Apa Itu Demam Denggi?

Apa itu Demam Denggi?

Demam denggi ialah sejenis penyakit bawaan nyamuk yang menjadi masalah utama kesihatan awam antarabangsa dalam beberapa tahun kebelakangan ini. Jenis demam denggi yang lebih merbahaya ialah demam denggi berdarah. Ia merupakan punca utama kematian kanak-kanak di kebanyakan negara hari ini.Demam denggi dibawa oleh nyamuk Aedes kepada manusia melalui gigitannya.

Bagaimanakah penyakit ini merebak?

Demam denggi didapati berlaku di kawasan bandar dan sekitarnya di negara-negara rantau tropika. Sesiapa sahaja yang digigit nyamuk yang membawa kuman virus denggi menghadapi risiko yang lebih tinggi mendapat denggi. Demam denggi menyerupai demam selsema dan ciri klinikalnya berbeza-beza mengikut umur pesakit.

Pemindahan penyakit:

• Virus denggi dipindahkan kepada manusia melalui gigitan nyamuk Aedes yang membawa virus denggi.
• Nyamuk berupaya menyebarkan penyakit berkenaan dalam jangka masa 8 - 12 hari selepas menghisap darah manusia (perumah).
• Nyamuk betina yang dijangkiti virus denggi boleh memindahkan virus tersebut ke generasi seterusnya melalui pemindahan transovarial (melalui ovari).
• Manusia masih merupakan perumah gandaan utama bagi virus denggi walaupun terdapat kajian menunjukkan di beberapa bahagian tertentu di dunia, monyet boleh dijangkiti dan menjadi sumber virus bagi nyamuk yang belum dijangkiti.
• Virus denggi dari perumah pertama (mangsa pertama) hanya dapat menjangkiti/dipindahkan ke perumah kedua 18 jam sebelum suhu badan meningkat dan sekurang-kurangnya 3 hari selepas timbulnya gejala penyakit.

Bagaimanakah terjadinya demam denggi?

Vektor demam denggi adalah nyamuk Aedes betina.

Nyamuk yang telah dijangkiti membawa virus denggi di dalam badannya. Virus ini kemudiannya dipindahkan kepada manusia semasa proses menghisap darah. Sebaik sahaja seseorang itu digigit, virus denggi akan memasuki dan beredar di dalam aliran darahnya, maka bermulalah penyakit ini.

Apakah penyebab demam denggi?

Penyakit demam denggi berpunca dari 4 jenis virus denggi yang dipindahkan kepada manusia melalui nyamuk Aedes yang telah dijangkiti.

Pada asasnya terdapat 4 jenis virus denggi iaitu flavivirus DEN-1, DEN-2, DEN-3 dan DEN-4. Semua nyamuk Aedes berupaya bertindak sebagai vektor virus denggi sebelum memindahkannya kepada manusia. Walau bagaimanapun, vektor utama virus ini ialah nyamuk Aedes Aegypti. Vektor lain adalah seperti nyamuk Aedes Albopictus yang merupakan vektor virus denggi di kawasan bandar.

Apakah faktor yang meningkatkan risiko denggi?

Pada asasnya, mereka yang tinggal di kawasan endemik denggi dan terdedah kepada nyamuk Aedes menghadapi risiko dijangkiti demam ini.

Kumpulan yang berisiko tinggi mendapat penyakit denggi ialah:

·Penduduk dan pelawat kawasan endemik denggi.

·Kanak-kanak berumur 15 tahun ke bawah. Penyakit ini menjadi lebih teruk dan sering membawa kematian kepada kumpulan ini.

Bagaimanakah kedudukan penyakit ini?

Kadar insidens demam denggi dan demam denggi berdarah di Malaysia adalah masing-masing 118.3 dan 5.1 bagi setiap 100,000 penduduk. Manakala kadar kematian atau mortaliti demam denggi dan demam denggi berdarah pada tahun 1998 adalah masing-masing 0.22 dan 0.23 bagi setiap 100,000 penduduk.

