Speaker 1: Hello again, everybody ed here, and I'm really excited about
Speaker 1: what I'm going to share with you today. It's the
Speaker 1: first ever episode of the very first season of SNAFU.
Speaker 1: I will never forget calling up wargames star Matthew Broderick
Speaker 1: for that first episode to ask if he had ever
Speaker 1: heard of the NATO military exercise Able Archer eighty three,
Speaker 1: And now I ask have you ever heard of it?
Speaker 1: If you're a new fan of SNAFU and you've never
Speaker 1: listened to our beloved season one, then stick around for
Speaker 1: a tale of nuclear dread, traitorous spies, and a wargame
Speaker 1: gone horribly wrong. It was the closest we ever actually
Speaker 1: came to a nuclear war since the Cuban missile crisis,
Speaker 1: and it's a story that really echoes in the present moment,
Speaker 1: especially with the rising international tensions around who has nuclear
Speaker 1: arms right now and who doesn't. We'll be sharing the
Speaker 1: second episode next week, along with all the episodes on
Speaker 1: YouTube for the first time ever, but you can also
Speaker 1: go back and listen to the audio on any podcast app.
Speaker 1: Be sure to let us know what you think if
Speaker 1: you check it out. I'm always so excited to know
Speaker 1: kind of what the listeners are thinking and feeling about stuff. Now, This,
Speaker 1: of course is our very first season and it's very
Speaker 1: near and dear to my heart. I'm insanely proud of it,
Speaker 1: so check it out here. Is not all fun and
Speaker 1: war games. Did you ever watch a movie as a
Speaker 1: kid and convince yourself that it was real, that its
Speaker 1: outlandish premise could possibly come true? I know I did,
Speaker 1: and for me, one of those movies was war Games.
Speaker 1: Great to meet you, Great to meet you too. I'm
Speaker 1: ed by the way. Yeah, that's Matthew Broadrick. He's a
Speaker 1: national treasure and also the star of Wargames about an
Speaker 1: almost accidental nuclear war that I watched maybe one hundred
Speaker 1: times as a kid, came out in nineteen eighty three,
Speaker 1: and it was Matthew's breakout role.
Speaker 2: The fact that I had gotten the lead of a
Speaker 2: you know, studio movie was incredible, Yeah, absolutely incredible.
Speaker 1: His character was a hacker, a tech genius.
Speaker 3: David Lightman was a moister at computer games.
Speaker 1: And Matthew was great in it. I mean, obviously right,
Speaker 1: he's an incredible actor.
Speaker 2: But wait now do I adjust my volume? Can you
Speaker 2: speak you guys?
Speaker 4: Yeah?
Speaker 5: Talking talking talking?
Speaker 2: Say gee, I'm nodding because I want to now pretend
Speaker 2: that it's working. Okay, yeah, so it's perfect.
Speaker 1: Matthew Broderick is clearly not a tech genius in real life,
Speaker 1: but that's just further proof what a great actor he is.
Speaker 1: So in War Games, teenage hacker David Lightman tries to
Speaker 1: impress a girl at school, Jennifer, played by another eighties icon,
Speaker 1: Ali Sheety. Along the way, he accidentally hacks into a
Speaker 1: supercomputer that the US is using to game out World
Speaker 1: War three scenarios, hence wargames.
Speaker 6: How about global nuclear.
Speaker 1: It gets misinterpreted as a real nuclear attack and almost
Speaker 1: starts World War three launch detection. We have a launch
Speaker 1: Detections assign.
Speaker 7: This is.
Speaker 1: Terrifying. Yeah, I am not charmed by that. I am
Speaker 1: terrified by that. When I was nine years old, wargames
Speaker 1: really captured my imagination in the sense that I became
Speaker 1: utterly convinced it was real. I even had a breakdown
Speaker 1: at summer camp because of it. All the other kids
Speaker 1: were having a grand old time. Meanwhile, I was just
Speaker 1: terrified that at any moment we'd all die in a
Speaker 1: fiery nuclear armageddon. Yeah, I guess I was a bit
Speaker 1: of a wet blanket while everyone else was just trying
Speaker 1: to get pumped up for s'mores. So why am I
Speaker 1: talking to Matthew Broderick about wargames? After all, it's just
Speaker 1: a movie, an outlandish premise, a fantasy. Right, Eventually we
Speaker 1: all grow up and realize that movies aren't real. There
Speaker 1: are no accidental nuclear wars. Right. Well, my friends, imagine
Speaker 1: my surprise when I learned that the premise of Wargames
Speaker 1: was fucking real. Yeah, it came true only months after
Speaker 1: the movie's release. That's right. As it turns out, in
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty three, a real life military exercise, a wargame,
Speaker 1: almost started an actual nuclear war, just like wargames. This
Speaker 1: exercise that almost ended at all. It goes by the
Speaker 1: code name Able Archer eighty three. And that's what this
Speaker 1: show oh is about.
Speaker 2: Wow, that's an amazing story.
Speaker 5: I I'm surprised. I don't know about that, but I
Speaker 5: don't think I do know about it.
Speaker 1: Too bad they don't give out an OSCAR for best
Speaker 1: nuclear war prediction. The Wargames screenwriters would have been a
Speaker 1: shoe in. It's like kind of a perfect screenplay. I
Speaker 1: don't think they were too far off when I first
Speaker 1: heard the story of Abel Archer eighty three. Let's just
Speaker 1: say my childhood fears were instantly validated. Thinking back on
Speaker 1: that moment at summer camp, paralyzed by the fear that
Speaker 1: the outlandish plot of war games would come true, camp
Speaker 1: counselors hovering around me, trying to console me, saying, come on, dude,
Speaker 1: it's just a movie. Let's go canoeing. Everything's gonna be fine. Well,
Speaker 1: looking back, I realize now it was not fine. It
Speaker 1: was so incredibly not fine. They were wrong and I
Speaker 1: was right. I'd just like to say, on behalf of
Speaker 1: nine year old me, I fucking so who? That felt good,
Speaker 1: but vindication aside, Learning this story still leaves me a
Speaker 1: little unnerved, maybe even alarmed, because if a military exercise
Speaker 1: almost caused a nuclear war in nineteen eighty three and
Speaker 1: nobody knew about it, what a complete and utter snaffoo.
