Speaker 1: In the movie biz, there's something called the false defeat.
Speaker 1: It's a moment towards the end of a movie when
Speaker 1: things are going really well, too well. The heroes just
Speaker 1: had a victory and the finish line is in sight,
Speaker 1: and then a grave challenge presents itself, one that seems
Speaker 1: so insurmountable that for a brief moment, the audience can't
Speaker 1: even fathom a happy ending. It's like in Sleepless in
Speaker 1: Seattle when Annie is rushing to the top of the
Speaker 1: Empire State Building, but it's too late because Sam and
Speaker 1: Jonah are already in the elevator on their way down.
Speaker 2: I'm sorry, man, empty.
Speaker 1: It's like in Home Alone when after Kevin absolutely roasts
Speaker 1: Harry and Marv with all his booby traps, they finally catch.
Speaker 3: Up with him high a pal be out smart this time.
Speaker 1: It's like when Our Fearless History slewth Nate Jones discovered
Speaker 1: that there was a top secret piffy app report one
Speaker 1: hundred pages long, all about Able Larcher, and then found
Speaker 1: out that it would take decades to unseal, and he
Speaker 1: probably wouldn't see it in his lifetime.
Speaker 4: We were in big trouble.
Speaker 1: Nate had waited eight years for his piffy app foya.
Speaker 1: When he finally.
Speaker 4: Faced the music, it just wasn't working.
Speaker 1: It was never gonna happen.
Speaker 5: Just kidding.
Speaker 1: Another thing about a false defeat. The hero always finds
Speaker 1: a way.
Speaker 4: Is never the end of the road.
Speaker 1: I learned that avoid Nate filing a FOYA isn't the
Speaker 1: only way to get a secret document declassified. There's one
Speaker 1: other path, but it's a real hail Mary.
Speaker 4: Called Mandatory Declassification.
Speaker 1: Review aka MDR aka ice CAP. Don't ask me why.
Speaker 1: Ice CAP is effectively a side door into the government vaults.
Speaker 4: It's a small born of one representative of all of
Speaker 4: the intelligence agencies sitting at the National Archives.
Speaker 1: Meaning instead of each agency taking years to approve declassification
Speaker 1: one by one, all the agencies sit down in a
Speaker 1: room and review it together at the same time.
Speaker 4: For a historian, it's kind of like the hottest ticket
Speaker 4: in town.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we're talking a hotter ticket than macho Man Randy
Speaker 1: Savage versus hul Kogan WrestleMania five, nineteen eighty nine. But
Speaker 1: there's a catch. If you want to try to get
Speaker 1: those ice Cap tickets, you have to withdraw your foyas first.
Speaker 1: You can't do both, which meant Nate would need to
Speaker 1: withdraw a FOYA that was already eight years in progress.
Speaker 1: Then if ice Cap declined to review the pifyab, he'd
Speaker 1: have to start all over again, eight years down the drain.
Speaker 1: But in the wise words of a risky Tom.
Speaker 6: Cruise, sometimes you gotta say what the fuck make you move?
Speaker 4: So we decided we are going to take a shot
Speaker 4: and do MDR and Gopher broke. If ice Cap can't
Speaker 4: do it, we're pretty screwed.
Speaker 1: All right, my listeners, We have arrived at the final chapter,
Speaker 1: and we've had quite a ride here, haven't we. First
Speaker 1: we heard about how Reagan's tough guy speeches plus a
Speaker 1: new deployment of super fast earth destoring weapons, fueled the
Speaker 1: Soviets paranoia to the point that they convinced themselves the
Speaker 1: US was going to nuke them at precisely the same
Speaker 1: time NATO was rehearsing a nuclear war. But at the
Speaker 1: last minute, we were all saved by a couple of
Speaker 1: spies and Lieutenant General Leonard Perutz, who, in a tense moment,
Speaker 1: kept a cool head. But then we learned that there
Speaker 1: isn't a record of the so called war scare in
Speaker 1: Eastern archives that two of the main eye witnesses might
Speaker 1: be kind of unreliable, and that maybe the story of
Speaker 1: Able Archer eighty three is nothing more than a Cold
Speaker 1: War myth. But one stone remains unturned the piffy. This
Speaker 1: episode we take one more shot at the most elusive
Speaker 1: facet of history, the truth. I'm at Helms and this
Speaker 1: is the season finale of Snaffoo Able Archer eighty three.
Speaker 1: One day in twenty fifteen, Nate Jones woke up for work.
Speaker 1: It was his thirty second birthday. He took his time
Speaker 1: moseying into the office.
Speaker 4: Probably about ten o'clock. I guess nicely might be in
Speaker 4: a historian, you can't go to work a little later.
Speaker 1: It was an ordinary day, save for a few happy birthdays,
Speaker 1: maybe a cupcake or two, and of course that thirty
Speaker 1: dollars check from Graham, which is so nice but never
Speaker 1: seemed to keep up with the pace of inflation. Come on, grandma.
Speaker 1: Nate settled in at his desk, unaware that the best
Speaker 1: birthday president of all time was about to arrive certified delivery,
Speaker 1: and it went through the mail slit.
Speaker 4: So there's kind of a thud onto the floor.
Speaker 1: Nate Jones wondered, what could.