Insidens global demam denggi telah meningkat dengan mendadak dalam beberapa dekad kebelakangan ini. Kini demam denggi merupakan endemik di lebih 100 buah negara rantau Afrika, Amerika, Mediterranean Timur, Asia Tenggara dan Pasifik Barat Sebelum tahun 1970, hanya sembilan buah negara mengalami epidemik denggi. Bilangan yang merupakan peningkatan 4 kali ganda di sekurang-kurangnya 41 buah negara dalam tahun 1995. Perangkaan yang lain adalah seperti di bawah . Seramai 2500 juta manusia - iaitu 2/5 penduduk dunia - sekarang ini menghadapi risiko demam denggi. Tanpa rawatan yang bersesuaian, kadar kematian akibat demam denggi berdarah mencapai 15% atau lebih .

Apakah gejala denggi?

Demam denggi ialah sejenis penyakit arboviral yang kompleks merangkumi demam denggi, demam denggi berdarah dan sindrom renjatan denggi.

Demam Denggi

·Ciri-ciri klinikal demam denggi berubah-ubah mengikut umur pesakit:

·Bayi dan kanak-kanak mungkin mengalami demam yang sukar dibeza-bezakan beserta dengan kemunculan ruam.

·Orang dewasa dan kanak-kanak yang lebih tua mungkin mengalami sama ada sindrom demam yang tidak serius ataupun demam kuat yang mengejut, sakit kepala yang teruk, ruam dan sakit di belakang mata, otot dan sendi.

·Pendarahan kulit adalah fenomena lazim.

·Kadar kematian amat rendah.

·Penyakit ini lazimnya bermula dengan peningkatan suhu badan yang mendadak, diikuti gejala-gejala lain yang tidak khusus seperti merah muka dan lain-lain gejala demam denggi yang tidak spesifik.

·Rasa tidak selesa di bahagian ulu hati (epigastrik), sensitif di bahagian rusuk kanan dan sakit di bahagian abdomen merupakan fenomena biasa demam denggi berdarah.

·Demam selalunya berterusan selama 2-7 hari dan suhu badan boleh meningkat setinggi 40-41oC dan mungkin diikuti dengan kekejangan dan pendarahan.

·Dalam kes-kes yang sederhana teruk, selalunya semua tanda dan gejala penyakit hilang selepas demam sembuh.

·Pesakit biasanya sembuh secara spontan atau selepas diberi terapi cecair dan elektrolit (ion berasingan seperti natrium, klorida, potasium, bikarbonat dan lain-lain)

Sindrom Renjatan Denggi

Bagi kes-kes yang serius, keadaan pesakit merosot dengan mendadak selepas demam beberapa hari. Tanda-tanda kegagalan peredaran darah dapat dilihat:

Kulit pesakit menjadi dingin, lebam dan padat dengan darah terkumpul, sianosis sirkumoral (circumoral cyanosis) dan pesakit merasa tidak selesa. Seterusnya, melarat ke tahap renjatan yang kritikal.

Renjatan dicirikan oleh denyutan nadi yang lemah dan cepat, tekanan darah rendah (hipotensi)(keadaan ini menurun secara tidak normal), kulit menjadi dingin serta lembap dan terasa tidak selesa. Pesakit yang mengalami renjatan adalah dalam keadaan bahaya dan boleh mengancam nyawa jika rawatan bersesuaian tidak diberikan segera. Jangka masa renjatan adalah pendek. Pesakit mungkin meninggal dunia dalam tempoh 12 - 24 jam atau sembuh dengan cepat selepas diberi terapi antirenjatan.

Apakah komplikasi yang mungkin timbul?

Komplikasi demam denggi ialah :

• Demam Denggi Berdarah.
• Sindrom Renjatan Denggi.

Apakah ujian-ujian yang boleh dilakukan untuk mengesan penyakit ini?

Pemeriksaan darah digunakan untuk membantu dalam diagnosis demam denggi. Kiraan sel platlet yang rendah (trombositopenia) dan kepekatan hematokrit (hemokonsentrasi) yang tinggi lazimnya dikesan

Ujian serologi menawarkan kaedah yang paling cepat dan ringkas untuk mengesahkan diagnosis klinikal demam denggi. Pengasingan virus merupakan kaedah diagnosis yang paling boleh dipercayai.

Apakah rawatan yang diberi untuk demam denggi?

Tiada rawatan khusus untuk demam denggi.