Speaker 1: Snaffoo is a military term first used by soldiers in
Speaker 1: World War Two. It's an acronym snaffoo. It stands for
Speaker 1: situation normal, all fucked up, meaning this is so fucked up?
Speaker 1: But then again, isn't it always? That's what this show
Speaker 1: is about. The gas, the disasters history's greatest screw ups.
Speaker 1: This season the story of Able Archer eighty three. It's
Speaker 1: the ultimate Cold War mystery, a stew of espionage, paranoia,
Speaker 1: shady politics, and dangerous miscalculation. Oh and a lot of
Speaker 1: mind games. Put on your hazmat suits, listeners. I'm at Elms,
Speaker 1: your host, and this is Snafu Able Archer eighty three.
Speaker 8: It's just this whole game of deception and count deception.
Speaker 1: Who can you trust? He's preparing a sudden.
Speaker 3: I heard a young father saying, I love my little
Speaker 3: girls more than anything, and I would rather see my
Speaker 3: little girls die now than have them grow up under communism.
Speaker 6: Really, for the first time in my life, I felt
Speaker 6: like there could be nuclear warship.
Speaker 1: It wasn't a question of would it happen, It was
Speaker 1: a question of when was it going to happen. If
Speaker 1: we were preparing to fight barmageddon, if that's.
Speaker 8: What we're told, that's what we believed, we were trained
Speaker 8: to fight the end of the world.
Speaker 9: It was a week just like every other week. Abel
Speaker 9: Archer eighty three was not anything out of the ordinary.
Speaker 1: This is Jean Gay. He was a participant in the
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty three Able Archer wargamejan Like a lot of
Speaker 1: men who participated in Able Archer that year recall it
Speaker 1: the same way, which is to say, they don't really
Speaker 1: recall much at all.
Speaker 4: Nothing to me from that exercise at the time. You know,
Speaker 4: jumped out.
Speaker 1: That's Colonel Spike Calendar and he says the same thing. Nope,
Speaker 1: nothing of note to these men. That week in early
Speaker 1: November nineteen eighty three was just a week like any
Speaker 1: other week, just another week of standard military exercises, practicing
Speaker 1: how to fight the end of the world as one does.
Speaker 4: The whole purpose of Able Archer was the emphasis on
Speaker 4: the practice of the nuclear weapons release for caizures.
Speaker 1: Able Archer was a NATO exercise in November of nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty three. The Able Archer players sat in a bunker
Speaker 1: in Belgium practicing how if it came to it, they'd
Speaker 1: fight a nuclear war against the Soviet Union. It's like
Speaker 1: a soccer team doing drills, but instead of training for
Speaker 1: a game, they're training for armageddon, which, like a soccer game,
Speaker 1: you can't use your hands because they got blown off.
Speaker 4: The whole idea was if you ever had to do it,
Speaker 4: you know you didn't want to do it. For the
Speaker 4: first time.
Speaker 1: When Spike says do it, he's referring to the task
Speaker 1: of launching planet destroying weapons. It's an example of how
Speaker 1: military professionals are weirdly cavalier when they're talking about their work.
Speaker 1: It's kind of shocking how something so gnarly can sound
Speaker 1: so routine.
Speaker 4: How do you look at what the requirements truly are,
Speaker 4: you know, for those weapons systems and the numbers of them.
Speaker 4: So it would be a matter of being accounting and
Speaker 4: in some respects if you have a Soviet division, what
Speaker 4: is the number of weapons that might be required to
Speaker 4: reduce the effectiveness of that division to where it was
Speaker 4: no longer military capable?
Speaker 1: See what I mean? My point is this, to men
Speaker 1: like Gene and Spike, there was nothing exceptional about gaming
Speaker 1: out of fictional war during Able Larger, it was routine.
Speaker 1: But a few decades later, Gene and Spike would learn
Speaker 1: that Able Archer eighty three was anything but routine.
Speaker 4: I was in my own little world. I hate to
Speaker 4: use the word oblivious, but I've used that word before.
Speaker 9: It was many years later that I found out about
Speaker 9: it that anything other than the exercise took place in
Speaker 9: the real world situation that occurred at during that time.
Speaker 9: I was not aware of that until years afterwards.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I never heard of anything more about this exercise
Speaker 4: until what twenty or twenty five years later.
Speaker 1: What Gene and Spike would come to learn is that
Speaker 1: while they were sitting in their bunker back in nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty three rehearsing the end of the World missiles to
Speaker 1: strike targets and Moscow, the Soviets were listening, and they
Speaker 1: seemed to be convinced it was not a rehearsal at all.
Speaker 1: Soviet missile commanders were placed on high alert. Soviet leaders
Speaker 1: retreated to their bunkers, fingers hovering over the proverbial big
Speaker 1: red button, and NATO had no idea. I mean, it
Speaker 1: is a miracle.
Speaker 8: We did not all die like it's just goofy.
Speaker 1: This is Jeffrey Lewis. He's an expert on nuclear history
Speaker 1: and geopolitics, and he finds the whole story of Able Archer,
Speaker 1: what he calls the War Scare to be sort of funny.
Speaker 8: Almost all of the war scare is totally self inflicted,
Speaker 8: which makes it like really darkly comic.
Speaker 1: I have to agree, there's an old saying that tragedy
Speaker 1: plus time equals comedy. Well, if that's true, then a
Speaker 1: story about a nuclear near miss plus about forty years
Speaker 1: should be fucking hilarious.
