National Security Archives

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

For more information contact:
William Burr - 202/994-7032

http://www.nsarchive.org/nukevault

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."

Please visit the Archive's Nuclear Vault for more information.

http://www.nsarchive.org/nukevault