Speaker 4: It be that was about one hundred pages thick with
Speaker 4: government and dress government stamps. So I knew it might
Speaker 4: be good. So went and looked at it and then
Speaker 4: saw that it was from ice Cap. My heart started
Speaker 4: beating a little bit and ripped it open and saw
Speaker 4: the title.
Speaker 1: The Soviet War Scare President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, also
Speaker 1: known as Piffy AM.
Speaker 4: I still remember. It had a bright red stamp, had
Speaker 4: seven code words.
Speaker 1: Top secret, wintel, no FRON, no contract, orcn Umbra, gamma.
Speaker 4: And all seven of them had a line through them
Speaker 4: tick tick tick tick tick tick tick, meaning that they
Speaker 4: were no longer classified.
Speaker 1: This is it. The report to end all reports? Was
Speaker 1: able Archer a Cold War myth like some historians believed,
Speaker 1: a propaganda plot like the CIA concluded in the eighties,
Speaker 1: or a terrifying nuclear near myss like Leonard Perutz had
Speaker 1: insisted for so many decades. Nate nervously began to flip
Speaker 1: through the Piffy app hoping praying that what he was
Speaker 1: holding was not one hundred percent redacted.
Speaker 4: And I flipped through and I saw way more text
Speaker 4: than redactions, and I said, oh my God, this is it.
Speaker 4: And then I actually read it for the content and
Speaker 4: I said, oh my god, this is revealing the secrets
Speaker 4: that I was so curious about.
Speaker 1: Finally clarity. All right, let's break it all down, shall we.
Speaker 1: The report confirmed a lot of things that Nate had
Speaker 1: already figured out from other sources, like those planes in
Speaker 1: East Germany loaded up with nukes. But there was some
Speaker 1: new stuff too.
Speaker 4: There's details about flights and helicopter flights, probably for surveillance
Speaker 4: of able Archer.
Speaker 1: The Soviets conducted over thirty six reconnaissance flights monitoring able Archer.
Speaker 1: The report said that even though the Soviets monitored able
Speaker 1: archer every year, this was more reconnaissance than any year before.
Speaker 1: And apart from these flights, all other Soviet flights were grounded.
Speaker 1: Why is that important? The report author speculates that this
Speaker 1: was in order to have as many aircraft as possible
Speaker 1: at the ready for combat.
Speaker 4: Said that Soviet military reaction hadn't been like this since
Speaker 4: World War Two.
Speaker 1: For example, the Soviets stopped production at their tractor factory
Speaker 1: and started using it to build tanks. The last time
Speaker 1: they did that was during World War Two. The report
Speaker 1: also pointed to the Soviet's own nuclear wargames as evidence
Speaker 1: that they genuinely believed NATO might launch a surprise nuclear attack.
Speaker 1: The wargame they're talking about is called Druzeba, which, according
Speaker 1: to Google, translates to Friendship. That's right, a wargame called friendship.
Speaker 1: Who says that Soviets don't have a sense of humor anyway.
Speaker 1: In the years after Able Archer eighty three, in nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty five, eighty six, and eighty seven, the Druzebil wargame
Speaker 1: scripts all began the same way, with NATO launching a
Speaker 1: surprise nuclear attack during Autumn Forge, which is the NATO
Speaker 1: exercise that ends with Able Archer. Ultimately, the Able Archer mystery,
Speaker 1: the mystery of how close we really were to all
Speaker 1: dying that night in nineteen eighty three, It really comes
Speaker 1: down to one question. How genuine was the Soviets fear
Speaker 1: that the US was going to attack them? Were they
Speaker 1: terrified finger hovering over the button or were they pretending
Speaker 1: to be terrified. Well, the pifyab's take was this.
Speaker 4: They concluded that during Naval Archer that US actions and
Speaker 4: Soviet actions put the world on hair trigger away from
Speaker 4: nuclear war.
Speaker 1: They said knowing what we know now, it's very possible
Speaker 1: the Soviets were genuinely afraid that an attack was imminent,
Speaker 1: and they may have prepared their own nuclear weapons to
Speaker 1: fire first.
Speaker 4: And I agree with this conclusion that the war scare
Speaker 4: was real and the war scare was dangerous.
Speaker 1: Nate immediately wrote up a summary and the next day
Speaker 1: he published the declassified Pifyab for all the world to see.
Speaker 4: I won't say I cried, but my eyes did get
Speaker 4: a little misty. I've had a lot of good birthdays,
Speaker 4: but that one might.
Speaker 1: Take the cake. Happy birthday, buddy. The End You music
Speaker 1: roll credits SNAFU was a production of iHeartRadio, Film, Nation Entertainment,
Speaker 1: and Pacific Electric Picture Company. I'm kidding, it's not the
Speaker 1: end people. There's always a twist. Nate's Piffy ab win
Speaker 1: was supposed to be our hero's victory against all odds.
Speaker 1: The Foyer Warrior fought for the Piffy ab Report and
Speaker 1: finally he solved the able Archer mystery once and for all.
Speaker 1: But it turns out this might be a false victory
Speaker 1: after the false defeat, or something like that, because even
Speaker 1: though Nate was convinced.
Speaker 4: Very good analysis very good use of facts.
Speaker 1: Not everyone would agree. You see in the PIFYAB reports
Speaker 1: one hundred pages, it didn't actually claim to solve the
Speaker 1: mystery of Able Archer. It didn't say what definitely happened
Speaker 1: that night. It used a lot of equivocating phrases like
Speaker 1: may have and very possible. And the truth is, the
Speaker 1: conclusions that are drawn from the Piffyab will differ depending
Speaker 1: on who's reading it.