Speaker 8: Because if you step back, it sounds crazy, right, It
Speaker 8: sounds crazy that we could have had a serious nuclear
Speaker 8: crisis that nobody knew about.
Speaker 1: Like, that's nuts. It is nuts, Jeffrey, because it's not
Speaker 1: just that able Archer participants like Gene and Spike didn't
Speaker 1: know that a nuclear crisis was unfolding under their noses.
Speaker 1: No one knew. Let that sink in for a second.
Speaker 1: If it's possible that a nuclear crisis could unfold right
Speaker 1: under our noses, that we were in danger without knowing it,
Speaker 1: does that mean it's still possible? All right, let's set
Speaker 1: the stage a little bit. It's the nineteen eighties. There
Speaker 1: was certainly a general and very pervasive anxiety about nuclear weapons.
Speaker 1: Pretty Much everywhere you looked, you'd find nuclear paranoia. It
Speaker 1: wasn't just wargames, it was all over pop culture. This
Speaker 1: delightful little number is ninety nine Loft Balloons by Nina.
Speaker 1: It's about one hundred red balloons accidentally inciting a nuclear war.
Speaker 1: Kind of heavy for a kitchy pop hit. The nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty three Bond film had a nuclear plot. Doctor Seuss
Speaker 1: was feeling the heat.
Speaker 6: This bomb on the zeokes just as fast as you can.
Speaker 1: Even Sting chimed in.
Speaker 7: Love that.
Speaker 1: Personally, I love that song, and I just love that
Speaker 1: Sting threw his hat right in the middle of an
Speaker 1: international conflict. Anyway, when it comes to examples of nuclear
Speaker 1: anxiety in nineteen eighty three pop culture, there's actually one
Speaker 1: that stands above all the rest. It was just a
Speaker 1: made for TV movie, but it became a cultural event
Speaker 1: and it would actually play a role in our Cold
Speaker 1: War mystery.
Speaker 7: It was a movie like no other movie, and it
Speaker 7: had a profound impact on New York that story.
Speaker 1: Next, we'll hear from people who like you watch the
Speaker 1: Ultimate Disaster movie the day after, a movie that would
Speaker 1: scare the living shit out of America. More than seven
Speaker 1: hundred people packed Riverside Church.
Speaker 6: Tonight to watch the day after. Many said they came
Speaker 6: here because they were afraid to watch it alone.
Speaker 1: Everyone, and by everyone, I mean ae hundred million people,
Speaker 1: almost half the US population at the time, gathered around
Speaker 1: their TVs on the evening of November twentieth, nineteen eighty three,
Speaker 1: and tuned into ABC to watch.
Speaker 4: It before the movie begins.
Speaker 7: I would like to caution parents about the graphic depiction
Speaker 7: of nuclear explosions and then devastating effects in a moment.
Speaker 1: One day after that, gather around, kids, Time to fill
Speaker 1: your innocent little heads with deep, reverberating drama past the popcorn.
Speaker 5: I tried to do my part in making people keenly
Speaker 5: aware of what the real consequences would be.
Speaker 1: This is Ed Hume, he wrote the day after. The
Speaker 1: film is set at the border of Kansas and Missouri.
Speaker 1: That's where the US nuclear missile silos are. The main
Speaker 1: characters are average townspeople in the American heartland.
Speaker 5: A bunch of people living in the Midwest doing ordinary things.
Speaker 1: At first, the whole nuclear war thing isn't really front
Speaker 1: and center. It just kind of lurks in the periphery.
Speaker 1: But even as it creeps in, the characters can't accept
Speaker 1: their fate. What was it.
Speaker 5: There's one scene where a woman is so in denial
Speaker 5: that she's running around making beds as they know that
Speaker 5: missiles are being launched.
Speaker 1: Don't bother with the bed just now, even we've got
Speaker 1: to get down below.
Speaker 5: Listen, those missiles are all gone off.
Speaker 1: Oh my gosh, wow, she really wants to make those beds.
Speaker 5: And then it happens.
Speaker 1: It happens, the heartland is evapor The rest of the
Speaker 1: film is stomach churning. To put it lightly, it showed
Speaker 1: what a nuclear war would actually look like, flashes of light,
Speaker 1: lives instantaneously incinerated. But the whole explosion part isn't the
Speaker 1: worst of it because you get to see what happens
Speaker 1: the day after nuclear fallout, radiation, poisoning, blistering skin and
Speaker 1: dying organs, piles of bodies and rubble looting, hoarding, and
Speaker 1: everyday Americans turning on each other. I mean, all jokes aside,
Speaker 1: this is grim fucking stuff.
Speaker 5: The General Pavla, they were pardon my language, but they
Speaker 5: were scared shutless.
Speaker 10: I for one, felt that it was just devastating. Like
Speaker 10: every horror story you've ever read roamed into one story.
Speaker 6: We got a glimpse of what is really a stake
Speaker 6: in a nuclear war.
Speaker 10: I just want to go.
Speaker 6: I went to last and not have to live and start.
Speaker 1: All over again. Okay, didn't heed the parental advisory. This
Speaker 1: is how that clip makes me feel. Okay, So yeah,
Speaker 1: in nineteen eighty three, there was a general sense of
Speaker 1: nuclear doom. Hell, it's why I had a mental breakdown
Speaker 1: at summer camp. But we didn't know that there was
Speaker 1: a specific crisis to be afraid of. We didn't know
Speaker 1: that we might have almost had a nuclear war during
Speaker 1: NATO's annual able Archer exercise. So then the question becomes why.
Speaker 7: Not there is and you probably need it. About now,
Speaker 7: there is some good news.
Speaker 1: This is Ted Copple from Nightline. He's hosting a live
Speaker 1: panel about the day after right after the movie aired.
Speaker 7: If you can take a quick look out the window,
Speaker 7: it's all still there.