Dalam kes demam denggi dengan atau tanpa renjatan, cecair yang diberi secara oral sudah memadai untuk menggantikan kehilangan cecair badan akibat demam kuat, anoreksia dan muntah-muntah.

Ubat antipiretik mungkin boleh digunakan untuk meredakan demam. Walau bagaimanapun, salisilat (sebatian yang mengandungi analgesik untuk melegakan kesakitan, antipyresis - mengurangkan demam dengan menurunkan suhu badan dan aktiviti anti keradangan seperti aspirin) perlu dielakkan kerana ia diketahui boleh menyebabkan pendarahan. Pesakit perlu diawasi dengan rapi bagi mengesan tanda-tanda awal renjatan.

Untuk pesakit-pesakit sindrom renjatan denggi, penggantian awal dan segera plasma yang hilang dengan plasma, penambah plasma dan/atau larutan elektrolit dan cecair akan menghasilkan kesan yang menggalakkan.

Rawatan bukan farmakologi

Rawatan termasuk:

·Meningkatkan pengambilan cecair.

·Meningkatkan bekalan oksigen.

Pesakit demam denggi perlu berehat dan minum lebih banyak air untuk segera sembuh. Pesakit yang mengalami renjatan ketika demam perlu diberi cecair secara intravena (melalui salur darah vena). Oksigen juga perlu diberikan. Untuk pesakit demam denggi berdarah, penggantian cecair badan yang hilang mungkin mampu menyelamatkan nyawanya. Bagi sesetengah kes, pemindahan darah perlu dilakukan bagi mengawal pendarahan.

Rawatan farmakologi

Tiada ubat khusus bagi merawat demam denggi. Rawatan adalah untuk menghilangkan gejala yang timbul.

Apakah jenis pemantauan yang perlu dibuat?

·Apabila sahaja pesakit disahkan mendapat demam denggi adalah menjadi tanggung jawab doktor yang merawat untuk memaklumkan kepada pihak berkuasa kesihatan mengenai perkara ini kerana denggi merupakan penyakit yang perlu dilaporkan. Laporan ini penting supaya tindakan lanjutan seperti di bawah ini dapat dijalankan:

·Kawasan dan persekitaran di mana pesakit disyaki dijangkiti perlu dilakukan pengasapan (fogging) oleh pihak berkuasa.

·Memantau kawasan yang menjadi tempat pembiakan nyamuk aedes supaya ianya tidak merebak ke tempat lain. Jika tempat pembiakan ditemui pemilik rumah akan didenda.

·Apabila pesakit telah keluar dari hospital, beliau dan ahli keluarganya perlu mengambil langkah-langkah pencegahan dan bertindak untuk mencegah penyakit ini dari berulang. Ini kerana pesakit yang pernah mengalami denggi jika ia mendapat semula penyakit ini, kesannya adalah amat teruk.

Apakah prognosis bagi demam denggi?

Pada umumnya, prognosis bagi demam denggi dan demam denggi berdarah adalah baik jika rawatan sokongan diberi lebih awal.

Adakah terdapat kaedah saringan tertentu atau suntikan untuk denggi?

Malang sekali, vaksin untuk penyakit denggi masih belum ada. Namun begitu, beberapa kemajuan telah dicapai dalam proses penghasilan vaksin yang mampu melindungi manusia dari keempat-empat jenis virus denggi. Produk berkenaan mungkin boleh didapati di pasaran dalam beberapa tahun lagi.

Bagaimana cara untuk mencegah denggi?

Berikut adalah langkah-langkah pencegahan utama:

• Perlindungan dari gigitan nyamuk.
• Elak dari melawat atau berkunjung ke kawasan berisiko tinggi pada siang hari.
• Musnahkan tempat-tempat pembiakan nyamuk.
• Hapuskan nyamuk Aedes dewasa.

Lindungi diri anda dari gigitan nyamuk

Untuk mengelak dari gigitan nyamuk, seseorang itu perlulah mengetahui tabiat makan nyamuk dan menggunakan bahan penghindar nyamuk pada kulit yang terdedah apabila perlu. Pakai pakaian yang menutupi kebanyakan bahagian tubuh kerana ini boleh melindungi dari gigitan nyamuk. Pasangkan jaring nyamuk dan skrin pada tingkap untuk mencegah nyamuk dari memasuki rumah.

