SYMHC Classics: Nuclear Close Calls

This episode from 2017 covers several moments in history when the world came perilously close to a full-scale nuclear war, due to false alarms or miscommunication.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday. Today, at least on the day this episode
is publishing, is the anniversary of a nuclear close call
that happened in 1983 when an early warning system falsely
showed five U.S. missiles headed toward the Soviet Union. We
talked about this in our episode on nuclear close calls,
which is today's Saturday classic. It originally came out on

(00:25):
April 10th, 2017. September 26th is also now observed as
the International Day for the Total Elimination of Nuclear Weapons,
which was established by the United Nations in 2013. This
episode's a little stressful, but enjoy. Welcome to Stuff You
Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Music Hello

(00:56):
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy B. Wilson. And
I'm Holly Frey. Not long ago, I went to the
Maritime Museum in San Diego, California, which if you like
boats and ships and maritime history, it's worth a stop.
It's also right down the road from the USS Midway Museum.
So if you would like some military history and some

(01:16):
maritime history all together, like you can just spend a
whole day out there. Um, Don't do what I did
and lose your camera, though. If anyone saw my camera
in San Diego, let me know. Yeah, I think I
have the last known photo from that camera because you
texted it to me from the museum. Oh, I took
that from my iPhone. Fortunately, I didn't lose my phone.
I only lost my point-and-shoot camera. Anyway, the actual point is...

(01:41):
Among the many seafaring vessels at the Maritime Museum is
this Soviet Foxtrot-class submarine, which is home to an exhibit
about a really harrowing incident I had never heard about before.
It was one of the surprisingly many moments in history
when the world came perilously close to a full-scale nuclear war.

(02:03):
And I did not actually know there were that many
That's surprisingly many incidents until I started looking into it
for this episode today. So today we are just going
to look at three of them, including the one I
learned about in San Diego, which inspired today's show. The
incident aboard Soviet submarine B-59 is tangled up with the
Cuban Missile Crisis and the nuclear arms race between the

(02:25):
United States and the Soviet Union. With the help of
its allies, the United States developed the first nuclear weapons
through the Manhattan Project. Among the weapons the Manhattan Project
produced were the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
Japan in 1945. Not long after World War II, the
Soviet Union successfully detonated its own nuclear bomb, and soon

(02:48):
the United States and the Soviet Union were locked in
a Cold War and a nuclear arms race. Both nations
were simultaneously building more nuclear weapons and developing more powerful
weapons that were able to travel greater distances and deliver
bigger payloads. The Cuban Missile Crisis grew out of this
Cold War and arms race. In July of 1962, the

(03:11):
Soviet Union reached an agreement with Cuba to install several
missiles there. The negotiation and the transportation of missiles to
Cuba were conducted in secret, but the U.S. learned about
it through aerial surveillance photography on October 14, 1962. Those
photographs were delivered to the White House the next day.

(03:31):
At this point, the United States nuclear arsenal was far,
far bigger and more powerful than the Soviet Union's. And
the United States also already had missiles stationed in Turkey
in easy reach of Soviet territory. But with the placement
of missiles in Cuba for the first time, the Soviet
Union also had missiles in easy reach of American territory.

(03:53):
Even though the Soviets insisted that the missiles were only
in Cuba as a defensive measure, This was a move
that was both intended and interpreted as a threat. For
a few days, news of the missile installation was also
kept secret from the general public. But on October 22nd,
President John F. Kennedy gave a televised address, giving Americans

(04:15):
a detailed description of the missile sites being built. He
called Soviets' placement of missiles in Cuba a, quote, clandestine, reckless,
and provocative threat. And he announced a naval quarantine around
Cuba to prohibit the delivery of any further materials or weapons.
This quarantine really goes in air quotes. It was a blockade.

(04:36):
But calling it a blockade would have presumed a state
of war. So they chose the word quarantine to be
nicer about it. Kennedy also wrote to Nikita Khrushchev, the
first secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party
of the Soviet Union, basically the leader of the Soviet Union,
to say that the United States would not tolerate the
presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba. He also spelled out

(05:00):
that any nuclear attack on any nation launched from Cuba
would be viewed as a Soviet attack on the United
States and the United States would retaliate in kind. Khrushchev,
for his part, insisted that these missiles were just being
placed there to defend Cuba from attack. For the whole
of the 13 days of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the

(05:21):
United States and the Soviet Union were in an incredibly
tense stalemate, with the U.S. demanding that the Soviet Union
remove the missiles and the Soviet Union both refusing and
continuing construction on the missile sites. And on October 27th,
things were particularly bad. The U.S. had been at DEFCON
2 with the armed forces ready to launch an all-out

(05:43):
nuclear war for three days. And then that day, an
American U-2 spy plane was shot down by a Russian
missile over Cuba and its pilot, Major Rudolph Anderson, was killed.
So the prevailing description of the Cuban Missile Crisis is
that for this entire time, the world was on the
brink of a nuclear war. But there was also this

(06:06):
other element of it going on that wasn't known about
until much later. There were four Soviet submarines, each of
them with a nuclear-tipped torpedo among their armaments, and they
were en route to Cuba as part of a submarine
force that was going to be stationed there. These were
all Foxtrot-class submarines, and they were powered by a combination
of diesel and battery power. While they were submerged, they

(06:29):
ran on their batteries, and then they had to return
to the surface periodically to get recharged. Soviet navigators were
exceptionally skilled at using the varying temperatures of the ocean
depths to avoid detection on radar. But without periodically recharging
the batteries on the surface where they were much more
easy to spot, they could not stay underwater. Their last