Speaker 1: Wow. Deeply reassuring Ted. Anyway, Celebrity scientist Carl Sagan was there,
Speaker 1: telling an already nauseous audience that he thought the film's
Speaker 1: portrayal of nuclear war was actually not as bad as
Speaker 1: it would be if it really happened. H boy Henry
Speaker 1: Kissinger was there too, probably talking about feasting on the
Speaker 1: souls of innocent children or something, but before the panel began.
Speaker 7: Joining us live from his home in suburban Washington is
Speaker 7: the Secretary of State mister George Schultz.
Speaker 1: Ted Copple brings out US Secretary of State George Schultz,
Speaker 1: President Reagan's right hand man. He was a serious man,
Speaker 1: loyal to the president, famously bragged about enjoying staring contests
Speaker 1: with the Soviets, waiting for them to blink, comforting and so.
Speaker 1: Mere minutes after the American public watched this horrifying film,
Speaker 1: hearts still in their stomachs. The man who would be
Speaker 1: standing next to the button pusher in chief answers the
Speaker 1: burning question at the front of every viewer's mind.
Speaker 7: The future as we've just viewed it tonight. Is that
Speaker 7: the future as it will be, or only the future
Speaker 7: as it may be?
Speaker 11: Neither that is not the future at all. The film
Speaker 11: is a vivid and dramatic portrayal of the fact that
Speaker 11: nuclear war is simply not acceptable, and that fact and
Speaker 11: the realization of it has been the policy of the
Speaker 11: United States for decades now, the successful policy of the
Speaker 11: United States.
Speaker 1: If you watch the clip, George Schultz is shifty as hell.
Speaker 1: His eyes keep flickering just to the right of the
Speaker 1: camera and then back again, like he's reading Q cards.
Speaker 1: He looks scared. Ted Season's journalist that he is smells
Speaker 1: a little bullshit, He presses George.
Speaker 7: Mister Schultz, that is the answer of a Secretary of State,
Speaker 7: to a reporter. And that's fair enough, because that's what
Speaker 7: you and I, respectively are. But what would a George
Speaker 7: Schultz who was talking to a member of his family
Speaker 7: say in response to the same question, same answer.
Speaker 11: Well, I would give the same answer.
Speaker 1: I'll tell you why I think George is nervous. It's
Speaker 1: because eleven days before this interview Abel Archer eighty three
Speaker 1: could have caused a nuclear war. A man in Schultz's
Speaker 1: position would have known about that, right. Surely he was
Speaker 1: shitting his slacks for the past eleven days trying to
Speaker 1: figure out how such a colossal fuck up could have happened.
Speaker 1: Now would be a great time to come clean, to say, yeah,
Speaker 1: we're gonna shake things up with our nuclear policy, because
Speaker 1: the movie's right, this is scary shit. And yet, after
Speaker 1: watching the day after George Schultz, Secretary of State assures
Speaker 1: the American public that the administration's status quo is effective
Speaker 1: in preventing nuclear war. In eleven days after a nuclear.
Speaker 8: War scare, it's a very different kind of crisis because
Speaker 8: it's so clumsy.
Speaker 1: Here's Jeffrey Lewis again.
Speaker 8: You know this is more like two drunks in a
Speaker 8: bar circling one another. And it's not so much that
Speaker 8: anybody would deliberately choose to start the war. It's just
Speaker 8: that things would spiral out of control.
Speaker 1: The two drunks here are, of course, the United States
Speaker 1: and the Soviet Union their drink bombs. And I'm not
Speaker 1: talking Jaeger. Here's the part of the show where I
Speaker 1: give you a crash course on the Cold War. Get
Speaker 1: out your pencils, kids, Welcome to Arms Race one oh one.
Speaker 7: An atom bomb destroys or injures in three ways by blast, heat,
Speaker 7: and radioactivity.
Speaker 1: The og atomic bomb was invented by the Americans in
Speaker 1: the forties, you know, the one Hiroshima, Nagasaki. It only
Speaker 1: took the Soviets five years to figure it out for themselves,
Speaker 1: and once they had the bomb too, it began and
Speaker 1: a decade's long race for bigger and better death machines.
Speaker 8: The fun thing about the Cold War is that there
Speaker 8: were a huge variety of nuclear weapons and nuclear yields.
Speaker 1: Jeffrey and I have very different definitions of fun.
Speaker 8: So pretty soon after the end of World War II,
Speaker 8: the United States developed a much more powerful nuclear weapon
Speaker 8: than even the city destroyers that we saw dropped on
Speaker 8: Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and these were called thermon nuclear weapons.
Speaker 1: This is the early fifties. A thermonuclear weapon uses the
Speaker 1: radiation from the initial blast to ignite an even bigger blast,
Speaker 1: a bomb within a bomb. The result is a warhead
Speaker 1: that's about the same size as the atom bomb, but
Speaker 1: way more destructive, like a million tons of explosive power
Speaker 1: instead of ten thousand. In other words, it was economical
Speaker 1: a bigger catastrophe for a smaller cost. You can't argue
Speaker 1: with savings like that.
Speaker 8: Once the United States, followed by other countries, developed their
Speaker 8: nuclear weapons, there was no limit to how large a
Speaker 8: nuclear weapon one could make. The phrase that came to
Speaker 8: be used about the amount of nuclear destructive power was overkill,
Speaker 8: because each side was worried that the other side would
Speaker 8: strike them first, so they needed to have backups and
Speaker 8: redundancy and more than you needed. And so in practice
Speaker 8: what that led to was each side having the capacity
Speaker 8: to destroy the other many, many times over, to make
Speaker 8: the rubble bounce. In one particular phrase.
