Those who present Able Archer as a near miss with nuclear war zero in on a passage in a 1989 memorandum by Lt. Gen. Leonard Perroots, assistant chief of staff for intelligence at U.S. Air Forces Europe during the 1983 exercise. As a U.S. special national intelligence estimate produced in the spring of 1984 stresses, bringing just this small subset of Soviet forces to a heightened alert makes little sense if Moscow were contemplating the prospect of nuclear war: “by confining heightened readiness to selected air units Moscow clearly revealed that it did not in fact think there was a possibility of a NATO attack.” As Gordievsky tells it in a book coauthored with Christopher Andrew, that message led him to conclude that Moscow feared that U.S.