Chilling new evidence that Britain and America came close to provoking the Soviet Union into launching a nuclear attack has emerged in former classified documents written at the height of the Cold War.
British government memos and briefing papers released under the U.K.'s Freedom of Information Act, which creates a public "right of access" to information held by public authorities, reveal that a major war games exercise, Operation Able Art, conducted in November 1983 by the U.S. and its NATO allies was so realistic it made the Russians believe that a nuclear strike on its territory was a real possibility.
When intelligence filtered back to the British Conservative government on the Russians' reaction to the exercise, the prime minister at the time, Margaret Thatcher, ordered her officials to lobby the Americans to make sure that such a mistake could never happen again. Anti-nuclear proliferation campaigners have credited the move with changing how the U.K. and the U.S. thought about their relationship with the Soviet Union and beginning a thaw in relations between East and West.