Speaker 1: Back in the sixties, the US had enough nuclear weapons
Speaker 1: to destroy the Soviet Union fifty times over, you know,
Speaker 1: just in case some little cockroach escaped. The first forty
Speaker 1: nine blasts, which set the table quite nicely for this
Speaker 1: good evening, my fellow citizens. That's John F. Kennedy back
Speaker 1: in nineteen sixty two telling the world in a televised
Speaker 1: speech from the White House that a nuclear crisis was
Speaker 1: unfolding in Cuba. US biplanes had discovered that the Soviet
Speaker 1: Union was building nuclear missile sites on the Caribbean island nation,
Speaker 1: a little too close to the United States for comfort.
Speaker 3: The purpose of these bases can be none other than
Speaker 3: to provide a nuclear strike capability against the Western Hemisphere.
Speaker 1: The US Navy set up a blockade, trying to prevent
Speaker 1: any Soviet ships from bringing their nukes anywhere near the island.
Speaker 1: The Soviet ships approached the blockade nuclear weapons in tow.
Speaker 1: It was a full fledged nuclear standoff. The news coverage
Speaker 1: of the Cuban missile crisis was impossible to ignore. A
Speaker 1: major world event became television drama. For thirteen days, Americans
Speaker 1: sat glued to their televisions until finally it was over.
Speaker 7: Under aerial surveillance, the missiles that had threatened the United
Speaker 7: States went back where they came from.
Speaker 1: Everyone breathed a sigh of Marlborough smoke filled relief, and
Speaker 1: did we learn our lesson? Did we scale down operations
Speaker 1: at the bomb factory and literally cool our jets? No, No,
Speaker 1: my dear listener, of course we didn't. In the late
Speaker 1: sixties and seventies, the US would build more weapons, the
Speaker 1: Soviets would build a lot more weapons, We'd get rid
Speaker 1: of some and then build some more. By the early
Speaker 1: nineteen eighties, our nuclear fruit basket contained big nukes, small nukes,
Speaker 1: extremely precise nukes.
Speaker 8: And so the question naturally arises, like, why the hell
Speaker 8: did we do that? And I think the answer lies
Speaker 8: in the fact that we didn't have a better idea.
Speaker 8: I'm just going to build as many nuclear weapons as
Speaker 8: I can to keep the bad guys away from me.
Speaker 8: How am I going to think about it any more
Speaker 8: than that? And that's a very powerful, simple idea, wrong.
Speaker 1: But incredibly powerful.
Speaker 8: And it's how you end up with two countries with
Speaker 8: tens of thousands of nuclear weapons pointed at each other,
Speaker 8: ready on a moment's notice to end civilization as we
Speaker 8: know it. You know, over who controls Berlin, which admitted
Speaker 8: is a very nice city.
Speaker 1: And that just about sums up that successful nuclear policy.
Speaker 1: George Schultz was talking about earlier.
Speaker 11: The successful policy of the United States.
Speaker 1: Each side made a gamble that if they could just
Speaker 1: build enough weapons, their adversary wouldn't dare test them, so
Speaker 1: they didn't need diplomacy. They were bound by the contract
Speaker 1: of mutually assured destruction. It was a horrific game of
Speaker 1: nuclear chicken, and it would lead right to Able Archer
Speaker 1: eighty three, which some say is the closest we came
Speaker 1: to a nuclear war since the Cuban Missile Crisis. But
Speaker 1: here's the thing. Able Archer isn't anything like the Cuban
Speaker 1: missile crisis. In fact, it's not like most crises we've experienced,
Speaker 1: not just because no one knew about it, but because
Speaker 1: it was completely unintentional a mistake. It's not like I
Speaker 1: don't know the Vietnam War or Russias insane invasion of Ukraine. Today,
Speaker 1: during Able Archer, two countries with absolutely no desire to
Speaker 1: get into a nuclear conflict may have almost started one
Speaker 1: in spite of themselves.
Speaker 8: If the Reagan administration nearly sleepwalked into a nuclear war,
Speaker 8: that suggests those people shouldn't be let anywhere near positions
Speaker 8: of power. And if the intelligence community missed the fact
Speaker 8: that the Reagan administration was sleepwalking toward nuclear war.
Speaker 1: That suggests we need different analysts. If all that's true,
Speaker 1: then it makes perfect sense the Reagan administration would not
Speaker 1: want to leak a snafoo this massive, so the public
Speaker 1: would never hear about Abel Archer eighty three. Instead, it
Speaker 1: would become nothing more than a Cold War rumor, a
Speaker 1: myth only whispered about in the back hallways of the Pentagon.
Speaker 1: And it might have stayed that way if it wasn't
Speaker 1: for Nate Jones.
Speaker 6: Walking through. This is the It really looks like the
Speaker 6: warehouse at the end of Indiana. Jones of just boxes, boxes, boxes.
Speaker 6: Sometimes I used to come here just do a little
Speaker 6: bit of work because the atmosphere of thousands of boxes
Speaker 6: looming over and me helps me work.
Speaker 1: This is Nate Jones, an historian. Actually, he's really more
Speaker 1: of a sleuth, like a history detective who has dedicated
Speaker 1: almost twenty years of his career to uncovering what the
Speaker 1: hell really happened during Able Archer eighty three.
Speaker 6: My desk is overrun with Foyer requests. It looks like
Speaker 6: at least ten thousand pages of Foyer requests and responses,
Speaker 6: So it's definitely a tree unfriendly business. But the government
Speaker 6: works on paper, so we got to work on paper.
Speaker 1: This FOYA that Nate is talking about, like everything in government,
Speaker 1: it's an acronym. It stands for the Freedom of Information Act,
Speaker 1: and if you can't tell, it has dominated his life
Speaker 1: for the past decade. For ten years, Nate worked at
Speaker 1: the National Security Archive, where he and his common leagues
Speaker 1: used the Freedom of Information Act to pry classified information
Speaker 1: about able Archer eighty three out of the government's clause.
