Det danske Fredsakademi
Kronologi over fredssagen og international politik 11.
september 2009 / Timeline September 11, 2009
Version 3.5
10. September 2009, 12. September 2009
09/11/2009
Mohandas Gandhi
starter den ikkevoldelige satyagraha-bevægelse i
Sydafrika,
1906.
09/11/2009
National Security Archive Update, September 11, 2009
Previously Classified Interviews with Former Soviet Officials
Reveal U.S. Strategic Intelligence Failure Over Decades
1995 Contractor Study Finds that U.S. Analysts Exaggerated Soviet
Aggressiveness and Understated Moscow's Fears of a U.S. First
Strike
Washington, DC, September 11, 2009 - During a 1972 command post
exercise, according to top Soviet generals interviewed by Pentagon
contractors at the end of the Cold War, General Secretary Leonid
Brezhnev "trembled" when he was asked to push a launch button,
asking Soviet defense minister Grechko "this is definitely an
exercise?" During the excercise, leaders of the Kremlin listened to
a briefing on the results of a hypothetical war with the United
States, in which a U.S. attack killed 80 million Soviet citizens
and destroyed 85 percent of the country's industrial capacity.
This story appears in a recently declassified two-volume study on
Soviet Intentions, 1965-1985, prepared in 1995 by the Pentagon
contractor BDM Corporation, and published today for the first time
by the National Security Archive. Based on an extraordinarily
revealing series of interviews with former senior Soviet defense
officials -- "unhappy Cold Warriors" -- during the final days of
the Soviet Union, the BDM study puts Soviet nuclear policy in a
fresh light by highlighting the leadership's recognition of the
catastrophe of nuclear conflict, even while it supported
preparations for fighting an unsurvivable war.
BDM's unique interview evidence with former Soviet military
officers, military analysts, and industrial specialists covers a
wide range of strategic issues, including force levels and
postures, targeting and war planning, weapons effects, and the role
of defense industries. BDM staffers compared this new evidence with
mainly official and semi-official U.S. interpretations of Soviet
strategic policy and decision-making during the Cold War. The BDM
analysts identified what they saw as significant failures of
analysis, including:
* "[Erring] on the side of overestimating Soviet aggressiveness"
and underestimating "the extent to which the Soviet leadership was
deterred from using nuclear weapons."
* Seriously misjudging Soviet military intentions, "which had the
potential [to] mislead ... U.S. decision makers in the event of an
extreme crisis."
* "Serious[ly] misunderstanding ... the Soviet decision-making
process" by underestimating the "decisive influence exercised by
the defense industry." That the defense industrial complex, not the
Soviet high command, played a key role in driving the quantitative
arms buildup "led U.S. analysts to ... exaggerate the aggressive
intentions of the Soviets."
* The BDM study also shows that Soviet military high command
"understood the devastating consequences of nuclear war" and
believed that nuclear weapons use had to be avoided at "all costs."
In 1968, a Defense Ministry study showed that Moscow could not win
a nuclear war, even if it launched a first strike. Although Soviet
ideology had insisted that survival was possible, no one in the
leadership believed that.
During the 1970s, Team B critics of CIA intelligence analysis
argued that the Soviets believed that they could win a nuclear war.
According to William Burr, a senior analyst at the National
Security Archive, "these previously secret interviews show that
inflated notions of the Soviet 'present danger' -- such as the Team
B exercise -- were wrong, but that more conventional U.S. analysis
-- Team A -- also misunderstood Soviet nuclear thinking and
decision making."
09/11/2009
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