Forecasting Nuclear War:An Historical Research Of Soviet Operation RYAN(1981-1991)

Since late 1970s,Soviet leadership's understanding of the Western nuclear threat was increasingly realistic and pessimistic.On the one hand,the Soviets saw the power of the West was booming,which may break the the strategic balance built up in the era of Detente.On the other hand,they saw the intensified confrontation,a willingness to use military force,even an inclination to wage a limited nuclear war in the West.As a response,the Soviets launched a large-scale missile modernization program,aiming at providing its leaders with much advance warning of a surprise nuclear attack.Meanwhile,Soviet intelligence started some intelligence-gathering operations to build up an improved early warning system.After Ronald Reagan took office,he pursued an even tougher policy toward the Soviet Union.As a result,some departments in the USSR thought more seriously about the possibility of a surprise nuclear strike.The intelligence agencies and the leading circles of the military feared of the underestimate of the danger,perceiving that the correlation of forces had turned against them,that the chances of the West launching a nuclear attack were growing.In contrast,the officers in Foreign Ministry and Department for International Information of the CPSU who had direct contact with the West were more optimistic.However,the hardliners had much more political powers,what pushed the USSR into a vigilance side.Confronting the real danger of the possibility of a Western surprise nuclear strike,KGB chairman Yuri Andropov launched Operation RYAN(Raketno Yademoye Napadenie),a special intelligence program to detect such signs in May 1981.In his design,Operation RYAN had dual aims.One was making no "surprise".It meant that the intelligence would give advance warning when the West was making decisions of launching an attack,which would increase the response time of the Soviets greatly.The other was compensating the insufficiency of its technical intelligence,making the strategic security of USSR more reliable.The action mode of Operation RYAN had three aspects:Comprehensive intelligence-gathering activities.The Soviet foreign intelligence was instructed to collect the information in a wide variety of spheres-political,economic,military,civil defense and activities of intelligence services,for the purpose of displaying a complete image of the nuclear war preparation of the West.Secondly.Counter-intelligence activities.The Soviet intelligence would prevent their Western counterparts from using all kinds of agents to conduct infiltration and subversion in USSR.Thirdly.Active measures.The Soviets would support the peace movements and anti-nuclear movements in the West in various ways.Furthermore,the Soviets intensified the intelligence cooperation with its Warsaw Pact counterparts,establishing a vast network of intelligence and early warning.Since the start of Operation RYAN,Moscow dispatched various instructions to Residences overseas to reaffirm its priority and refine the indicators of intelligence-gathering.Nevertheless,the initial phase of Operation RYAN had many flaws due to overly broad scope of intelligence collection and the underestimate of intelligence analysis.By 1983,a sequence of crisis broke into Soviet-US relations,tensing the Soviet intelligence community and policymakers and reaching its peak in Able Archer 83 incidence in November.From the point of view of Soviet nuclear strategy in this stage,they even had an initiative of launching a preemptive strike against the West.At the same time,American intelligence community gradually knew some details about Operation RYAN and the Soviet nuclear war scare.But they didn't warn their decision-makers that the policy toward the USSR was counterproductive.From their prospective,these actions and measures were just a well-planned propaganda war,and the Soviet leaderships were not really scare about an American nuclear attack.As a consequence,US intelligence reaffirmed their erroneous conclusions in several important reports in this stage.More seriously,they didn't change their mind until 1990.Despite the misjudgment of the US intelligence,President Reagan seemed to realize the seriousness of the Soviets' paranoid of nuclear war earlier.He decided to relax the Soviets in late 1983 to early 1984,which furthered the U.S.-Soviet rapprochement in the 1980s.Operation RYAN also experienced some profound changes in 1984.For one thing,Soviet intelligence modified the operation,emphasizing on the supplementation,amendment and refinement of the indicators;the augment of functions division between Warsaw Pact countries;the enhancement of technical intelligence;the promotion of overall planning and coordination;the perfection of intelligence analysis.For another,the priority of Operation RYAN was slightly downgraded as Soviet leaderships determined to ease their tensions with the West by negotiation.After Mikhail Gorbachev entered the Kremlin in March 1985,the USSR pursued the diplomatic policy so call "the new thought" while introducing a set of significant reforms in the country,which had relaxed the tight relationship between USSR and Western countries.In the background of thawing,Operation RYAN still functioned during Gorbachev years.In this period,KGB strengthened its cooperation with Stasi,the Ministry of State Security of GDR,imposing more tasks on the latter.With implements of Openness(glasnost)in KGB,the Soviet intelligence was not as intense as before,further weakening the status of Operation RYAN in 1988.KGB was ordered to be reorganized entirely after the August Coup of 1991.Consequently,Yevgeny Primakov,the head of Soviet foreign intelligence,decided to cancel Operation RYAN.