Forced Hand Incident
The Forced Hand Incident was a major event in the world of the Chain Breakers and is thought to be the most overt of the many causes of the deviation between their history and our own. The incident took place from the 23rd through the 25th of June, 1984, and was the closest the cold war came go going hot. In most contemporary estimations of history the incident was a conflict between the Game of Stakes NATO Powers and the Warsaw Pact; in reality it was a conflict between those powers and the so-called Third Power. Though a bloodless moment in human history it was a major turning point, marking the changing of the age between the Game of Stakes and the Slow Burn eras. Owing to the effects of the historical fog-of-war, there is a broad gap between the public understanding of these events and the shadow history.
Public Understanding
Since the incident served to end the Game of Stakes era and begin the Slow Burn, the evolution of understanding of these events was largely shaped by the passage of the Slow Burn era. The version represented below is more representative of how a Corporate Wars-era person would understand the period, bearing in mind that it took place outside of living memory, a century or more before the person was even born. Faciltators setting games in the Slow Burn era or near to the Forced Hand Incident are encouraged to play fast and loose with the public understanding; it's not quite the granular reality of the event anyway.
Nuclear Postures in the Cold War
Prior to the Forced Hand Incident, the world had been in a period of Cold War, with an arms race (including and most prominently the development of nuclear weapons) between the two major world powers - the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), itself largely headed by the United States of America, and the so-called Warsaw Pact powers, largely headed by the United Socialist Soviet Republics. This created an atmosphere of fear and tension. Nuclear tests being highly difficult to keep secret, and the results often being highly propagandized, the public in both hemispheres was largely aware that at any moment, nuclear war could break out between the world powers and lead to widespread catastrophe, possibly including the end of all recognizable human civilization on earth, if not the destruction of life on earth itself.
Prior to this event there had been several "false starts" or near misses where in the tense wee hours of various days, military personnel and high-ranking political figures anxiously watched their clocks ticking and begged for the Armageddon that appeared to be beginning to not come to pass. Owing to the so-called Red Box Network, rapid communication between the USA's capital at Washington, D.C., and the USSR capital in Moscow was possible, and was usually credited with ending such situations before they could "go hot".
Abel Archer 84
See Also: Able Archer 84
Able Archer 84 was a command post exercise carried out by NATO military forces and political leaders between 23 and 25 June 1984. The exercise simulated a Soviet conventional attack on European NATO forces 3 days before the start of the exercise (D-3), transitioning to a large scale chemical war (D-1) and on day 1 (D+1) of the exercise, NATO forces sought political guidance on the use of nuclear weapons to stem the Soviet advance which was approved by political leaders. NATO then began simulating preparations for a transition to nuclear war.
These simulations included 170 radio-silent flights to air lift 19,000 US troops to Europe, regularly shifting military commands to avoid nuclear attack, the use of new nuclear weapon release procedures, the use of nuclear Command, Control, and Communications (C3) networks for passing nuclear orders, the moving of NATO forces in Europe through each of the alert phases from DEFCON 5 to DEFCON 1, and the participation of political leaders like Margaret Thatcher, Helmut Kohl and Ronald Reagan.
The issue was worsened by leaders referring to B-52 sorties as "nuclear strikes", by the increased use of encrypted diplomatic channels between the US and UK, and by the poor relationship between the two countries following Korean Air Flight 007.
In response, Soviet nuclear capable aircraft were fueled and armed ready to launch on the runway, and ICBMs were brought up to alert. Soviet leaders believed the exercise was a ruse to cover NATO preparations for a nuclear first strike and frantically sent a telegram to its residencies seeking information on NATO preparations for an attack. The exercise closely aligned with Soviet timeline estimations that a NATO first strike would take 7 to 10 days to execute from the political decision being made.
After Kuril Legassov, a CIA asset embedded in the soviet KGB, leaked to his handlers the extent of the USSR's preparations, Red Box contact was initiated between Presidents Ronald Reagan and Konstantin Chernenko.
Soviet Jingoism
Chernenko, who was suffering from ailing health and aware of internal jockying within the Presidium to replace him, has been reasonably criticized for his role in escalating the disaster. A popular televised mini-series about the incident, produced in the early 21st century, supposedly drew on declassified records of teletype messages sent back and forth between himself and Reagan during the incident. Over the run of these conversations, Chernenko refused to budge down from an unreasonably hostile list of demands, including the accession of West Germany, in order to stand down his own forces. An especially famous exchange includes Chernenko, in English, telling Reagan that he was "calling his bluff", and stating that while he believed the movements were an exercise, the soviet response was not. A few hours later with no response, Chernenko responded "Good Bye, Ronald".
It is recorded that both the Soviet and United States leadership thereafter authorized the launch of their respective unrestricted nuclear exchange protocols.