Speaker 5: The first time I read the PIFFIAB report was when
Speaker 5: the National Security Archive managed to get a copy of it.
Speaker 1: This is Ben Fisher. He's the CIA historian who brought
Speaker 1: the Able Archer story into the public eye in the
Speaker 1: late nineties, the one who convinced the intelligence community at
Speaker 1: large that Able Archer may have been much more than
Speaker 1: a propaganda plot. So you may be surprised to hear
Speaker 1: that by the time the PIFYAB report came out, Ben
Speaker 1: had this to say about it.
Speaker 5: I think that the Piffyab study was an exaggeration.
Speaker 1: I know, it's surprising that the guy who changed everyone's
Speaker 1: mind about Able Archer would say such a blasphemous thing
Speaker 1: in light of you know, everything we've talked about on
Speaker 1: this show, The war mongering speeches, the euro Missiles Operation Ryan,
Speaker 1: the stories of Oli Gordievsky and ryder Up, the airplanes
Speaker 1: on alert with nukes potentially loaded, Missile commanders called in
Speaker 1: for emergency shifts. Not to mention the new details from
Speaker 1: the PIFYAB report, reconnaissance flights, tank production, and Soviet nuclear
Speaker 1: war games.
Speaker 5: But nonetheless I began to move away from the countdown
Speaker 5: to armageddon. The Abel Archer alert was a night we
Speaker 5: almost went to war.
Speaker 1: Ben says. Despite the way it looks, there could be
Speaker 1: another reasonable explanation for everything. Let's start with the Soviet's
Speaker 1: military mobilization during Able Archer.
Speaker 5: Shall we Especially during the Able Archer Alert, the Soviets
Speaker 5: did take certain actions. The strip alert for the aircraft
Speaker 5: is one thing. They may have put some of their
Speaker 5: forces on alert. Senior officials may have repaired to their
Speaker 5: underground bunkers. How do I interpret this? I think it's
Speaker 5: what we call signaling. It's sending messages to the other
Speaker 5: side by doing things, rather than saying things.
Speaker 1: Like, hey, we see you doing your big exercise over there.
Speaker 1: We're watching and we're ready, so don't try any funny business.
Speaker 1: It's like the wargame equivalent of that like I'm watching
Speaker 1: you thing where you point at your eyes and then
Speaker 1: point at the other guy's eyes and then point at
Speaker 1: your eyes again. Ben says that if the Soviets were
Speaker 1: truly on the brink, we should be seeing a lot
Speaker 1: more military activity than we did, Entire armies at the ready,
Speaker 1: navy ships, submarines and tanks, anything smaller just signaling. Okay, So,
Speaker 1: what's beIN's take on our two spies, you know, the
Speaker 1: two men who just so happened to have their own
Speaker 1: stories about the Soviets getting really freaked out during Able Archer.
Speaker 7: Well, it was a flush telegram, It wasn't super urgent telegram.
Speaker 4: Do you remember sending a message in there?
Speaker 5: I remember sending You know, we always have this problem
Speaker 5: with people who do who defect, you know, how much
Speaker 5: of what they say is true, how much of it it's
Speaker 5: not true, how much of it is slanted in a
Speaker 5: certain direction.
Speaker 1: We reached out to both Gordiovski and Ruugh to try
Speaker 1: to get to the bottom of all this. Oleg Gordievsky
Speaker 1: was unavailable due to his health, plus the fact that
Speaker 1: he's in a safe house hiding from Putin's assassins, and
Speaker 1: we just never heard back from Rhina Rup, so ultimately
Speaker 1: we can't ask them these questions. But for what it's worth,
Speaker 1: Ben doesn't think Oleg Gordievsky is a liar.
Speaker 5: Oliah Gordiowsky was absolutely the best Soviet agent of the
Speaker 5: Cold War. I've met him a couple of times. A
Speaker 5: good man who risked his life. Obviously, I think he
Speaker 5: reported what he believed and what he saw and what
Speaker 5: he heard. There's a bigger question of what about the
Speaker 5: people above him. I mean, to what extent were they serious?
Speaker 1: By they? Ben means the KGB leaders who under Operation
Speaker 1: Ryan commanded their spies in the West to report back
Speaker 1: any indication of NATO war preparation. You remember that proverbial
Speaker 1: tic tac toe board of death the batshit crazy nuclear
Speaker 1: crystal ball. But Ben thinks Operation Ryan may have actually
Speaker 1: been more down to earth, that the Soviets were just
Speaker 1: doing due diligence in a period of heightened nuclear tension.
Speaker 5: Simple they were concerned that they balance the power was
Speaker 5: tipping against them. They wanted to be prepared for if
Speaker 5: and when that happened.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they did send messages to their spies saying the
Speaker 1: adversary could attack us at any moment, But maybe they
Speaker 1: were just saying that to encourage thorough espionage.
Speaker 5: Sevie Union's following apart. They've got all kinds of problems.
Speaker 5: You need to keep the morale of your troops up.
Speaker 5: How do you do this, Well, you give them a task,
Speaker 5: and the task is to go out and collect information
Speaker 5: related to the possibility of a surprise nuclear missile attack
Speaker 5: on the Soviet Union. Okay, this gives people something to do.