Speaker 1: I like to picture them wrestling with a very stubborn
Speaker 1: bald eagle. But let's not get ahead of ourselves. At
Speaker 1: one point in time, Nate was like most people. He
Speaker 1: didn't know about Able Archer eighty three until one day
Speaker 1: in two thousand and four, a professor of his uttered
Speaker 1: a few words that totally changed the course of his life.
Speaker 1: He said, Hey, Nate, I heard about this nuclear fuck
Speaker 1: up in nineteen eighty three called Able Archer. Why don't
Speaker 1: you look into it?
Speaker 6: And he said, I really think this is an unsolved
Speaker 6: mystery of the Cold War. And I was pretty hooked
Speaker 6: right there.
Speaker 1: Like me, Nate heard about the mysterious able Archer eighty
Speaker 1: three story and asked himself. Why doesn't anyone know about it?
Speaker 1: If we narrowly escaped nuclear armageddon, shouldn't there be a
Speaker 1: national holiday or something. We should have Able Archer Day,
Speaker 1: a day that commemorates our wonderful avoidance of nuclear annihilation.
Speaker 1: I'm not just saying this because I want an extra
Speaker 1: Monday off work. Not dying, that's cause for celebration. All
Speaker 1: jokes aside. Nate was seriously concerned. I mean, if something
Speaker 1: like able Archer can happen, what does that say about
Speaker 1: how precarious our situation really is? Is the world safe?
Speaker 1: One thing is clear. If we're going to learn anything
Speaker 1: from this, we got to know exactly what happened, Thank
Speaker 1: God for Nate Jones. At first, there just wasn't much
Speaker 1: out there as far as sources go. Anybody who knew
Speaker 1: the details of the crisis wasn't talking. There were a
Speaker 1: few mentions of a nineteen eighty three crisis, and various
Speaker 1: memoirs from retired politicians and so forth, but it was
Speaker 1: also vague. I'll let Nate paraphrase.
Speaker 6: We're not exactly shared, but it was a very tense
Speaker 6: situation and we were worried.
Speaker 1: There was only one primary source available that even mentioned
Speaker 1: Able Archer eighty three by name. A CIA document written
Speaker 1: shortly after it happened.
Speaker 6: So have so this is implications of recent Soviet military
Speaker 6: political activities, and this is the first CIA report on
Speaker 6: what happened during the war scand what happened during Able Archer.
Speaker 1: This document is a crucial piece of the Able Archer
Speaker 1: puzzle because it reveals what the CIA thought about the
Speaker 1: crisis at the time, and it provides a hint as
Speaker 1: to why the public wouldn't learn about it until decades later.
Speaker 1: Classic CIA bullshit. I mean, they still haven't told us
Speaker 1: why they killed Kennedy. It was written in May of
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty four, six months after Able Archer, and it says, yeah,
Speaker 1: during the Able Archer eighty three exercise, it sort of
Speaker 1: looked like the Soviets were getting battle ready.
Speaker 6: And it listed all these alarming things, but it came
Speaker 6: to the conclusion that quote, we believe strongly that Soviet
Speaker 6: actions are not inspired and Soviet leaders do not perceive
Speaker 6: a genuine danger of conflict or confrontation with the United States.
Speaker 1: The report says, yeah, sure it looks scary, but in hindsight,
Speaker 1: we don't think the Soviets were actually going to do anything.
Speaker 6: So the conclusion was that the war scare is not real.
Speaker 1: That's right. The reason nobody knows about the able Archer
Speaker 1: war scare is because for decades the CIA would deny
Speaker 1: that anything dangerous happened during that exercise, but rumors still
Speaker 1: swirled in the intelligence community. Maybe there was more to
Speaker 1: the story, which you've probably guessed because there's a bunch
Speaker 1: more episodes left in this podcast. Nate Jones, fresh out
Speaker 1: of college, had a hunch that he could piece together
Speaker 1: the truth about able Archer given access to the right records.
Speaker 6: We couldn't really tell a good history without the records,
Speaker 6: and we couldn't get the good records without a fight
Speaker 6: against the government.
Speaker 1: Oh it's on now, might be a good time to
Speaker 1: introduce another main character.
Speaker 3: I don't know whether you know it or not, but
Speaker 3: I have a new hobby. I am collecting stories.
Speaker 1: Ronald Wilson Reagan Again, the man knew the power of
Speaker 1: a good anecdote. I mean, the guy could really spin
Speaker 1: a yarn.
Speaker 3: But I remember the story of a fella, which makes
Speaker 3: me think of a story. Everything makes me think of
Speaker 3: a story. I wanted to tell a story, whether anything
Speaker 3: reminded me or not.
Speaker 1: He also famously loved movies. No surprise there. He was
Speaker 1: a movie star. Only president ever to make a movie
Speaker 1: with a chimp. To be fair, Calvin Coolidge was in
Speaker 1: a play with a baboon once, but it's not the
Speaker 1: same thing, and it's also not true. Where was I?
Speaker 1: Reagan hosted regular screenings at Camp David throughout his presidency.
Speaker 1: In fact, he loved movies so much he used to
Speaker 1: write film reviews in his diary Saturday, February fourteenth, nine
Speaker 1: to five funny, but one scene made me mad, A
Speaker 1: truly funny scene if the three gals had played getting drunk,
Speaker 1: but no, they hadn't to get stoned on pot. It
Speaker 1: was an endorsement of pot smoking for any young person
Speaker 1: who sees the picture. Yeah, so that's actually a totally
Speaker 1: real Ronald Reagan diary entry. I shit you not. The
Speaker 1: man took movies very seriously and really overestimated the influence
Speaker 1: of a stoned Dolly parton. Ronald Reagan's presidency was like
Speaker 1: the plot of a movie, and he was the hero,
Speaker 1: an American cowboy with a white hat fighting his nemesis,
Speaker 1: the evil Communist menace. And he played the part beautifully.