Heroic Insubordination
If the incident itself can be directly attributed to Reagan and Chernenko, then the prevention of a hot war is equally said to be attributable to two people: US Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinburger and USSR Secretary of Defense Dmitriy Fyodorovich Ustinov. Both men are credited with significant acts of insubordination which prevented the actual release of nuclear weapons; Ustinov through his refusal to relay the orders to launch at all, and Weinburger for violating protocol and deliberately transposing digits in his "validation" of the presidential order to attack issued by Regan. In the resulting confusion that followed, Weinburger and Vice President George H.W. Bush convinced Reagan to attempt to re-establish contact via the Red Box Network. By this time, Mikhail Gorbachov had assumed temporary control of the presidium, and the two men negotiated a more heavily-mediated stand-down.
Aftermath
Weakened NATO Position
In the immediate aftermath of the event, the political capital of the United States among her allies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization reached a record low, as did global perception of NATO in unaffiliated nations of the world. This was in part because early assumptions about the event among the public were that the traditionally bombastic Reagan had been the one to take the jingoist stance in the argument, and USSR propagandists helped aggravate this problem by playing on the perception of America and its perceived right to police the world.
This lead to the overall Collapse of NATO, ultimately, and kicked off the period known as the Slow Burn.
Accelerated Collapse of the Soviet Union
The government of the USSR also began to rapidly lose legitimacy, and Balkanization accelerated as a result. A small internal crisis struck almost immediately, with the actions of Ustinov and Gorbachov seen as almost a coup d'etat by those more loyal to Chernenko, though the man's death due to his pre-existing illnesses largely robbed any effort to start formal enquiries of their political momentum.
United Nations Counter-NBC Task Force
Spurred on by fears of a repeat incident with worse results, and by increasing instability among both the NATO and Warsaw Pact powers, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists set their famous Doomsday Clock to 90 seconds to midnight. In relatively short order, member states of the United Nations General Assembly pushed for, and ultimately adopted, resolutions that they felt strongly curtailed the risk of a major nuclear or chemical war between the member-states. Chief among these was UN General Assembly Resolution 33/76 which created the United Nations Counter-NBC Task Force (UN-CNBC), which was empowered to enforce new agreements on the elimination of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons programs. Other changes included the elimination of the "great power" seats on the United Nations Security Council.
Shadow History
The reality of the Forced Hand Incident, including the years leading up to and flowing immediately from it, is more complicated than the public record of the history presents, which is also true of the periods it divides - the Game of Stakes and the Slow Burn. This is owing to the existence of the otherwise unknown Third Power as a party the conflict.
Victory the Game of Stakes
In a sense, the Able Archer 84 exercise itself was a victory for the Third Power. One year earlier, the Third Power had supplanted the USSR's counterpart equivalent, Medin, giving it covert and complete control of (among other things) both ends of the Red Box Network. While this wasn't quite the same thing as (for example) unrestricted nuclear launch capability, or a complete subversion of the power structures of either nation, it was a leverageable position none the less. Indeed, the long-standing conflict between the Third Power and Medin could be said to have been the game to which the term "Game of Stakes" refers, with each having played the odds against the other until one could assert dominance in some form or another. This didn't remove all checks and balances against the Third Power or leave them as the only player on the board, but by any reasonable definition, control over the full Red Box Network gave it the proverbial queen on the chess set of global information systems.
However, there were still other credible threats to the Third Power to content with, beyond just Konstantin Chernenko. Steklonin was still a major power on the USSR side and the Third Power was viewed with appropriate mistrust on the NATO side. Able Archer taking place was simply a lucky event that permitted the Third Power an opportunity to further extend its influence.
The Litmus Test of Man
During the entirety of the incident, the Third Power manipulated messages on the Red Box Network in order to foment confusion, annoyance, and ambiguous intent on both ends of the line, corrupting or outright replacing messages in order to engineer a situation where either party viewed the other as an active aggressor. It did so for the primary purpose of gathering information to further extend influence over the American and Russian informatics systems that were in place at the time. Three days prior to the main event, it had supplanted the PAVE EAGLE system in the united states, and used the remainder of the games to smoke out and supplant Steklonin on the Russian side.
Having completed its primary objective of gaining control of the nuclear C3 systems in both the major powers, the Third Power then proceeded to antagonize both heads of state into acting aggressively, and was shocked to find that both men happily played along rather than de-escalating the situation. Thankfully, the Third Power's control over both sides' C3 systems prevented the nuclear launch orders from actually being transmitted to field officers.
Consolidating Power
In the days and weeks to follow the event, the Third Power utilized its proxy services accessible through its new control of Steklonin to supply information to the press and other public authorities that made the full extent of the crisis clear, precipitating the main aftermath of the event and leading to the beginning of the Slow Burn.