Speaker 1: So back to the central question. Just how close of
Speaker 1: a call was a larger How scared were the Soviets.
Speaker 5: I'm from Oklahoma, I'm a country boy. As a phrase,
Speaker 5: I use that they were worried, but they weren't shaking
Speaker 5: in their boots.
Speaker 1: Ben believes that there was at least some element of
Speaker 1: truth to the Soviet fear in nineteen eighty three. If
Speaker 1: they weren't afraid at all, they wouldn't have shot down
Speaker 1: that Korean Airlines flight. If they weren't afraid at all,
Speaker 1: they wouldn't have spent billions of dollars building underground bunkers.
Speaker 1: If they weren't afraid at all, they wouldn't have practiced
Speaker 1: a nuclear wargame. That begins with NATO attacking undercover of
Speaker 1: Autumn Forge. So yeah, they were scared, but they weren't
Speaker 1: quote shaken in their boots. In other words, Ben doesn't
Speaker 1: think Yuri and drop Off was anywhere close to pushing
Speaker 1: that button.
Speaker 5: It was a serious matter, but it wasn't almost the
Speaker 5: end of the world.
Speaker 1: That said, Ben admits he doesn't know for sure.
Speaker 5: I realized how complex it is. There's no hard and
Speaker 5: fast answer. It's a very marky world and rarely does
Speaker 5: it offer concrete evidence of this or that. And that's
Speaker 5: why you have intellvisionce failures. It's not scientific, it's an arts,
Speaker 5: not science.
Speaker 1: Hold on, Ben, that's kind of terrifying. These intelligence agencies
Speaker 1: hold the fate of the world in their hands, and
Speaker 1: you're telling me there's rarely concrete evidence of this or that.
Speaker 1: It's an art.
Speaker 5: Intelligent and honest people on both sides of the same issue.
Speaker 5: People are not bad because they have one point of
Speaker 5: view or not good because they have another point of view.
Speaker 5: They're human beings struggling to make sense of what's going
Speaker 5: on around them.
Speaker 1: The Able Archer mystery is riddled with maddening contradictions. As
Speaker 1: a result, rational people can look at the same information
Speaker 1: and draw startlingly different conclusions.
Speaker 4: No matter what's found, I think that the debate will continue.
Speaker 4: That's history arguing both sides. What the best evidence you
Speaker 4: have in.
Speaker 1: The end Able Archer is a rorshack test. In other words,
Speaker 1: how you see it might just be a reflection of
Speaker 1: your personality, how optimistic or cynical or fearful you might be.
Speaker 1: I don't know if you ask me, No matter how
Speaker 1: it makes you feel, the fact that intelligent people can
Speaker 1: still argue about how close we came to armageddon means
Speaker 1: we came too damn close. It was June of nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty four, about seven months after Able Archer, when Ronald
Speaker 1: Reagan took the Able Archer Rorschach test himself.
Speaker 6: While we go on believing that the Soviets are blotting
Speaker 6: against us and mean us harm, maybe they are scared
Speaker 6: of us and think we are a threat.
Speaker 1: This is an entry from his diary. It was written
Speaker 1: right around the same time that Reagan first read a
Speaker 1: detailed report listing the specifics of the Soviet reaction to
Speaker 1: Abel Archer, and even though his own CIA analysts claimed
Speaker 1: that there was absolutely nothing to worry about, that these
Speaker 1: Soviet reactions were all part of a propaganda campaign that
Speaker 1: wasn't Reagan's takeaway. To him, it seemed possible that the
Speaker 1: Soviets were preparing for war on his watch without his knowing.
Speaker 1: In the end, Reagan ignored the advice of his own analysts.
Speaker 1: He believed that the able Archer war scare was quote
Speaker 1: very scary. He decides to set up a face to
Speaker 1: face meeting with the new Soviet leader, the first time
Speaker 1: he would do this in over three years of being president.
Speaker 1: He writes, and I quote, I.
Speaker 8: Haven't got feeling we should do this, no shit. So
Speaker 8: this is why I tell people the war scare is
Speaker 8: actually a good news story.
Speaker 5: Okay, there's always a room for miscalculation, there's always a
Speaker 5: room for hubris, there's always a room for mistakes. But
Speaker 5: what came out of the war scare, well, President Reagan
Speaker 5: learned for the first time in his life that this
Speaker 5: helped mes a're scared of us, And from that you
Speaker 5: can or a straight line to his second term, where
Speaker 5: he says he wanted to be known not as the
Speaker 5: man who waits to coal warp, but the man who
Speaker 5: would end it. And he realized that to do this
Speaker 5: he was going to have to deal with the Soviet leaders.
Speaker 5: He was going to have to talk to them.
Speaker 3: This is tomorrow morning's Washington Post.
Speaker 5: Reagan Gorbachev signed.
Speaker 3: Nuclear missile treaty. As you can see, it is very
Speaker 3: big news here in the United States.
Speaker 1: On December eighth, nineteen eighty seven, over four years after
Speaker 1: able Archer, President Reagan and Soviet General Secretary Gorbachev signed
Speaker 1: the historic Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty AKAINF.
