Let me back up. Since 1991, the department has been required by law to publish “a thorough, accurate, and reliable” history of U.S. foreign policy within 30 years of the events. It does this in the Foreign Relations of the United States series, curated collections of primary source documents abbreviated as FRUS.
The State Department has published more than 450 volumes, which include thousands of primary source records detailing the crafting of U.S. foreign policy dating back to the Lincoln administration. The thick, bound ruby buckram volumes are a staple on the bookshelves of many college history departments, where they remain an invaluable tool for students, scholars and authors.
But in the internet era, FRUS has become a predominantly digital publication, hosted on the State Department’s website.
And it is easier to delete digital records than to destroy books.
This January, the State Department did just that when it republished on its website a volume about the Reagan administration — without 15 pages on the risk of inadvertent nuclear war sparked by a 1983 NATO exercise.
Previously, the revelations about the incident, known as the Able Archer 83 War Scare, were included toward the end of the 14,079-page digital volume on the Reagan administration’s foreign policy toward the Soviet Union from January 1983 to March 1985.
These pages, originally published in February 2021, included historical documents such as a warning from the Defense Intelligence Agency director that Able Archer 83 brought the United States closer to nuclear war than most realized. The Washington Post reported these revelations at the time the collection of records was published.
According to the records, Able Archer 83 resembled an actual nuclear attack so closely that parts of the Soviet military made preparations for nuclear war. The documents revealed that the Soviet Union “implemented military and intelligence activities that previously were seen only during actual crises,” including placing fighter jets on alert “which included preparations for immediate use of nuclear weapons.”
According to another document excerpted in the Foreign Relations volume, after learning of the war scare, Reagan “described the events as ‘really scary.’”
Then, in, 2022, the entire Foreign Relations volume mysteriously disappeared from the State Department website without public announcement or explanation. When it reappeared in January 2025, the key pages on Able Archer 83 were missing.