Speaker 3: When action is called for, we're taking it. Our response
Speaker 3: can make the difference between peaceful change or disorder in violence.
Speaker 1: In fact, he played the part so well that he
Speaker 1: may have pushed it a little too far. Now, if
Speaker 1: you ask just about anybody how the Cold War ended,
Speaker 1: you'll get one of two answers. Either A. Ronald Reagan
Speaker 1: was strong, showed those Soviets who was boss and they
Speaker 1: backed down.
Speaker 7: Or B.
Speaker 1: Reagan was just lucky enough to be the guy sitting
Speaker 1: in the White House when a young Soviet leader stepped
Speaker 1: in and reformed the joint. But what if there was
Speaker 1: an entirely different reason the Cold War ended? What if
Speaker 1: the Cold War really ended because of Abel Archer.
Speaker 10: He was Ronald evil Empire. Reagan talked a tough game
Speaker 10: against the Soviets, engaged in a military build up.
Speaker 1: Meet Beth Fisher. She's an historian and author of a
Speaker 1: book called The Reagan Reversal, where she writes about a
Speaker 1: drastic shift in Ronald Reagan's attitude towards the Soviet Union
Speaker 1: and listeners. That shift has very interesting timing.
Speaker 10: I was doing my doctoral research and it was on
Speaker 10: US foreign policy, and I was going through a lot
Speaker 10: of speeches from the Reagan administration from the early eighties.
Speaker 1: Beth says that Reagan's speeches were pretty consistent from nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty one to about October thirty first, nineteen eighty three.
Speaker 1: Just before Able Archer.
Speaker 10: The Reagan administration was pre confrontational. They charged that the
Speaker 10: Soviet Union was immoral, They lied, they cheat. They were
Speaker 10: the greatest source of international insecurity.
Speaker 3: Born of a society which wantonly disregards individual rights and
Speaker 3: the value of human life, and seeks constantly to expand
Speaker 3: and dominate other nations.
Speaker 10: The next major speech came on January sixteenth, nineteen eighty four.
Speaker 1: In his first major speech since Able Archer, Ronald Reagan
Speaker 1: steps on stage and the American public meets a very
Speaker 1: new president.
Speaker 3: During these first days of nineteen eighty four, I would
Speaker 3: like to share with you and the people of the
Speaker 3: world my thoughts on a subject of great importance to
Speaker 3: the cause of peace, relations between the United States and
Speaker 3: the Soviet Union. Just suppose with me for a moment,
Speaker 3: but an Ivan and Ananya could find themselves, say in
Speaker 3: a waiting room, or sharing a shelter from the rain
Speaker 3: or a storm with a Jim and Sally and there
Speaker 3: was no language barrier to keep them from getting acquainted.
Speaker 10: President Reagan told this little story about these two couples,
Speaker 10: Ivan and Anya and Jim and Sally.
Speaker 1: Ivan and Anya a lovely couple from Moscow and our
Speaker 1: beloved Jim and Sally from I don't know, uh, Toledo.
Speaker 1: They just feel Midwestern to me.
Speaker 3: And as they went their separate ways, maybe Anya would
Speaker 3: be saying to Ivan, wasn't she nice?
Speaker 1: She also teaches music.
Speaker 3: They might even have decided they were all going to
Speaker 3: get together for dinner some evening soon.
Speaker 1: Ah, dinner, How cute. Two months ago, Reagan would have
Speaker 1: ended that story with Jim poking Ivan's eyeballs out and
Speaker 1: Sally shoving Anya in front of a bus for freedom.
Speaker 6: And it was really different.
Speaker 10: It was different in tone, it was different in substance.
Speaker 3: We do not threaten the Soviet Union. Our two countries
Speaker 3: have never fought each other. There's no reason why we
Speaker 3: ever should Let us begin now.
Speaker 6: Thank you.
Speaker 1: The media picked up on Reagan's shift. The Ivan and
Speaker 1: Anya tale would go down and speech writing history. But
Speaker 1: when Beth came across this speech, what caught her attention
Speaker 1: was one sentence, so slight, so discreet that if you
Speaker 1: didn't know what to listen for, you might miss it
Speaker 1: all together.
Speaker 10: Let's see, I have a quote here, we need to
Speaker 10: find meaningful ways to reduce the uncertainty and potential for
Speaker 10: misinterpretations surrounding military activities. I eventually learned that early drafts
Speaker 10: of the speech had been circulating within Washington in mid December.
Speaker 1: And remember the old Reagan, the tough guy, was still
Speaker 1: giving hard line speeches right up until November one.
Speaker 10: So my question became what happened between November one and
Speaker 10: mid December? And that's when I discovered Able Archer.
Speaker 1: Two months ago. A very secret nuclear near fuck up
Speaker 1: may have unfolded during November's Able Archer exercise. And then
Speaker 1: all of a sudden, this very aggressive, very anti communist
Speaker 1: president is talking about Sally braiding Anya's hair. All of
Speaker 1: a sudden, he's worried about reducing the potential for misinterpretation
Speaker 1: surrounding military activities. Pretty interesting timing. I mean, I'm know
Speaker 1: Erchio plaurot, but seems like there might be a connection here.
Speaker 3: To reduce the uncertainty and potential for misinterpretations surrounding military activities.
Speaker 1: And boom, did you hear that? That's Able Archer right
Speaker 1: in the speech. Over twenty years after Able Archer, Nate
Speaker 1: Jones began his quest to find out what really happened.
Speaker 1: As a student of history and a living human being,
Speaker 1: he was more than a little concerned about how a
Speaker 1: nuclear near miss was just a rumor in academic circles.
