On Sept. 2, 1980, a U.S. government Special Coordination Committee met to try to determine how to deter a large-scale Soviet invasion of Iran. The committee’s yawn-inducing name belied its grim subject matter and the seniority of its participants—the national security advisor, the secretaries of state and defense, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, among others—as well as the notes of desperation that crept into their conversation.
There was widespread concern within the U.S. government that a force buildup by the Soviet Union in its southwest was the prelude to an invasion of Iran. The Joint Chiefs was “unambiguous in its assertion that we cannot defend Iran on any line today against a determined Soviet attack. We simply do not have the forces.” The participants debated the pros and cons of spreading the conflict geographically as opposed to using nuclear weapons. And they discussed some unspecified “deterrence actions” proposed by the Joint Chiefs. Secretary of State Edmund Muskie considered them a “formula for moving toward World War III.”
Contrary to one previous account of this remarkable but little-known war scare, the United States cannot claim success for deterring an attack on Iran—because no attack was planned. Our research, based on declassified Soviet and U.S. sources, as well as memoirs and oral histories, suggests that the crisis was fueled by reciprocal, exaggerated fears. Both the Soviet Union and the United States worried incorrectly that the other had designs on Iran and took steps to deter or mitigate the consequences of its rival’s acting on those designs. Each step compounded fears on the other side, exacerbating tensions. The crisis culminated with a Soviet military exercise that the United States misinterpreted as possible preparation for an invasion and that led Muskie to deliver a thinly veiled nuclear threat to his Soviet counterpart at the end of September 1980.
The extent to which exaggerated fears of adversaries’ intentions fuel international conflict is a perennially important question. For some, such as Harvard University professor Stephen M. Walt, writing in these pages, the “security dilemma” underlies conflicts in the West Pacific, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East. Actions that one state takes to enhance its own security tend to decrease the security of rivals, resulting in a “tightening spiral of hostility that leaves neither side better off than before.”
Governments typically have little sympathy with this theory. Both Beijing and Washington, for example, have made it clear that neither believes it exaggerates the other’s hostility. Washington sees Beijing as aggressive and expansionist. Beijing sees Washington as seeking global hegemony. The war scare of 1980 cannot reveal to decision-makers in China and the United States whether their states are currently locked into a security dilemma—but it should give them pause before automatically assuming the worst about their adversary’s intentions.
The backdrop to the war scare was the Islamic Revolution in Iran at the start of 1979, followed by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan at that year’s end. A nervous Washington, including a beleaguered White House under President Jimmy Carter, who was beset by accusations of weakness, saw these developments as posing a serious threat to its Middle Eastern interests. The Soviet Union was supporting national liberation movements in what was then called the Third World and had long fixated on acquiring a blue-water navy. Washington now feared that the Soviet Union would embark on further adventurism to advance these goals.
In early 1980, U.S. fears about Soviet intervention in Iran, initially sparked by the chaos of late 1978, became more intense. In January 1980, U.S. National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski received a memo from his staff describing “strategies for dealing with a Soviet military move into Iran in the near future.” A few days later, Cyrus Vance, who was secretary of state until April 1980, asked the Soviet ambassador to the United States, Anatoly Dobrynin, whether the Soviet Union intended to attack Iran, before formally protesting “increasing Soviet military activity along the northwest border of Iran” in February.
To try to deter Moscow, Carter declared in his January 1980 State of the Union address that any attempt “to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States,” and his administration launched a major regional security initiative, which became known as the Persian Gulf Security Framework. Its military component included U.S. force deployments to the region and the creation of the Rapid Deployment Joint Task Force, which would ultimately become U.S. Central Command.
From Moscow’s perspective, however, these actions appeared to be offensive, not defensive—aimed at compellence or even flat-out aggression, not deterrence. In a mirror image of U.S. thinking, the Soviet Union was concerned about the possibility of U.S. intervention in the Middle East.
The 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran deprived the United States of an important foothold in the region. Moscow’s primary worry was that the United States might try to regain that foothold by direct or indirect intervention in Afghanistan—as stenographic records of Politburo deliberations and Soviet memoirs attest—and it was an important motivation for Russia’s own invasion of Afghanistan. Moscow was also concerned about U.S. intervention in Iran itself and warned Washington against military action there as early as 1979, after the seizure of hostages from the U.S. Embassy in Tehran.
