Washington, D.C., November 14, 2025 - The State Department quietly deleted important archival records from an official history detailing how a 1983 NATO war game could have led to a catastrophic nuclear exchange, according to new reporting from the Washington Post. This is the first known instance in which the State Department has removed previously declassified and published documents from one of its Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) volumes, according to the report.
Today, the Archive is publishing copies of the records that were censored by the State Department, along with a selection of the most revealing war scare records. These include a report from the CIA’s Office of Soviet Analysis on “Warsaw Pact Military Perceptions of Nuclear Initiation,” which is published here for the first time.
A State Department official confirmed to the Post that the Department republished the FRUS volume without the records after the U.S. Court of Appeals in 2024 upheld a CIA decision to deny a 2021 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request from the National Security Archive. The FOIA sought the declassification of an important retrospective analysis of Able Archer 83 written by U.S. Air Force Lt. Gen. Leonard Perroots, who served as director of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) from 1985-1989. Written as Perroots was retiring from public service in January 1989, his “End of Tour Report Addendum” warned that the military exercise could have led to “a potentially disastrous situation.”
Because of its importance, the Archive wanted a copy of the original document in addition to the transcription that was first published by the State Department in the February 2021 FRUS volume, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1981-1988, Volume IV, Soviet Union, January 1983-March 1985.
The State Department told the Post that it removed the documents because the Archive’s FOIA case “was litigated in District Court and the Court of Appeals and [b]oth courts upheld withholding the information.”
Although the authors of the FRUS volume thanked CIA staff for “arranging full access to CIA records,” U.S. District Court Judge James Boasberg—after reviewing in camera declarations from CIA and State Department security officials—ruled that an original copy of the record did not have to be released to the Archive because the CIA “was not properly involved in the document’s disclosure.” The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the ruling but said nothing about removing the already published record—much less additional records and analysis not at issue in the lawsuit—from the FRUS volume.
Asked why 15 pages on Able Archer had been removed from the history without explanation, the State Department official told the Post that “[t]he Department was not required to provide public notice.”
While earlier accounts of Able Archer 83 have focused on Operation RYaN, the Soviet intelligence initiative to predict a U.S. first strike, and the role of Soviet spy Oleg Gordievsky, the new evidence published here today highlights the genuine fear among the Soviet military leadership that the Soviet Union was vulnerable to a preemptive nuclear strike from the West during the war scare.
National Security Archive director Tom Blanton said that the unprecedented deletion of declassified historical records from the State Department volume on the war scare echoed similar efforts in the Soviet Union where, as author David Remnick writes, the “censors went through the libraries with razor blades and slashed from the bound copies of Novy Mir” (“New World,” a Soviet-era literary magazine).
“Today, in America,” Blanton said, “the censors just have to press delete.”