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

Heuser, B. (2016) Military exercises and the dangers of misunderstandings: the East-West Crisis of the Early 1980s. PFUR Bulletin of International Relations, 160 (3). pp. 391-404. ISSN 2313-0679

Abstract/Summary

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.

Item Type	Article
URI	https://reading-clone.eprints-hosting.org/id/eprint/67103
Refereed	No
Divisions	Arts, Humanities and Social Science > School of Politics, Economics and International Relations > Politics and International Relations
Publisher	RUDN University
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