The Soviets were completely convinced that “Able Archer” was the cover for a real nuclear strike. They believed that starting from this maneuver a strike aimed at decapitating the command, control and communication centers of the Soviet army, the state apparatus and the party apparatus would be carried out with the help of the new ultra-modern and precise tactical nuclear missiles, Pershing II and cruise missiles for which you had a warning time of only five to eight minutes. With these rockets, the criminal gang in the Pentagon hoped to decapitate the Soviet army, so that they — a quote that I myself have heard — “would run around the farmhouse like a chicken with its head cut off.”
Rainer Rupp
I mean, yeah, sure, you had the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, and that was a whole thing, but honestly the Cold War kind of chilled out for a long time after that. The USA and USSR hardly kissed on the mouth afterwards, but they at least came to the conclusion that they should probably take actual nuclear war and guaranteed world destruction off the table for a while. There were still working people attempting to build some sort of Communism all over the world of course, and the USA trying to support the ruling classes to beat these people down – in Angola, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and to a lesser extent Bangladesh and Ethiopia – but the world’s two biggest swinging dicks at least agreed to maybe not spray both of their piss in every direction with such ferocity that it ended all human life. That would, they both agreed, really stink.
Then – whoop-de-fucking-doo – Thatcher and Reagan were elected in 1979 and 1980. They were both united in their shared belief that they were tired of this hippy bullshit. They also both agreed that having to consider workers rights and public welfare to make sure their populations didn’t look too longingly over to the Soviet Union was a lot of work. It also required a high tax rate for the rich. And they thought fuck that. What if, yeah – here me out, OK? – we just stopped caring for 90% of our own citizens, tell them that the real enemy is the ‘Evil Empire’ of the USSR, cut all taxes for rich people so the ruling class has reason to support us, and be done with nearly all public spending apart from shit loads of fucking rockets and shit that we’ll obviously need to protect ourselves against the ‘Evil Empire’? Cool? Cool.
NATO, being the absolute warmongering trolls that they remain to this day, had already begun deploying nuclear missiles in Europe in 1979. Remember that Cuban Missile Crisis thing? You know how that started when the US put nuclear missiles in Italy and Turkey? You don’t?? Weird how that part is never mentioned. The Reagan administration* decided that their new official international relations policy was not just to swing their bookie’s biro sized dicks, but to do so millimetres from the USSR’s face while obnoxiously braying “Not touching you, can’t do anything, not touching you, can’t do anything…” In 1983, a bunch of Pershing II ballistic missiles (“the United States Army’s primary nuclear-capable theater-level weapon“) were deployed in West Germany and the USSR had – it’s fair to say – just about had it with this shit. They now only had minutes to react to a surprise attack. The last time a regime launched a surprise attac om the country, 26 million people died, so they were not willing to risk that again. There were tragedies amongst these heightened tensions: the USSR’s sweaty, twitching trigger fingers lead to a Korean Airlines Boeing 747 being shot down after entering the USSR airspace, under the mistaken belief that it was an American spy plane, killing all 269 people on board.
(*some of these dudes, man: Paul Wolfowitz, George Bush Classic, Dick Cheney… The world’s worst ever collection of emotionally impotent old men who’d bomb ten civilian hospitals without flinching but complain all evening about being asked to tip their waiter $5)
So anyway, it was under this cloud of heightened threats and dangerous agitation that NATO decided to conduct a Europewide War Games exercise codenamed ‘Able Archer’. Able Archer is a song on this album, see? This isn’t a complete tangent. How dare you? I’m a fucking journalist. Put some respect on my name. Able Archer – presumably codenamed because NATO wanted all of its archers in Europe to be able to fire off nuclear weapons into major USSR population centres – was some big boy shit. 40’000 [FORTY THOUSAND] US and NATO (that ‘and’ is really superfluous, isn’t it?) troops would advance across Western Europe, under the pretend premise that the Warsaw Pact countries had sent troops into Czechoslovakia, then would go on to invade Finland, Norway and Greece. Seriously, the Cold War was like if the r/AlternateHistory subreddit had access to a trillion dollar military overspend. The exercise would last ten days from 83/11/02 and simulate coordinated deployment of nuclear weapons, played out with radio silence because, I dunno, would make it more fun I guess.