Elakkan dari membuat lawatan ke kawasan berisiko tinggi di waktu siang

Jalan terbaik ialah mengelak dari bertandang ke kawasan berisiko (kawasan bandar) di siang hari. Ini adalah kerana nyamuk Aedes bukanlah serangga malam. Waktu puncak ia mencari makan ialah di awal pagi dan awal senja.

Musnahkan tempat pembiakan nyamuk

Cara lain untuk mencegah denggi ialah dengan memusnahkan tempat pembiakan nyamuk. Nyamuk Aedes membiak dalam tempat-tempat takungan air seperti tayar buruk dan bekas menyimpan air. Anda juga perlu selalu menukar air dalam pasu bunga dan bekas air minum haiwan peliharaan untuk mencegah nyamuk dari membiak. Apa yang anda dan keluarga perlu lakukan ialah:

• Tutup dengan rapat semua bekas air seperti baldi, bejana air dan tong-tong atau masukkan ubat pembunuh jentik-jentik ke dalamnya.
• Salin air dalam jambangan bunga setiap minggu.
• Buangkan air dan basuh pengalas pasu bunga setiap minggu.
• Periksa saluran air hujan (saluran bumbung) setiap minggu dan buang daun-daun kayu atau sampah sarap lain yang menyekat aliran air.
• Bersihkan persekitaran rumah anda. Buangkan semua bekas atau benda yang boleh menakung air seperti tin-tin kosong dan botol ke dalam beg plastik dan letakkan dalam tong sampah yang bertutup.

Hapuskan nyamuk Aedes dewasa

Anda boleh menggunakan penyembur serangga bagi membunuh nyamuk dewasa di dalam rumah. Melakukan semburan menyeluruh bahagian rumah. Untuk lebih berkesan, semburan perlulah dilakukan ke seluruh bahagian dalam rumah. Anda juga boleh menggunakan ubat nyamuk untuk mengelakkan anda dan keluarga dari digigit nyamuk.

Adakah terdapat kaedah saringan tertentu atau suntikan untuk denggi?

Malang sekali, vaksin untuk penyakit denggi masih belum ada. Namun begitu, beberapa kemajuan telah dicapai dalam proses penghasilan vaksin yang mampu melindungi manusia dari keempat-empat jenis virus denggi. Produk berkenaan mungkin boleh didapati di pasaran dalam beberapa tahun lagi.

Info daripada :
Unit Vektor, JKNPK

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The Man With The Bomb.

By Richard Rhodes

Robert Oppenheimer oversaw the design and construction of the first atomic bombs. The American theoretical physicist wasn’t the only one involved—more than 130,000 people contributed their skills to the World War II Manhattan Project, from construction workers to explosives experts to Soviet spies—but his name survives uniquely in popular memory as the names of the other participants fade. British philosopher Ray Monk’s lengthy new biography of the man is only the most recent of several to appear, and Oppenheimer wins significant assessment in every history of the Manhattan Project, including my own. Why this one man should have come to stand for the whole huge business, then, is the essential question any biographer must answer.

It’s not as if the bomb program were bereft of men of distinction. Gen. Leslie Groves built the Pentagon and thousands of other U.S. military installations before leading the entire Manhattan Project to success in record time. Hans Bethe discovered the sequence of thermonuclear reactions that fire the stars. Leo Szilard and Enrico Fermi invented the nuclear reactor. John von Neumann conceived the stored-program digital computer. Edward Teller and Stanislaw Ulam co-invented the hydrogen bomb. Luis Alvarez devised a whole new technology for detonating explosives to make the Fat Man bomb work, and later, with his son, Walter, proved that an Earth-impacting asteroid killed off the dinosaurs. The list goes on. What was so special about Oppenheimer?

He was brilliant, rich, handsome, charismatic. Women adored him. As a young professor at Berkeley and Caltech in the 1930s, he broke the European monopoly on theoretical physics, contributing significantly to making America a physics powerhouse that continues to win a freight of Nobel Prizes. Despite never having directed any organization before, he led the Los Alamos bomb laboratory with such skill that even his worst enemy, Edward Teller, told me once that Oppenheimer was the best lab director he’d ever known. After the war he led the group of scientists who guided American nuclear policy, the General Advisory Committee to the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). He finished out his life as director of the prestigious Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, where he welcomed young scientists and scholars into that traditionally aloof club.

Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum/EPA

August 9, 1945: Nagasaki is hit by an atom bomb.

Those were exceptional achievements, but they don’t by themselves explain his unique place in nuclear history. For that, add in the dark side. His brilliance came with a casual cruelty, born certainly of insecurity, which lashed out with invective against anyone who said anything he considered stupid; even the brilliant Bethe wasn’t exempt. His relationships with the significant women in his life were destructive: his first deep love, Jean Tatlock, the daughter of a Berkeley professor, was a suicide; his wife, Kitty, a lifelong alcoholic. His daughter committed suicide; his son continues to live an isolated life.

His choices or mistakes, combined with his penchant for humiliating lesser men, eventually destroyed him.

Oppenheimer’s achievements as a theoretical physicist never reached the level his brilliance seemed to promise; the reason, his student and later Nobel laureate Julian Schwinger judged, was that he “very much insisted on displaying that he was on top of everything”—a polite way of saying Oppenheimer was glib. The physicist Isidor Rabi, a Nobel laureate colleague whom Oppenheimer deeply respected, thought he attributed too much mystery to the workings of nature. Monk notes his curiously uncritical respect for the received wisdom of his field.

Monk’s discussion of Oppenheimer’s work in physics is one of his book’s great contributions to the saga, an area of the man’s life that previous biographies have neglected. In the late 1920s Oppenheimer first worked out the physics of what came to be called black holes, those collapsing giant stars that pull even light in behind them as they shrink to solar-system or even planetary size. Some have speculated Oppenheimer might have won a Nobel for that work had he lived to see the first black hole identified in 1971.

Corbis

Oppenheimer with Albert Einstein, circa the 1940s.

Oppenheimer’s patriotism should have been evident to even the most obtuse government critic. He gave up his beloved physics, after all, not to mention any vestige of personal privacy, to help make his country invulnerable with atomic bombs. Yet he risked his work and reputation by dabbling in left-wing and communist politics before the war and lying to security officers during the war about a solicitation to espionage he received. His choices or mistakes, combined with his penchant for humiliating lesser men, eventually destroyed him.

One of those lesser men, a vicious piece of work named Lewis Strauss, a former shoe salesman turned Wall Street financier and physicist manqué, was the vehicle of Oppenheimer’s destruction. When President Eisenhower appointed Strauss to the chairmanship of the AEC in the summer of 1953, Strauss pieced together a case against Oppenheimer. He was still splenetic from an extended Oppenheimer drubbing delivered during a congressional hearing all the way back in 1948, and he believed the physicist was a Soviet spy.

Strauss proceeded to revoke Oppenheimer’s security clearance, effectively shutting him out of government. Oppenheimer could have accepted his fate and returned to an academic life filled with honors; he was due to be dropped as an AEC consultant anyway. He chose instead to fight the charges. Strauss found a brutal prosecuting attorney to question the scientist, bugged his communications with his attorney, and stalled giving the attorney the clearances he needed to vet the charges. The transcript of the hearing In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer is one of the great, dark documents of the early atomic age, almost Shakespearean in its craven parade of hostile witnesses through the government star chamber, with the victim himself, catatonic with shame, sunken on a couch incessantly smoking the cigarettes that would kill him with throat cancer at 63 in 1967.

Rabi was one of the few witnesses who stood up for his friend, finally challenging the hearing board in exasperation, “We have an A-bomb and a whole series of it [because of Oppenheimer’s work], and what more do you want, mermaids?” What Strauss and others, particularly Edward Teller, wanted was Oppenheimer’s head on a platter, and they got it. The public humiliation, which he called “my train wreck,” destroyed him. Those who knew him best have told me sadly that he was never the same again.

For Monk as for Rabi, Oppenheimer’s central problem was his hollow core, his false sense of self, which Rabi with characteristic wit framed as an inability to decide whether he wanted to be president of the Knights of Columbus or B’nai B’rith. The German Jews who were Oppenheimer’s 19th-century forebears had worked hard at assimilation—that is, at denying their religious heritage. Oppenheimer’s parents submerged that heritage further in New York’s ethical-culture movement that salvaged the humanism of Judaism while scrapping the supernatural overburden. Oppenheimer, actor that he was, could fit himself to almost any role, but turned either abject or imperious when threatened. He was a great lab director at Los Alamos because of his intelligence—“He was much smarter than the rest of us,” Bethe told me—because of his broad knowledge and culture; because of his psychological insight into the complicated personalities of the gifted men assembled there to work on the bomb; most of all because he decided to play that role, as a patriotic citizen, and played it superbly.

