believes that if we opened them up a bit, their leading citizens would get braver about proposing changes in their system. I'm going to pursue this.It's clear that the United States did not have any intentions of launching a nuclear first strike against the Soviets, but were having a significant amount of trouble communicating this. Project RYAN continued to feed into Soviet fears that the United States was being dishonest, and Able Archer 83 simply fanned the flames. Soviet administration Background The leader of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in the time leading up to the war games was Leonid Brezhnev. He was in power from October 1964 to November 1982. Tensions were beginning to rise after the Détente of the 1970s. Tensions rose due to Moscow harboring a growing concern that their arsenal of nuclear weapons, which rivaled that of the United States, had been the factor urging NATO in its quest for military supremacy. The Russian administration believed this quest was pursued solely to upset the equilibrium that was recently acquired by the Soviet Union with their nuclear weapons and conventional power. The Soviets viewed the building up of U.S. forces as an attempt to ‘blackmail’ the Soviet Union into submission. This led the Soviets to “enhance the value of nuclear weapons” as a war fighting weapon. However, in 1982, the Soviet Union renounced the first use of nuclear weapons, but the declaration did not affect the soviets war plan, as they still considered a preemptive strike if authentic information was acquired. In March 1979, the Soviet Minister of Defense, Marshal Dmitrii Ustinov anticipated that NATO would easily be able to enlist the help of China and France, from that he deduced that NATO could be ready for war in as little as 48 hours. In December 1979, the Warsaw Pact viewed NATO's motives as being driven by their desire to gain military superiority. These views were fueled and supported by the intelligence that was being gathered at the time. In February 1980, the head of the Committee for State Security (KGB), Yurii V. Andropov, raised concern over the “U.S. bid for military superiority”. A meeting in early 1981 between Andropov and Brezhnev resulted in the formation of RYAN (as detailed above), with the intent of gaining enough intelligence to foretell the comings of a nuclear attack. In 1981, Soviets obtained the war plan for the