There exists in this republic a peculiar, almost sacred covenant between the people and their past. It is the understanding that the record of what was done, and why, and by whom shall not be airbrushed away by the whims of the present.
This covenant was broken, quietly and without fanfare, in the digital stacks of the State Department.
The deletion is complete, the explanation absent, and the precedent as dangerous as the history it seeks to erase.
They have taken a razor to the books.
Not a literal razor, of course.
That crude tool belonged to another era and another empire, where censors in drab offices would slice offending passages from bound journals. Our modern version is cleaner, quieter, more bureaucratic.
A command is issued, a key is pressed, and fifteen pages of history—detailing one of the moments this trembling world came closest to incinerating itself—vanish from the official record as if they were never there.
The history in question is the Foreign Relations of the United States series, the government’s own solemn pledge to render “a thorough, accurate, and reliable” account of its deeds.
The volume covered the early 1980s, when the air between Washington and Moscow was so thick with paranoia you could have carved it with a knife.
At the heart of that period lies Able Archer 83, a NATO military exercise that was, to the men in the Kremlin, indistinguishable from the opening act of Armageddon.
We now know, because the records once told us, that Soviet fighter jets were placed on alert. We knew that parts of their military began preparations for the immediate use of nuclear weapons.
We read the warning from a senior U.S. intelligence director that we had drifted far closer to the brink than anyone had realized. We saw President Reagan’s own handwritten notation calling the episode “really scary.”
These were not speculative musings.
They were conclusions drawn from the government’s own declassified files, published for all to see. They served as a stark monument to human error, to the terrifying fact that the machinery of doom can be set in motion by mistake, by misunderstanding, by a scripted war game that looks a little too real to a terrified adversary.
And now those lessons are gone.
The State Department, when asked, offered a shrug wrapped in legalese. They were “not required to provide public notice.”
The excuse, as polished and hollow as a river stone, is that the deletion came after a legal tussle over a Freedom of Information Act request—a request that sought not to hide the documents, but to obtain an original copy of one of them. The courts ruled the CIA need not provide that copy.
They said nothing about setting history ablaze.
So the guardians of our diplomatic past have performed a magic trick. They have made the fear disappear.
They have taken a terrifying brush with annihilation and filed it under “nothing to see here.” In doing so, they have committed a double betrayal: first, against the historians and citizens who rely on the integrity of these volumes, and second, against every soldier, statesman, and schoolchild who needs to remember how thin the ice truly is.
The real message is that you don’t need to know how close our government came to killing us all, and that is a thought that makes one wonder what else they are hiding.
What is most galling is the sheer smallness of the act.
It reeks not of grand conspiracy but of petty officialdom. It is the action of a clerk who decides that the simplest way to solve a paperwork problem is to make the paper itself go away. It is a silence purchased with a keystroke, a triumph of administrative convenience over moral and historical obligation.
They have fired the independent watchdog committee of historians meant to prevent such abuses. They have allowed the statutory deadline for reporting to Congress to pass unmet. They operate now in a vacuum of their own making, accountable to no one—not even to the past they are tasked with preserving.
Let us be plain. This is not merely the loss of a few documents.
It is the surrender of a principle. If the record of a near miss with nuclear war can be disappeared on a bureaucratic whim, then no chapter is safe. The past becomes clay to be molded by the present into whatever shape is least inconvenient.
The truth, of course, is a stubborn creature.
It has backups. The excised pages can still be found in other archives, on other servers, preserved by those who understand that memory is the first line of defense against folly.
But the act of deletion itself is the story. It is a confession of insecurity, a monument to the very arrogance that has, time and again, brought us to the edge of the cliff.
We are left with a simple, chilling question: What are they so afraid we will see? And what, precisely, do they plan to do next time, when the lights on the board glow red and the fears are real, if their first instinct is to erase the last time we stood at the precipice and looked down?
A government that fears its own history is a government that has lost faith in its own people.
Experts have argued whether Thomas Jefferson said, “When government fears the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny.”
Nobody should doubt that it is a fair sentiment. That is the way it is, and, as in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four might have said, it is deeply and profoundly un-good.