The USSR noticed this. They noticed that the whole of NATO seemed to be conducting a secretive exercise in Western Europe. They noticed how it looked like they were coordinating the deployment of nuclear weapons. They thought: “Huh.”
A’ight, so we doing this then, yeah? All of the USSR’s strategic nuclear forces were put on red alert, aircrafts in Poland and East Germany were fitted with nuclear weapons, and nuclear subs were sent under the arctic ice to avoid detection. As far as the USSR could tell though, this was far from an overreaction, just a response to the NATO forces doing similar: “Moscow also thought, wrongly, that the US had put its troops on the highest alarm stage, DEFCON 1. In reality DEFCON 1 was only simulated during the exercise“. So one side was playing a game where they pretending to be operating under DEFCON 1, which the other side saw and mistook their pretend DEFCON 1 for a real DEFCON 1 and so went to DEFCON 1. What a ridiculous time to be alive. NATO noticed the USSR’s mobilisation and – get this – thought that they were playing War Games as well! One side thinks it’s real, the other thinks they’re both just playing a game designed to look as real as possible. What a ridiculous way to end the world.
Thank God for spies. Rainer Rupp was born in West Germany, but decided to fight the good fight by training as a spy in the East for the USSR-aligned German Democratic Republic (GDR) when he was at university. There were so many more options for school leavers back in those days. He was good enough to have worked for NATO since 1977. He heard of the USSR’s plans for a pre-emptive strike, in defence of the nuclear attack that was being orchestrated in Europe by NATO. It didn’t sound right to Rainer. Nobody at NATO had mentioned anything in the dinning halls that afternoon. Rainer took photographs of literally every NATO document he could, even the ones that didn’t seem in the least bit relevant, and sent them to GDR in a bid to desperately avoid total annihilation based on one side LARPing.
Since all documents were officially numbered, the comrades in the HVA and Moscow could clearly see that nothing was missing and nothing important had been overlooked. At the height of the crisis this was supplemented by daily messages to East Berlin. And since they had a corresponding confidence in the sources, Moscow finally dropped the option of a pre-emptive counter-attack
Rainer Rupp
What you could say, is that Rainer’s heroic and literal saving of the world involved the great unmasking of either side’s intentions. [SEGWAY]
The ‘Unmasking’ that Robin Jax is referring to on their colossal project as RobinPlaysChords is more to with neurodivergence. Jax is autistic, and says that in that context, ‘unmasking’ is more “about blending into and slipping through the gates of so-called neurotypical society“. There’s also the more literal sense that Jax used to only perform live and in official photos while wearing a butterfly mask that they’ve only recently decided to remove and there’s a lot of stuff going on here.
But enough of all that bourgeois, pinky nonsense such as meaning and context and nuclear standoffs, the fact of the matter is that ‘Unmasking’ is an absolutely phenomenal record. Five tracks, forty minutes, no filler, all killer. Jax manages to craft and perform the most expansive and epic guitar rock operas that you barely notice have so few active components. Similar to metagirl at #22, there are the minimum amount of instruments here contributing to such a full experience. However, while metagirl ‘only’ proves that they have the musical genius to construct perfect pop songs with only their essential parts, on ‘Unmasking’ Jax occasionally creates the epic yet terrifying sound of the Earth’s destruction over 13minutes with little more than echoing guitars and his own voice. It’s an emotional howitzer of DEFCON 1 musical dissonance, with a quiet/loud dynamic instead switched to swings between anxious dread of annihilation and OH FUCK WE’RE ALL BEING NUCLEAR FUCKING BOMBED!!
There’s no other music right now that sounds quite like the apocalyptic swings that Robin Jax is making, and it’s good enough that we should probably thank Rainer Rupp that we’re alive to appreciate it.
I do not think that a third world war is now an imminent risk. The Syrian spark, however, can quickly jump over to the Ukraine.
Rainer Rupp in 2015
Necessary Evil 
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