Speaker 9: This ceremony and the treaty we're signing today are both
Speaker 9: excellent examples of the rewards of patients. On the Soviet side,
Speaker 9: over fifteen hundred deployed warheads will be removed. On our side,
Speaker 9: our entire complement of pershing to and ground launched cruise missiles,
Speaker 9: with some four hundred deployed warheads, will all be destroyed.
Speaker 5: It's almost a miracle in some ways, because eventually in
Speaker 5: Italy to the end of the Cold War.
Speaker 1: At the signing of the i in F, the entire
Speaker 1: globe heaved a giant sigh of relief. At last, the
Speaker 1: Cold War was coming to an end. Now, I wish
Speaker 1: I could say that at this point we collectively threw
Speaker 1: aside all of the geopolitical theater that led us to
Speaker 1: able our t eighty three, that we got smarter, that
Speaker 1: we approached the nuclear dilemma with a little more humility
Speaker 1: and a little less trash talking. But unfortunately that's not
Speaker 1: what happened.
Speaker 3: As President Winston Churchill once said that trying to maintain
Speaker 3: a good relationship with a communist was not unlike trying
Speaker 3: to woo a crocodile. When it opened its mouth, you
Speaker 3: never could be quite certain whether it was trying to
Speaker 3: smile or eat you up.
Speaker 1: This is from an interview with Reagan after news about
Speaker 1: the inf treaty broke. You may or may not be
Speaker 1: surprised to hear that he got a lot of criticism
Speaker 1: from his own party about being too weak.
Speaker 3: Americans respect you, love you, and pulling for you, with
Speaker 3: their concerned that perhaps you are going to or already
Speaker 3: have allowed Gorbachev to eat you and us up.
Speaker 9: Well, I haven't changed from the time when I made
Speaker 9: a speech about an evil empire, evil empire, evil empire.
Speaker 1: Ere Certain phrases come to mind at a time like this.
Speaker 1: Old habits die hard. You can't teach an old dog
Speaker 1: new tricks. Nancy's astrologer made me do it. You see,
Speaker 1: even after Ronald Reagan had his able Archer epiphany, even
Speaker 1: after he reached across the Iron Curtain and negotiated a
Speaker 1: groundbreaking treaty publicly, he wasn't prepared to let go of
Speaker 1: his tough guy persona. In other words, according to Reagan,
Speaker 1: the Cold War didn't simply end through a mutual detente.
Speaker 1: He the American cowboy had finally conquered the evil Communist villain,
Speaker 1: and the US had won the Cold War with pure
Speaker 1: brute strength.
Speaker 10: The men in those positions are so confident.
Speaker 1: Here's Jeffrey Lewis talking about the people in power during
Speaker 1: the Cold War.
Speaker 10: They believe that they are like the masters of the universe,
Speaker 10: and that they are in complete and total control, and
Speaker 10: nothing will happen without them allowing it to happen. And
Speaker 10: that you're this incredibly clever brinksman who will always pull
Speaker 10: back at the last moment because you know what you're doing,
Speaker 10: because you don't know what the fuck you're doing.
Speaker 1: Thank you, Jeffrey. And that brings me to my next
Speaker 1: point where it all went wrong.
Speaker 4: I was almost a scolding to.
Speaker 1: That's Nate Jones again. He's talking about the piffyab the
Speaker 1: report chronicled the events leading up to Able Archer in
Speaker 1: a lot of detail, and it tried to identify all
Speaker 1: the mistakes that allowed things to get to that point.
Speaker 1: The idea was maybe if we can find what went wrong,
Speaker 1: we could avoid I don't know, accidentally stumbling into a
Speaker 1: nuclear war moving forward. And in the end the authors
Speaker 1: focus on one root cause of the whole snaffu, what
Speaker 1: they call over confidence.
Speaker 4: Essentially saying that the intelligence did not accurately present the
Speaker 4: picture of the danger at the time.
Speaker 1: The report says, look, even with the benefit of hindsight
Speaker 1: and access to more intel than ever before, we still
Speaker 1: don't know exactly what happened that night. And back then
Speaker 1: the CIA had so much less information, and yet their
Speaker 1: conclusion was very specific and very confident that it was
Speaker 1: all propaganda. But how could they have known that, Well,
Speaker 1: they simply couldn't have, not with one hundred percent certainty.
Speaker 4: There is too much confidence that a nuclear war can
Speaker 4: never happen, or that the Soviets would never think that.
Speaker 1: The report says, the CIA analysts in the eighties should
Speaker 1: have entertained all possible explanations. You know, maybe it's propaganda,
Speaker 1: or maybe the Earth is hurtling towards imminent demise, or
Speaker 1: at the very least they could have reevaluated as new
Speaker 1: intel came in. Instead, they just kept doubling down again
Speaker 1: and again, and EPIFIAB says that was insanely risky.
Speaker 4: With something with such catastrophic results, even if the risk
Speaker 4: is low as an unacceptable risk.
Speaker 1: Exactly because it's not just the immediate damage of a
Speaker 1: nuclear explosion, the tens of millions of people instantaneously incinerated
Speaker 1: after the initial blast, there's a domino effect. A recent
Speaker 1: study said that if only three percent of today's nuclear
Speaker 1: stockpile was used in a nuclear exchange, there'd be firestorms,
Speaker 1: soot rising into the atmosphere to block the sun, we'd
Speaker 1: plummet into an ice age, lose a majority of our
Speaker 1: food production, and in the end, an estimated one third
Speaker 1: of the world's population would die from starvation. So yeah,
Speaker 1: I'd say the stakes are high. But alas the report
Speaker 1: couldn't really pinpoint a specific blunder that caused this whole mess.
