12/27/2023 0 Comments Us nuclear stockpile 1983 to 2013![]() Strangelove” ( KGB: The Inside Story 589). As Gordievsky remembered, “Under Guk’s sometimes alcoholic direction, there were moments when the British end of Operation Ryan more closely resembled the Marx Brothers than Dr. It can be assumed that Soviet residencies across Europe and in the United States received similar nonsensical instructions. The KGB also considered any dramatic change in the number of lights on in buildings at night and the price of blood at donor centers (despite the fact that no one paid for blood in the United Kingdom) to be credible indications of a potential nuclear attack. The KGB officers in London were ordered to surveil British government officials, determine their routines, and notify Moscow if they were behaving out of the ordinary. “The result was that RYAN created a vicious spiral of intelligence-gathering and evaluation, with foreign stations feeling obliged to report alarming information even if they did not believe it” ( Next Stop Execution 261). “I quickly discovered that my colleagues in the PR Line regarded RYAN with some skepticism…yet none wanted to lose face and credit at the Centre by contradicting the First Chief Directorate’s assessment,” he recalled. ![]() Based on his testimony, it is evident that the operation had flawed principles from its inception. Most of the information on RYAN available to the public today comes from Gordievsky, who was stationed at the Soviet embassy in London at the time. As KGB General Oleg Kalugin recalled, “The slogan” of RYAN was “do not miss the moment when the West is about to launch war.” According to top secret KGB documents from defector Oleg Gordievsky, “The fact that the adversary maintains a considerable part of his strategic forces in a state of operational readiness…makes it essential to discover signs of preparation for RYAN at a very early stage, before the order is given to the troops to use nuclear weapons” ( Instructions from the Centre 75). Operation RYAN primarily relied on Soviet officers stationed abroad to determine if and when an American attack was coming. Andropov announced that the KGB was launching an intelligence program, Operation RYAN, which was an acronym for Raketno-Yadernoe Napadenie, or “nuclear missile attack.” Yuri Andropov, the head of the KGB and the future General Secretary, furthermore explained that the Reagan administration was preparing for a possible preemptive nuclear strike against the Soviet Union. The zenith of this escalation arguably came in 1983, when a NATO training exercise almost prompted nuclear war.Īt a secret meeting of top Soviet officials in May 1981, General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev condemned Reagan, whose aggressive rhetoric was decidedly anti-communist. The election of President Ronald Reagan in 1980 saw the return of heightened Cold War tensions after a period of détente during the previous decade.
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