Code name TOPAZ and how a "calculator" averted nuclear war

 

Rainer Rupp, codename Topaz, was a West German working for the East German secret service at the heart of NATO in its headquarters in Brussels. Operation Able Archer ’83 was Reagan’s plan for a massive combined NATO exercise, simulating a nuclear war on eastern Europe using nuclear weapons and with every sense of a real situation. The realism of the exercise so alarmed the Soviet Union that they thought the exercise was a ruse for the real thing – a pre-emptive strike against them. They were determined to get in first, and only days before the exercise was due to take place had their bombers loaded with nuclear bombs ready on the tarmac. The posture is referred to in the Soviet military as “Launch on Attack”. Rupp was able to inform them that it was indeed only an exercise, but they still didn’t believe him until he was able, at the last minute, to provide them with highly classified documentation to prove his assertion.

In an interview for the Channel 4 program "1983: The Brink of Apocalypse", about exercise Able Archer 83, broadcast in the UK on 5 January 2008, Rupp said that he had transmitted the message that NATO was not preparing to launch a surprise nuclear attack against the USSR during the exercise to his HVA controllers. He did this by way of encoding the message on a device disguised as a calculator which then turned the message into a short electronic burst which could be transmitted to a set telephone number. He viewed this as vital to preventing a Soviet pre-emptive strike against NATO forces.

Without his timely intervention, the world would almost certainly have experienced a nuclear holocaust. For his efforts, Rupp was given 12 years in prison after German unification.