Monk is a levelheaded and congenial guide to Oppenheimer’s life, his biography certainly the best that has yet come along. But he devotes far too many pages to Oppenheimer’s Depression-era flirtation with communism, a dead letter long ago and one that speaks more of a rich esthete’s awakening to the suffering in the world than to Oppenheimer’s political convictions. He doesn’t always get the science right. Most of the errors are trivial, but a few are important to the story.

Their fundamental objection was to giving up production of real weapons so that Teller could pursue his pipe dream, a dead-end hydrogen bomb design.

A fundamental reason Oppenheimer opposed a crash program to develop the hydrogen bomb in response to the first Soviet atomic-bomb test in 1949 was the requirement of Edward Teller’s “Super” design for large amounts of a rare isotope of hydrogen, tritium. Tritium is bred by irradiating lithium in a nuclear reactor, but the slugs of lithium take up space that would otherwise be devoted to breeding plutonium. To make tritium for a hydrogen bomb that the U.S. did not know how to build would have required sacrificing most of the U.S. production of plutonium for devastating atomic bombs the U.S. did know how to build. To Oppenheimer and the other scientists on the GAC, such an irresponsible substitution as an answer to the Soviet bomb made no strategic sense. It’s true that the hydrogen bomb with its potentially unlimited scale of destruction made no military sense to them either—and was morally repugnant to some of them as well. But their fundamental objection, which Monk overlooks, was to giving up production of real weapons so that Teller could pursue his pipe dream, a dead-end hydrogen bomb design that never worked.

More egregious is Monk’s notion that the Danish physicist Niels Bohr, Oppenheimer’s mentor during the war on the international implications of the new technology, pushed for the bomb’s use on Japan to make its terror manifest. He did not. He pushed, to the contrary, for the Allies, the Soviet Union included, to discuss the implications of the bomb prior to its use and to devise a framework for controlling it. Bohr foresaw that the bomb would stalemate major war, as it has, but correctly feared that U.S. secrecy about its development would lead to a U.S.-Soviet arms race. He conferred with both Roosevelt and Churchill about presenting the fact of the bomb to the Russians as a common danger to the world, like a new epidemic disease, that needed to be quarantined by common agreement. Churchill vehemently disagreed, and Roosevelt was old and ill. The moment passed. The arms race followed, as Bohr foresaw, and with diminished force, among pariah states like Iran and North Korea, continues to this day.

Monk’s Oppenheimer is a less appealing figure than the Oppenheimer of previous biographies, perhaps because, as an Englishman, Monk is less susceptible to Oppenheimer’s rhetorical gifts and more candid about calling out his evasions. He pulls together most of what several generations of Oppenheimer scholars have found and offers new revelations as well. Yet there’s a faint whiff of condescension in his portrait, and the real Oppenheimer, the man whom so many loved and admired, still somehow escapes him. He misses the deep alignment of Robert Oppenheimer’s life with Greek tragedy, the charismatic hubris that was his glory but also the flaw that brought him low. But maybe I’m expecting too much: maybe only a large work of fiction could assemble that critical mass.

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New Documents Reveal How a 1980s Nuclear War Scare Became a Full-Blown Crisis

BY ROBERT BECKHUSEN

During 10 days in November 1983, the United States and the Soviet Union nearly started a nuclear war. Newly declassified documents from the CIA, NSA, KGB, and senior officials in both countries reveal just how close we came to mutually assured destruction — over a military exercise.

That exercise, Able Archer 83, simulated the transition by NATO from a conventional war to a nuclear war, culminating in the simulated release of warheads against the Soviet Union. NATO changed its readiness condition during Able Archer to DEFCON 1, the highest level. The Soviets interpreted the simulation as a ruse to conceal a first strike and readied their nukes. At this period in history, and especially during the exercise, a single false alarm or miscalculation could have brought Armageddon.

