural.html?m=1Perhaps we should remember Operation RYAN the next time there's a conversation about letting autonomous systems control weapons—no matter what the caliber. Maybe we should all have AI stick to chess for a while longer.