The U.S. military buildup in the Persian Gulf in 1980 exacerbated Soviet fears. According to the minutes of a Politburo meeting on March 13, 1980, Moscow assessed that “so-called ‘rapid reaction forces’ [are intended] for punitive operations and the seizure of regions of economic and military-strategic significance.” It worried, according to the minutes of an April 5 meeting, that this capability would allow the United States to “establish direct military control over sources of oil if deemed necessary.” The KGB even believed that the failed hostage rescue mission in April 1980 was actually an attempt to assassinate Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and initiate “an insurrection or a mutiny or something like that.”
These fears—exaggerated as they were—had real-world consequences. In July and August 1980, the Soviet Union held a major exercise, Yug-80 (South-80), “just in case the Americans introduced troops into Iran.” Specifically, according to the memoirs of Gen. Valentin Varennikov, then first deputy chief of the Soviet General Staff and head of its Main Operations Directorate, Soviet forces practiced deploying to Iran “to prevent the enemy from using its territory” against the Soviet Union following a hypothetical “reactionary coup.”
This exercise—the result of Soviet fears about U.S. intentions—played into U.S. concerns about a Soviet invasion of Iran. There was widespread agreement within the U.S. government that Yug-80 was not just an exercise. By late August, the CIA believed that the Soviet Union was giving itself the option to intervene “if the U.S. enters Iran, or if there is an internal collapse.” The military was more alarmist. According to a summary of official discussions:
General [David] Jones [then chairman of the Joint Chiefs] disagreed with the contingency plan notion. The Joint Chiefs believe there is a 50-50 possibility that the Soviets are themselves trying to control the timing, not just preparing to react to outside events. One of the Chiefs is sufficiently disturbed to recommend immediate deployment to the region in an effort to deter the Soviets.
On Sept. 2, the Special Coordination Committee considered the Joint Chiefs’ proposal for “deterrence actions.” That meeting ended inconclusively. When discussions resumed three days later, it was noted that “most of [the Joint Chiefs’ recommendations] are already in progress.” According to Brzezinski, Muskie again raised concerns about escalation, stating that “Congress would not feel that a nuclear war was worth 11 percent of our oil.”
Even so, Carter approved efforts to “develop military options both for the defense of Iran itself and for retaliatory military responses elsewhere.” Some of these options almost certainly involved the use of nuclear weapons. At a December meeting of the National Security Council, Carter personally stated that it “is hopeless to believe that we can match the Soviets with conventional forces in Iran. We simply cannot do it. We cannot defend them without the use of nuclear weapons.”
Even before then, Washington had conveyed its willingness to resort to nuclear use to Moscow. On Sept. 25, Muskie met with Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko in New York. Even though fears on both sides were subsiding by then, Muskie read aloud a “non-paper” on Iran and the Persian Gulf. (Because Brzezinski did not trust Muskie to convey its message accurately, Muskie was instructed to take the unusual step of giving Gromyko a copy.)
According to a draft of this document (which was personally reviewed and approved by Carter and is held in his presidential library), Muskie told Gromyko that any “military attempt to gain control of the Persian Gulf area, including specifically Soviet military action in Iran, could lead to a direct military confrontation with the U.S.” He added that such a confrontation would have “incalculable consequences”—a phrase that the U.S. government had used previously to convey nuclear threats. It was almost certainly meant by Muskie, and probably understood by Gromyko, as such.
Although this war scare was just that—a scare—it could have turned into something more. What if U.S.-Soviet relations were as strained in 1980 as they had been in the early 1960s or even as strained as they were to become within a year or two? What if the Soviet Union had, as part of its own “deterrence actions,” conducted military maneuvers in the Persian Gulf that, against the backdrop of Yug-80, looked to the United States like the start of an invasion? What if, while all this was happening, the United States had lost contact with an aircraft carrier for reasons unknown? It certainly wasn’t all that likely that the war scare of 1980 could have escalated into World War III—but, as Muskie warned, it wasn’t impossible.
The possibility of escalation should remind decision-makers that even when rivals’ interests clash in real and serious ways, assuming the worst about the other’s intentions won’t necessarily serve their state’s interests. On the contrary, it can exacerbate tensions and become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
To be sure, it would be equally, if not more, foolhardy for leaders to assume the best about an adversary’s intentions; as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has starkly shown, interstate aggression is hardly unknown. Rather, the real lesson here is that leaders should try to chart a course of action designed to avoid worst-case outcomes under any interpretation of their adversary’s intentions. The first step to managing a potential security dilemma is to recognize that you may be in one.
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