Date

Sep 1, 1987

Description

Vitalii Kataev, former Defense Industry Department senior advisor, recounted the situation as more dire than some of his colleagues remembered: “We in the Central Committee's Defense Department considered the early 1980s to be a crisis period, a pre-wartime period. We organized night shifts so that there was always someone on duty in the Central Committee. When Pershing IIs were deployed, there appeared the question of what to do with them in case they were in danger of falling into Warsaw Pact hands during a war. These missiles had to be launched. This made them extremely destabilizing. Furthermore, the only possible target of these missiles was our leadership in Moscow because Pershings could not reach most of our missiles.”

Varfolomei Korobushin, former deputy chief of staff of the Strategic Rocket Forces, revealed that, "it took just 13 seconds to deliver the decision [to launch a nuclear attack] to all of the launch sites in the Soviet Union."

Source

Defense Department Freedom of Information Act release.

Document published in following posting(s):

The Soviet Side of the 1983 War Scare

Nov 5, 2018