The Six Minute War: Michael Dobbs on Reagan, Russia, and the Race to Automate Armageddon

On 16 October 1962, exactly sixty-four years ago, photos of Soviet missiles on Cuba were shown to President Kennedy and the world faced nuclear Armageddon. The definitive account of that thirteen-day crisis, One Minute to Midnight, was written by today’s guest, the presidential crisis historian Michael Dobbs. He has now written about a crisis that few remember, but which he calls the climactic crisis of the Cold War. It happened in 1983. In September of that year, the Soviets shot down a South Korean airliner with 269 people aboard, among them the most anti-communist member of the United States Congress. A few weeks later a Soviet early-warning computer reported that America had launched its missiles, and a colonel named Petrov, alone in a bunker at one in the morning, decided on his own authority that the machine was lying. In November NATO ran a nuclear release exercise called Able Archer, which Moscow took for the real thing. The difference between 1962 and 1983, Dobbs says, was twenty years of technology. Kennedy had thirteen days. Reagan, by his own estimate in his memoirs, would have had six minutes. Thus the title of his new book, The Six Minute War, subtitled *Reagan, Russia and the Race to Automate Armageddon*. As the incoming Moscow correspondent for the *Washington Post*, Dobbs had a front seat on the crisis. He arrived in Moscow just after the airliner came down, and his best material is anecdotal. He saw Russians bussed to a state-organised protest outside the American embassy, chanting on cue while jealously eyeing the Buicks and Cadillacs parked on the street. In a Moscow cinema showing *Three Days of the Condor* as anti-American propaganda, he watched the audience gasp — not at the dastardly CIA, but at the lavish contents of Robert Redford’s fridge. Fast forward to today, and we get to the most worrying part of Dobbs’ analysis. The presidential crisis historian reckons we are now in a more dangerous period than at any point he can remember. We have more weapons, less warning, with our split-second decisions dependent on machines whose reasoning is increasingly hard for us humans to understand. Call the compounding annual risk one per cent. Multiply it across thirty years and the arithmetic isn’t reassuring. We might now be just a few seconds to midnight. **FURTHER READING** •   Michael Dobbs, The Six Minute War: Reagan, Russia, and the Race to Automate Armageddon (Simon & Schuster) •   His Cuban Missile Crisis book, One Minute to Midnight (2008) — the thirteen days against which he measures the six minutes. *Down with Big Brother* and *Six Months in 1945* complete his Cold War trilogy. •   The National Security Archive’s declassified sourcebook on Able Archer 83 — the NATO exercise the Kremlin read as cover for a first strike. •   Eliot Cohen made the companion argument on this show: that the nuclear danger now sits with Pakistan and North Korea rather than Moscow and Washington. Listen or watch. •   Harold James’s essay “Late Soviet America”, the gerontocracy parallel AK raises at 25:26 — among his Project Syndicate columns. **FIVE TAKEAWAYS** **1. The headline is about now, not 1983.** The historian who wrote the definitive account of the Cuban Missile Crisis says we are in a more dangerous period today than at any point in his memory of the Cold War, as a child or later as a reporter. His reasoning is that the warheads have proliferated, the warning times have been compressed, and the decisions are moving to computers whose workings we cannot inspect. The Cold War at least had a rough nuclear balance between two systems that understood each other. He is more frightened for his grandchildren than he was at the tensest moments he lived through. **2. What changed between 1962 and 1983 was twenty years of technology.** Kennedy and Khrushchev had thirteen days to argue their way out of Cuba, which now looks almost leisurely. By 1983 bombers had given way to missiles and computers had entered the early-warning chain, and Reagan wrote in his memoirs that he might have six minutes to decide whether a blip on a screen was the end of the world. That line is where the book’s title comes from. Dobbs is candid that there was no six-minute war: the compression of time is the subject, not an event. **3. A Soviet colonel is the reason this is a book about automation.** At one in the morning in the autumn of 1983, Soviet satellites and computers reported an American missile launch, and Colonel Petrov had to decide whether to pass it up the chain as real. He had written some of the algorithms himself and knew they could be wrong, and he reasoned that nobody opens a surprise attack with five missiles rather than two hundred. So he called it a false alarm on his own authority. Dobbs’s point is not that Petrov was a hero but that somebody else in that chair might have answered differently. **4. Reagan was the most anti-nuclear president since the bomb was invented.** This is the claim least appreciated at the time and the one Dobbs presses hardest. The man denouncing the evil empire was also reading the Bible for prophecies of Armageddon and was genuinely tormented by the possibility of nuclear war, which is why he later stunned his own advisers at Reykjavik by proposing to abolish nuclear weapons outright. Asked which Reagan to believe, Dobbs refuses to choose: both were real, the militant anti-communist and the pragmatist who found someone he could deal with in Gorbachev. **5. Nobody starts a nuclear war on purpose, which is the frightening part.** In both 1962 and 1983 the danger was never a deliberate first strike but an accident that escalates past the point where anyone can stop it — a stray airliner, a faulty algorithm, an exercise misread as cover. Andropov told the former ambassador Averell Harriman exactly that in the Kremlin, and Dobbs thinks it remains true with Pakistan, North Korea and now AI added to the mix. His prescription sounds modest and is not: elect sensible leaders, keep talking to the other side, and practise the empathy that let Kennedy ask what the world looked like from Khrushchev’s chair. **ABOUT THE GUEST** Michael Dobbs is a presidential crisis historian and a former foreign correspondent and Moscow bureau chief for the *Washington Post*, where he launched the paper’s Fact Checker column in 2007. He reported from Moscow through the 1983 war scare and was there in August 1991 when Boris Yeltsin climbed onto a tank. His Cold War trilogy comprises *Down with Big Brother*, *One Minute to Midnight* and *Six Months in 1945*; he is also the author of *King Richard*, *The Unwanted*, *Saboteurs* and a ...