Speaker 1: Was George Schultz hiding something when he spoke to Americans
Speaker 1: during that panel? And is it just a coincidence that
Speaker 1: Reagan changed his tune so dramatically Only months later? Nate
Speaker 1: started at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. It's a massive
Speaker 1: building overlooking mountains and the Pacific Ocean in the heart
Speaker 1: of Semi Valley, California. Inside the Reagan Foundation has completely
Speaker 1: reconstructed Reagan's air Force one, which sits perched above a
Speaker 1: giant souvenir shop. Nancy and Ronald Reagan are even buried
Speaker 1: there at the library, not the souvenir shop. Hard to
Speaker 1: buy a fridge magnet when the great Communicator's corpse is
Speaker 1: staring right at you, And a couple of floors down
Speaker 1: in the basement, there's an archive, and that's where Nate
Speaker 1: begins his fight.
Speaker 6: I go to the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and go
Speaker 6: through all the boxes.
Speaker 1: Looking through reems and reams of paperwork from our government's past,
Speaker 1: hoping to discover some shred of evidence amongst the redactions
Speaker 1: for anything to do with Abe larger eighty three, the
Speaker 1: National Security Advisors files, US military documents, documents from our allies,
Speaker 1: anything that could paint a picture of how a NATO
Speaker 1: exercise might have changed the course of history. And as
Speaker 1: you might assume, the archive isn't small. Presidential libraries contain
Speaker 1: a lot of stuff.
Speaker 6: It really essentially is a dumping ground.
Speaker 1: But hidden amongst all of it, there could be a
Speaker 1: needle in the haystack.
Speaker 6: Well, when I was there, if my spidey senses went up.
Speaker 1: Nate finds a box. He blows off decades of cobwebs.
Speaker 1: He opens it, swats away the moths as they see
Speaker 1: light for the first time in twenty eight No, I'm
Speaker 1: being dramatic. The point is the box is important. It's
Speaker 1: labeled NATO Military Exercises November nineteen eighty three, Jackpot.
Speaker 6: So go through that and pull out the folder, open
Speaker 6: it up, and it has this. I believe it's a
Speaker 6: green card that says every historian's nightmare withheld classified, go
Speaker 6: to the next folder, same thing. So it's a little
Speaker 6: bit heartbreaking.
Speaker 1: But this young historical treasure hunter will not be deterred.
Speaker 6: But I go to the archivist on duty and say, hey,
Speaker 6: what's the mechanism for getting this withheld stuff released? And
Speaker 6: I still remember he kind of gave me a kind
Speaker 6: of a mean laugh. He said, well, you could file
Speaker 6: a foyer or a review request, but don't hold your breath.
Speaker 6: You can file, but you'll never get it.
Speaker 1: What a motherfucker, god bureaucratic piece of self righteous do drag? Mother?
Speaker 1: Am I right? Then?
Speaker 9: I go too far?
Speaker 1: I went too far.
Speaker 6: I felt that we had a right to know what happened.
Speaker 6: It's possible that it shows this danger, unacceptable danger of
Speaker 6: nuclear weapons. And if they're that dangerous in the world,
Speaker 6: was that danger then in nineteen eighty three and might
Speaker 6: still be that dangerous now? That danger shouldn't be hidden
Speaker 6: your classification. And that right there got me a little
Speaker 6: bit angry and said, you know what, I'm going to
Speaker 6: fight this until the end, and I don't think the
Speaker 6: government should be keeping this secret. And I'm going to
Speaker 6: learn about FOYA and I'm going to learn about appeals
Speaker 6: and maybe even sue because the government's telling me, no,
Speaker 6: you can't have the documents, and I want the documents.
Speaker 1: Here's a message to that asshole who worked as the
Speaker 1: arkivist on duty at the Reagan Presidential Library in the
Speaker 1: year two thousand and four, our fearless for your warrior,
Speaker 1: Get the dacks and what would they show? A very
Speaker 1: alarming account of what really went down in nineteen eighty three,
Speaker 1: spurred by intelligence failures, reckless policies, failed diplomacy, and outright arrogance.
Speaker 1: Buckle up, boys and girls, It's going to be a
Speaker 1: terrifying ride over the rest of the season. Will spin
Speaker 1: a yarn so nuts that it would have Reagan himself
Speaker 1: shitting in his ten gallon stetson. We'll tell you how
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty three was a truly batshit year for the
Speaker 1: human race, complete with fake military invasions, a commercial airliner
Speaker 1: full of passengers shot down, and a calculator right out
Speaker 1: of a spy movie that might have saved the world.
Speaker 1: And all that craziness would set the stage for the
Speaker 1: Big SNAFU, a close call with nuclear war that would
Speaker 1: be kept top secret for decades. Next week on Snafu,
Speaker 1: we'll get into the minds of the button pushers themselves,
Speaker 1: President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Yuri and drop Off,
Speaker 1: two men whose provocations in paranoia would push the world
Speaker 1: to the brink.
Speaker 3: It did give me a real understanding of the communist menace.
Speaker 8: Ronald Reagan, having campaigned on being top, is not going
Speaker 8: to stand up and say, oh, that was just for
Speaker 8: the cameras. I'm actually an old softy.
Speaker 1: I love Borsche.
Speaker 5: Really.
Speaker 8: For the first time in my life, I feel like
Speaker 8: there could be nuclear war.
Speaker 1: Snapoo is a production of iHeartRadio, Film, Nation Entertainment, and
Speaker 1: Pacific Electric Picture Company in association with Gilded Audio. Our
Speaker 1: lead producers are Sarah Joyner and Alyssa Martino. Our producer
Speaker 1: is Carl Nellis, Associate producer Tory Smith. It's executive produced
Speaker 1: by me Ed Helms, Milan Papelka, Mike Falbo, Andy Chug,
Speaker 1: and Whitney Donaldson. This episode was written by Sarah Joyner,
Speaker 1: with additional writing from me Elliott Kalen and Whitney Donaldson.
Speaker 1: Our senior editor is Jeffrey Lewis Make the rubble Bouts.
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 at
Speaker 1: Aizenstat