Speaker 1: There's no single incident where somebody got definitive proof of
Speaker 1: an impending nuclear war and then shredded the document or
Speaker 1: aid it or something. In the end, the errors were psychological.
Speaker 1: The real mistake hubris refusing to accept the possibility of
Speaker 1: being wrong.
Speaker 11: We've got to always be very careful to make sure
Speaker 11: that we're not just seeing what we want to see,
Speaker 11: or you know what we're frightened of seeing, or you
Speaker 11: know what we don't want to see. We're pushing back
Speaker 11: against it, and that we've also it's got to kind
Speaker 11: of question the context.
Speaker 1: This is Fiona Hill, Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution.
Speaker 1: She's a former member of the National Security Council with
Speaker 1: an expertise in Russian affairs. Fianna says, there's a common
Speaker 1: pitfall in human psychology. It shows up everywhere, from marital
Speaker 1: spats to geopolitical standoffs, and it's called mirror imaging.
Speaker 11: Mirror imaging, you know, projecting your own rationale, failing to
Speaker 11: really understand the perspective of the other and where they're
Speaker 11: coming from, and to really kind of get into a
Speaker 11: deeper understanding of the mindsets of the individuals.
Speaker 1: Mirror imaging happens when two parties have trouble understanding each other,
Speaker 1: so their minds fill in the blanks and they project
Speaker 1: their own logic onto the other.
Speaker 11: Because you try to think about, well, what would I
Speaker 11: do what's rational for me? But you're not living in
Speaker 11: that context, and you don't fully understand what the information
Speaker 11: on the other side house at their fingertips, And ultimately,
Speaker 11: we never fully understand the other's perspective, and we always
Speaker 11: engage in quite a lot of mirror imaging.
Speaker 1: Ronald Reagan and his intelligence analysts knew that the United
Speaker 1: States would never start a nuclear war with the Soviet Union,
Speaker 1: and they assumed that Yuri and drop Off and the
Speaker 1: rest of the Soviets knew this. The US officials couldn't
Speaker 1: conceive of a reality where the Soviets would think anything different. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: the Soviet Union had a history of sneak attacking other
Speaker 1: countries under cover of military exercise, and so to them,
Speaker 1: this was a completely plausible strategy. For the Americans, Reagan
Speaker 1: and a drop Off never spoke in person or on
Speaker 1: the phone, not once, but they made plenty of assumptions
Speaker 1: about one another, and those assumptions cascaded into a slew
Speaker 1: of miscalculations.
Speaker 10: The fact of the nuclear age is that you share
Speaker 10: interests with your enemy and you have to talk to them,
Speaker 10: and that stuff is just like so unpopular the idea
Speaker 10: of talking to your mortal enemy is unthinkable, and to
Speaker 10: be fair, it's unpopular today when people talk about like well,
Speaker 10: maybe we should negotiate with the Chinese, or maybe we
Speaker 10: should like strike a deal with the Iranians. There is
Speaker 10: a huge outcry that we're somehow contaminating ourselves or staining
Speaker 10: our legacy by talking to these evil people. It is
Speaker 10: so much easier to just tell them to blow off
Speaker 10: and build some more bombs. And it is absolutely crazy
Speaker 10: to me that people who do not want to talk
Speaker 10: to the enemy are perfectly happy to live in that
Speaker 10: kind of arrangement. Like talking to them is like so
Speaker 10: much less scary, Like they have little cookies and tea,
Speaker 10: and you know, it's you go see, like a cultural
Speaker 10: thing after the it's nice. It's a way less scary
Speaker 10: than do clear.
Speaker 1: To me personally, I'm all about the cookies and tea.
Speaker 10: The answer is like, stop imagining that you can use
Speaker 10: force in this way.
Speaker 1: Well, at least we learned from it, right Jeffrey, Hey, Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's no learning.
Speaker 10: I mean, not only is there no learning, there was
Speaker 10: a refusal to accept it happened at the time, and
Speaker 10: those of us who were like you, know you, people
Speaker 10: really almost fucked up, Like people don't want to hear that.
Speaker 10: So the lesson that I draw from it is that
Speaker 10: people don't learn that we make the same mistake over
Speaker 10: and over again, just a tragedy.
Speaker 11: Basically where we are now we haven't learned enough from
Speaker 11: those previous crises.
Speaker 1: Here's Fiona Hill again. She was in Moscow training as
Speaker 1: a translator in nineteen eighty eight, just after Reagan and
Speaker 1: Gorbachev signed the IF Treaty. She recalls watching as the
Speaker 1: two heads of state strolled through Red Square in a
Speaker 1: public display of diplomacy.
Speaker 11: It was just mind blowing and just an amazing fitting.
Speaker 11: The world had turned, the access of the world had turned,
Speaker 11: and maybe, maybe, just maybe, after these war scares and
Speaker 11: all of this misunderstanding of each other, we were going
Speaker 11: to go off to a different path what we did
Speaker 11: for a while. But they're not so much.
