Pershing II

Okay.

That's why the army had a nuclear capability in the final phase of the cold war, you know, the Pershing two deployment, um, which was a then cutting edge, the Pershing 2 was a then cutting edge theater ballistic nuclear missile, you know, and that so shook up the Soviets that it led to, you know, them acceding to that drawdown of all intermediate nuclear forces in Europe.

But it was standing policy to utilize tactical nuclear weapons where appropriate.

The purpose of nuclear forces isn't to stockpile them and never, ever use them.

and possibly our power in Germany was a bit cheaper because of that.

But I was always nervous because not only did we have, when I left, it was with Western East Germany, we had 4,000 Pershing II missiles with nuclear warheads sitting there.

The Americans always said, oh, we neither confirm or deny, but then when they packed them up, it was very secretive and very protected, so it was nuclear warheads.

And then we had the nuclear power plant.

It gives you the ability to do A really exponentially more sexy thing, those who remember the original T-LAMs had TERCOM, Terrain Following Radar, basically.

Like the Pershing 2, they had a similar thing, using mostly radar to navigate based upon having a digitized map, being able to get around.

But More than that, using all sorts of fun things, the ability to navigate with a detail that they can fly through your car window from a thousand miles away without requiring external inputs, i.e. you can jam the GPS, you can jam your Starlink, or you can dial back the Starlink, as we've seen read about recently, but it doesn't make a difference.

It is literally the fire and forget.

Exactly, which was part of the problem.

This increase in realism, combined with the already tense relations between the US and the Soviets, not to mention the anticipated arrival of Pershing II nuclear missiles in Europe, led some members of the Soviet Politburo and military to believe that Able Archer 83 was a ruse of war, obscuring possible preparations for a genuine nuclear first strike.

Oh, shit.

So having actual heads of NATO countries probably didn't help.

I mean, actually, I think one of the more exciting developments or intriguing developments of the past decade has been the Army's move into this long-range strike area.

So, you know, going back seven, eight years, the longest range weapon system the Army ever had, well, I mean, after Pershing II, was the Atakans with a 300-kilometer range.

And that was as far, if the army wanted to hit a target, it better be within 300 kilometers range or they weren't gonna be able to get it.

Now they've got several options and more are coming that go way farther, right? They're in the process of the delayed fielding of the long-range hypersonic weapon by Lockheed, the Dark Eagle missile with that.

The Kremlin had a hard time kind of discerning those signals.

They thought that Amin was likely gonna kind of court like an Islamist coalition, um, around like a nominally Marxist-Leninist government, and then was gonna pivot to the West through Turkey and become this client regime, um, of the sort that America always wanted Iran to kind of become and would, was gonna welcome, you know, forces to be based there, you know, including things like Pershing II missile platforms.

And in the Andropov, Ustinov, Gromyko view, like this was the checkmate scenario in the Cold War.

And secondarily, a lot of people don't know this, Afghanistan actually has fairly substantial uranium deposits.

But also, uh, it shows you, uh, the degree to which, um, you know, like we were talking about a minute ago, the deg- the, the degree to which, you know, con- conditions of, of absolute peace, you know, could, could become conditions of general nuclear war, I mean, rapidly.

You know, there wasn't, there wasn't this kind of like, you know, scaled escalation over, you know, over days or weeks or even hours, you know? Um, the second aspect of this was Reagan, uh, um, is, you know, kind of, um, prompted by people like Caspar Weinberger and a, and a lot of the Team B types.

Um, Reagan had an i- Reagan, um, he greenlit the deployment of the Pershing II intermediate range ballistic missile platform to Europe, to the Bundesrepublik, to, uh, Italy, to the Netherlands, um, some of the UK, I believe, although I don't think they ever arrived.

Um, this would've, uh, this would've given NATO a profound edge on in-theater nuclear weapons, and, um, so deployed, uh, they could reach Moscow within minutes, okay? Um, this really terrified Soviet war planners, um, and for good reason.