Military exercises and the dangers of misunderstandings: the East-West Crisis of the Early 1980s

Abstract

The East-West Crisis of the Early 1980s demonstrated that one should never overestimate the degree of mutual understanding between two adversarial states. Military and command post exercises, thought to be entirely transparent in their purely defensive purposes by the West, were seen as potential smokescreen for a surprise attack in the East. While the crisis did not lead to war, the fact that it went as far as producing a Soviet nuclear alert in response to a command post exercise points to the inherent dangers of military exercises as crisis-destabilising