According to a diplomatic memo obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request by National Security Archives researcher Nate Jones, Soviet General Secretary Yuri Adroprov warned U.S. ambassador Averell Harriman six months before the crisis that both countries “may be moving toward a red line” in which a miscalculation could spark a nuclear war. Harriman later wrote that he believed Andropov was concerned “over the state of U.S.-Soviet relations and his desire to see them at least ‘normalized,’ if not improved.”

The early 1980s was a “crisis period, a pre-wartime period,” said Gen. Varfolomei Korobushin, the former deputy chief of staff of the Soviet nuclear Strategic Rocket Forces, according to an interview conducted by the Pentagon in the early 1990s and obtained by Jones. The Kremlin’s Central Committee slept in shifts. There were fears the deployment of Pershing II ballistic missiles to Europe (also in November 1983) could tip the balance. If a conventional war erupted, Soviet planners worried their troops would come close to capturing the nuclear-tipped missiles, prompting the United States to fire them.

The Soviet Union, according to an unclassified article written for the CIA’s classified Studies in Intelligence journal and provided to Jones, notes that Soviet fears of a preemptive American nuclear attack “while exaggerated, were scarcely insane.” This stemmed from the Soviet experience during World War II, when the Third Reich launched Operation Barbarossa, the largest invasion in human history. Soviet officials worried history might be repeated by NATO.

Oleg Gordievsky, a CIA and MI6 source during the Cold War, was previously known to have warned the West about these fears,  but the CIA article identifies a second source of this information: a Czech intelligence officer with ties to the KGB who “noted that his counterparts were obsessed with the historical parallel between 1941 and 1983. He believed this feeling was almost visceral, not intellectual, and deeply affected Soviet thinking.”

President Reagan wasn’t sure, and in March, 1984, asked Arthur Hartman, his ambassador to the Soviet Union, “Do you think Soviet leaders really fear us, or is all the huffing and puffing just part of their propaganda?” We don’t know what Hartman said in response, but John McMahon, the CIA director at the time, believed the Soviets were simply “rattling their pots and pans” to stop further Pershing II deployments.

It’s unclear how much of the fear was just pots and pans. Jones writes that although “real-time analysts, retroactive re-inspectors, and the historical community may be at odds as to how dangerous the War Scare was, all agree that the dearth of available evidence has made conclusions harder to deduce.” Jones did not get all the information he asked for. (The complete list of unclassified documents arecollected at the Archives’ website, with two more sets of documents to follow.) The NSA told him it had 81 more documents, but did not release them. However, it did “review, approve for release, stamp, and send a printout of a Wikipedia article,” he noted.

Still, we do have more evidence of serious Soviet preparations. Documents obtained by Jones detail a massive KGB intelligence-gathering mission called Operation RYaN. (The name is a Russian acronym for “nuclear missile attack.”) According to the CIA article, RYaN was “for real” and accelerated in the early 1980s during the scare. The goal was to find out if and when the United States and NATO would attack. According to KGB instructions sent to agents in London, Soviet spies were to monitor bomb shelters, blood banks, military bases and key financial and religious leaders for signs of war preparations. “Many of the assigned observations would have been very poor indicators of a nuclear attack,” Jones warns.

But in another sense, the scrambling for any scrap of intelligence — whether good or bad — reflected a feverish belief among some quarters that war was just around the corner. “[T]he Reagan administration marked the height of the Cold War,” notes one declassified history published by the National Security Agency. “The president referred to the Soviet Union as the Evil Empire, and was determined to spend it into the ground. The Politburo reciprocated, and the rhetoric on both sides, especially during the first Reagan administration, drove the hysteria. Some called it the Second Cold War. The period 1982-1984 marked the most dangerous Soviet-American confrontation since the Cuban Missile Crisis.”

Worse, there were “a lot of crazy people” in the Kremlin and Soviet military command, according to Vitalii Tsygichko, an analyst for the Soviet General Staff who was interviewed by the Pentagon. “I know many military people who look like normal people, but it was difficult to explain to them that waging nuclear war was not feasible. We had a lot of arguments in this respect. Unfortunately, as far as I know, there are a lot of stupid people both in NATO and our country.”

Considering the consequences of a war, and how close it came, those comments certainly ring true.

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