Speaker 1: The IF Treaty that both leaders signed that year reduced
Speaker 1: the world's nuclear stockpile by thousands, but today there are
Speaker 1: still more than twelve thousand nuclear weapons, some big, some small,
Speaker 1: some just right. No, I'm kidding, none of them are
Speaker 1: just right. They're all terrifying, and still plenty enough to
Speaker 1: destroy the world then and twenty nineteen the United States
Speaker 1: withdrew from the IONF treaty all together.
Speaker 11: We kept hoping that we would find some golden key
Speaker 11: to arms control that might even lead to nuclear zero,
Speaker 11: but we always haven't achieved that because we've had proliferation
Speaker 11: of nuclear weapons. It's not just China, the United States, Russia,
Speaker 11: Frompson the UK, but we've Akistan, in India, We've got
Speaker 11: all some others we think have nuclear weapons but we
Speaker 11: don't say it openly that we kind of know they do.
Speaker 11: And we've got loads of others who aspire to have
Speaker 11: nuclear weapons, you know, ran North Korea, where we can
Speaker 11: easily see that. What they've taken away from all of
Speaker 11: these lessons from the past is that you can blackmail
Speaker 11: other countries with nuclear weapons, that you can force people
Speaker 11: to do things that they don't want to do, or
Speaker 11: you can force them to reckon with you, even as
Speaker 11: they otherwise might ignore you in world affairs. So, you know,
Speaker 11: we're back to gund of the euromissile crisis feeling where
Speaker 11: we're all sort of sitting thinking, how do we get here,
Speaker 11: how do we get to this point? We kind of
Speaker 11: obviously totally misjudge and misunderstood and have been really poor
Speaker 11: at communicating. And we've got all this more information than
Speaker 11: we had before, and yet we've done it again, and.
Speaker 10: So there's no learning, you know. And it makes me
Speaker 10: crazy because people are like, well, we got through that crisis,
Speaker 10: nobody was killed, Like other than the airline are full
Speaker 10: of dead people like you. People are gambling with normal
Speaker 10: people's lives. And the reason I find able art are
Speaker 10: so interesting is precisely because there are other moments where
Speaker 10: you watch crises kind of start to spiral out of
Speaker 10: control and you see all the same dynamics at play.
Speaker 4: We now believe that only force will make him leave.
Speaker 1: We can't let the world's worse leaders blackmail threaten.
Speaker 9: Would be prepared to without delay with pis wonder ward.
Speaker 6: Just by walking away from it.
Speaker 1: That's a victory for the other side, with the blood
Speaker 1: of our citizens and the strength of our worry. Tonight
Speaker 1: about China's new missile capability.
Speaker 7: President Trump writing, will someone from his depleted and food
Speaker 7: starve regime please inform him that I too have a
Speaker 7: nuclear button, but it is a much bigger and more
Speaker 7: powerful one than his, and might hamm why don't we use.
Speaker 4: Them with Trump projected those weapons of mass destruction got
Speaker 4: to be something parading his nuclear arsenal.
Speaker 10: This posenominous nuclear language.
Speaker 1: It's president threatening nuclear war.
Speaker 4: This is not a bluff, and those who tried to
Speaker 4: blackmail us with nuclear weapons should know that the prevailing
Speaker 4: wins can turn in their direction.
Speaker 2: It's just way too complicated a problem for us to
Speaker 2: be cleanly and easily dealing with.
Speaker 1: This is John Batham.
Speaker 5: I'm John Batham. I'm the director of War Games.
Speaker 1: That's right, my friends. We're going to bring it all
Speaker 1: home right where we began with the movie that started
Speaker 1: it all, at least for me.
Speaker 4: Sure we got a problem.
Speaker 1: Whipper's not letting me log back on. They can't get
Speaker 1: any stand out of them. In the movie War Games,
Speaker 1: the plot comes to a climax when Whopper, that's the
Speaker 1: US Department of Defense's supercomputer, goes rogue and is about
Speaker 1: to start launching nuclear weapons at the Soviet Union.
Speaker 4: Well, can't they get in and stop?
Speaker 1: Time is running out at Norad, buried deep inside Cheyenne Mountain,
Speaker 1: the entire US Nuclear Command is running around like chickens
Speaker 1: with their heads cut off, trying to figure out how
Speaker 1: to stop the computer from starting a nuclear war. But
Speaker 1: none of the adults in the room can fix it.
Speaker 1: The world's only hope the kid, David Lightman, laid by
Speaker 1: National Treasurer Matthew Broderick.
Speaker 4: But what are we gonna do?
Speaker 5: I don't know, do you.
Speaker 4: I told you not to start playing games with that thing.
Speaker 6: It's games.
Speaker 4: Games. Try it wants to play a game, then play it.
Speaker 1: See Whopper uses games to teach itself Chess, poker, you
Speaker 1: name it. And David Lightman knows that the only hope
Speaker 1: in saving humanity is to somehow teach the computer to
Speaker 1: understand what mutually assured destruction really means.
Speaker 2: And eventually he does come up with a solution that,
Speaker 2: you know, kind of stemies the computer, which is playing
Speaker 2: Tic Tac Toe. Tic Tac Toe, one of the simplest
Speaker 2: games in the universe.
Speaker 5: Put X in the center square.
Speaker 1: As Whopper narrows in on the launch codes, it begins
Speaker 1: playing Tic Tac Toe. And we've all played it, so
Speaker 1: you know what happens next game after game ends in
Speaker 1: a tie. There's no way you can win that game.
