[center][b]The night of November 10th onto November 11th, 1983[/center][/b]

Of course, the preparation for the number of exercises in 1983 that culminated in ABLE ARCHER 83 were suspicious to the Kremlin. There was a force buildup not seen before in any exercises, and unlike the buildup to exercises before, there was a strict radio silence. Nothing was said, nothing revealed, nothing indicated an exercise: Everything indicated an invasion. When during the night various Western European leaders like Prime Minister Thatcher, Chancellor Kohl, and President Mitterand went to nuclear shelters and activity on bases surged, the Kremlin was informed.

[center][b]Central Clinical Hospital, Moscow. 0300, November 11th, 1983. [/center][/b]
The rough awakening did not do much good to the mood of Chairman Andropov, who was struck to a hospital bad after kidney failure earlier in the year. The General Secretary was done for physically and had not much fight left in him, but his mind was clear. Dmitriy Ustinov, Andrei Gromyko, Konstantin Chernenko and Viktor Chebrikov consulted him for something of grave importance. It better be of 'grave importance' to awaken a terminally ill old man in the middle of the night. And it was. The four consulted him on what they were convinced was a NATO invasion of the Eastern Bloc. They informed him of the situation and convinced Andropov that the USSR had to act now, and undo NATO before NATO undid them. Trusting his most loyal aides' consensus, he signed the order for a massive strike of all Warsaw Pact nations against the forces of NATO. Behind the Iron Curtain, active units were raised, the navies sailed out of port and the air forces took off with full payloads. It was about to get messy. The Warsaw Pact armies weren't expecting anything, and the NATO armies were informed their alarms would go off at 2:30 in the morning. However, at 1:30 in the morning the radars saw an abnormal amount of activiy and in some cases targets were bombed. The alarms they expected to go off an hour later went off already, and the theory that it was an error in timing was taken away as soon as the words "This is not a drill" were heard. Across West Germany the troops rushed into action. The Cold War had just gone hot.