In the early 1980s, according to newly released documents, Fidel Castro was suggesting a Soviet nuclear strike against the United States, until Moscow dissuaded him by patiently explaining how the radioactive cloud resulting from such a strike would also devastate Cuba.

The cold war was then in one of its chilliest phases. President Ronald Reagan had begun a trillion-dollar arms buildup, called the Soviet Union ``an evil empire'' and ordered scores of atomic detonations under the Nevada desert as a means of developing new arms. Some Reagan aides talked of fighting and winning a nuclear war.

Dozens of books warned that Reagan's policies threatened to end life on earth. In June 1982, a million protesters gathered in Central Park. Barack Obama, then an undergraduate at Columbia University, worried about the nuclear threat and later wrote as a student and a journalist about ways to avoid global annihilation. The future president didn't know half the danger.

UNCOVERED THREAT

The National Security Archive, a private research group at George Washington University, recently made public documents that reveal the nuclear threat in new detail.

The two-volume study, Soviet Intentions 1965-1985, was prepared in 1995 by a Pentagon contractor and based on extensive interviewing of former top Soviet military officials.

It took the security archive two years to get the Pentagon to release the study. Censors excised a few sections on nuclear tests and weapon effects, and the archive recently posted the redacted study on its website.

The Pentagon study attributes the Cuba revelation to Andrian A. Danilevich, a Soviet general staff officer from 1964 to 1990 and director of the staff officers who wrote the Soviet Union's final reference guide on strategic and nuclear planning.

PRESSED HARD

In the early 1980s, the study quotes him as saying that Castro ``pressed hard for a tougher Soviet line against the U.S. up to and including possible nuclear strikes.'' The general staff, General Danilevich continued, ``had to actively disabuse him of this view by spelling out the ecological consequences for Cuba of a Soviet strike against the U.S.''

That information, the general concluded, ``changed Castro's positions considerably.'' Moscow's effort to enlighten Castro to the innate messiness of nuclear warfare is among a number of disclosures in the Pentagon study. Other findings include how the Soviets strove for nuclear superiority but ``understood the devastating consequences of nuclear war'' and believed that the use of nuclear weapons had to be avoided ``at all costs.''

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