Speaker 4: I know that it doesn't.
Speaker 1: It doesn't learned what David Lightman knows that the supercomputer
Speaker 1: does not, is that Tic tac Toe is a futile game.
Speaker 1: There's no point in playing it at all because there's
Speaker 1: no winning. That's when the computer realizes, just like Tic
Speaker 1: Tac Toe, when it comes to nuclear war, every scenario
Speaker 1: ends the same way. In a tie, everyone is equally dead.
Speaker 2: The only winning move is not to play.
Speaker 4: Is not today? How am i okay nay of jess?
Speaker 1: The only winning move is not to play. It's such
Speaker 1: an obvious answer, but one that all the big adult
Speaker 1: brains running around Norad couldn't possibly consider, because being buried
Speaker 1: in nuclear strategy and tactics for so many years had
Speaker 1: blinded them to a simple truth found in a rudimentary
Speaker 1: children's game. So how close were we to all dying
Speaker 1: in November of nineteen eighty three? Well, my dear listeners,
Speaker 1: there are only a few people who can definitively answer
Speaker 1: that question once and for all. The Soviet leaders themselves
Speaker 1: and their answers are forever buried along with them in
Speaker 1: the Kremlin Wall necropolis. So unless the CIA lets me
Speaker 1: borrow their time machine and their mind reading device, were
Speaker 1: just never going to know exactly how close and drop
Speaker 1: off was to pushing the button that night.
Speaker 4: But ultimately, yeah, we don't know. Unfortunately, for the people
Speaker 4: that want to know how close was the finger to
Speaker 4: the button, we won't.
Speaker 1: Know the truth. That elusive holy Grail may be buried
Speaker 1: in Moscow for good. But there's no denying the able
Speaker 1: Archer story is still absolutely absurd. It is absurd that
Speaker 1: it's even remotely possible we all almost perished in an
Speaker 1: unintentional nuclear war in nineteen eighty three, and that the
Speaker 1: actions of just a few people could have been our
Speaker 1: saving grace. People like Stanislov Petrov and Oleg Gordievsky and
Speaker 1: Ryan or Rupp, who, in their own small ways intervened,
Speaker 1: and Leonard Perutz, who, after hearing that the Soviets were
Speaker 1: going on alert, decided to do nothing, decided not to
Speaker 1: play the game. If it wasn't for the people, we
Speaker 1: might all be tiny radioactive particles floating through a barren,
Speaker 1: scorched atmosphere. Their actions are inspiring, sure, but it's not
Speaker 1: exactly hopeful, is it, Because it reinforces an unacceptable nuclear reality,
Speaker 1: one where the fate of humanity can sometimes depend on
Speaker 1: a few people trying to thwart disaster. While the leaders
Speaker 1: of the world double down on public trash talking, attempted
Speaker 1: mind reading, and shows of strength in lieu of diplomacy.
Speaker 1: So where the hell does this leave us? Well, maybe
Speaker 1: not all is lost. Maybe we can begin to approach
Speaker 1: the nuclear dilemma with a little humility. Maybe we don't
Speaker 1: have to accept the status quo. Leonard Brutz didn't accept
Speaker 1: it when after Able Archer he wouldn't stay quiet about
Speaker 1: the intelligence failures he believed led us to the brink.
Speaker 1: Nate Jones didn't accept it when he dedicated his life
Speaker 1: to bringing Able Archer out of obscurity and into the light.
Speaker 1: And by the way, Nate Jones is still at it.
Speaker 4: I'm still voiding footnotes to go even deeper. I think
Speaker 4: there's still more stuff to find.
Speaker 1: Soldier on Nate Jones, You and those like you represent
Speaker 1: the real hope in this mess. Maybe, just maybe, through
Speaker 1: your tireless efforts, the situation normal won't always be fucked up.
Speaker 1: I don't know, listener, when it's all said and done,
Speaker 1: I think the real hero here is me. I don't
Speaker 1: know how, and I don't know why. Somehow that just
Speaker 1: feels right. So you're welcome, everyone. Snapoo is a production
Speaker 1: of iHeartRadio, Film, Nation Entertainment and Pacific Electric Picture Company
Speaker 1: in association with Gilded Audio. It's executive produced by me
Speaker 1: Ed Helms, Nolan Papelka, Mike Falbo, Andy Chuck, and Whitney Donaldson.
Speaker 1: Our lead producers are Sarah Joyner and Alyssa Martino. Our
Speaker 1: producer is Carl Nellis. Associate producer Tory Smith. This episode
Speaker 1: was written by Sarah Joyner, with additional writing from me
Speaker 1: Elliott Kalen, and Whitney Donaldson. Our senior editor is Jeffrey
Speaker 1: Lewis like they.
Speaker 10: Have little cookies and tea and you know it's nice.
Speaker 1: Olivia Kenny is our production assistant. Our creative executive is
Speaker 1: Brett Harris. Additional research and fact checking by Charles Richter.
Speaker 1: Engineering and technical direction by Nick Dooley. Original music and
Speaker 1: sound design by Dan Rosatto. Some archival audio from this
Speaker 1: episode originally appeared in Taylor Downing's fantastic film nineteen eighty three,
Speaker 1: The Brink of Apocalypse. Thank you, mister Downing for permission
Speaker 1: to use it. Special thanks to Alison Cohen and Matt Asenstadt.