(06:51):
instruction from Moscow had been to hold position not far
from Cuba, but they'd since lost contact. And the vessels themselves,
built for use in colder waters, were not tolerating the
warmer ocean near Cuba very well. The air conditioning failed,
and the temperatures in the subs started to rise well
above 100 degrees. To make matters worse, they were running

(07:13):
out of food and water. And since they'd lost contact
with Moscow, their only way of finding out what was
happening and whether the United States and the Soviet Union
had gone to war was to listen to a civilian
radio broadcast from Miami. On the 27th of October, a
spotter plane caught a glimpse of one of the submarines
near the surface of the ocean. And late that afternoon,

(07:36):
American reconnaissance had detected the presence of at least three
Soviet submarines near Cuba. Ships that were in the area
as part of the quarantine started to try to get
the submarines to the surface by dropping signaling charges into
the ocean. There's a little bit of discrepancy in accounts
among the people who were actually there. Some of them

(07:56):
say that dropping four or five loud but non-damaging charges
was an official signal to surface. But others say that
they were intentionally dropping these charges to harass the submerged
submarines in the hope of basically forcing them up to
the surface. Aboard the B-59, though, the Soviets had no

(08:17):
idea what was going on. They had not gotten new
orders from Moscow in more than a week, and they
were overheated, dehydrated, and exhausted. As battery power failed, life
support systems did as well, and the air aboard had
less and less oxygen. They didn't know if the explosions
that they were hearing around them could damage or destroy

(08:37):
their craft. And their only source of information was these
American news reports on the civilian radio, which were reporting
the extreme tensions and fears about the Cuban Missile Crisis.
The commanders of these four submarines had been authorized to
use their nuclear-tipped torpedoes if they were attacked, and aboard

(08:58):
the B-59, Captain Valentin Stavitsky concluded that they were. And
he gave orders to prepare their nuclear torpedo, saying, quote, Fortunately,
cooler heads prevailed. Savitsky had the agreement of his other
officers in launching the torpedo. But since the B-59 was

(09:21):
the flagship of the flotilla bound for Cuba, it also
carried the flotilla commander, Vasily Arkhipov. Since Arkhipov was aboard,
they needed his approval as well, and Arkhipov refused, and
he instead convinced Savitsky to surface. They got fresh air,
they recharged their batteries, and at the first opportunity, submerged

(09:43):
and slipped away again, evading American detection before apparently returning
to Soviet waters. Today, Arkhabov is generally regarded as a hero,
as somebody whose clear thinking prevented what surely would have
been a full-on nuclear war. But on his return to
the Soviet Union, his decisions were heavily criticized. The general

(10:05):
feeling was that he and the rest of them should
have gone down with a ship. Arkhipov later died of cancer,
probably a result of a previous incident aboard a submarine,
which was a near meltdown on the K-19 during its
maiden voyage. That killed seven people who were aboard almost
immediately and then caused delayed effects for many of the

(10:26):
others who had been there. Basically, they averted a total
meltdown situation, but it was at a high cost. The U.S.
was completely unaware that they had been dropping signaling charges
on a nuclear-armed submarine until much later. And the whole
incident was little known until documents related to it were
declassified in 1992. If you would like to know more,

(10:49):
there is a PBS Secrets of the Dead episode about
this whole incident that's called The Man Who Saved the World.
And to wrap up the Cuban Missile Crisis, eventually the
Soviet Union agreed to remove the missiles from Cuba in
exchange for a pledge that the United States wouldn't invade
the nation, something that the U.S. had already tried and
failed to do during the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961.

(11:13):
And in another move that wasn't publicly known until decades later...
The U.S. also removed its nuclear missiles from Turkey. I
kind of imagine this as being like, if you were
throwing rocks at a tree and not hitting it, and
then you realized later that the tree had a big
old hornet's nest inside, like, that's sort of what was

(11:36):
going on with dropping signaling charges onto this nuclear-armed submarine
full of people who were overheated, exhausted, dehydrated, and not
having enough oxygen. Yeah, but a hornet's nest that could
kill a lot of people. Yeah, a hornet's nest that
would destroy the entire world. So with that teary thought,
we're going to take a quick break. Take a word
from a sponsor before we move on to our next story.

(12:06):
Now we are going to move beyond the Cold War
into a story that's right on the cusp of our
typical window of history on the show. It took place
in 1983. And as was the case with the Soviet
submarine B-59, this also happened during a period of heightened
tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union. Throughout

(12:27):
the Cold War, both the U.S. and the Soviet Union
were actively making plans for what they would do if
the other struck first in a nuclear attack. And for
a couple of years in the early 1980s, Yuri Andropov,
General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union,
was particularly convinced that the U.S. was making definite plans

(12:47):
for a nuclear attack that would devastate Soviet leadership. Under
his command, the Soviet Union was preparing for a certainty,
not an eventuality. Both the U.S. and the Soviet Union
had also made it clear that a nuclear strike by
one would prompt an immediate and devastating response from the other.
In 1983, a series of incidents had ratcheted up the

(13:10):
general sense of nuclear paranoia. On March 8th, President Ronald
Reagan had delivered a speech arguing against a proposed nuclear
freeze in which he called the Soviet Union an evil empire.
Later that month, he announced the missile defense system that
came to be known as Star Wars. Both nations undertook
maneuvers and drills purportedly for the sake of preparedness. but

(13:34):
often they were interpreted by the other as being anything
from a threatening show of force to a real effort
to secretly lay the groundwork for an upcoming World War III.
And when our next incident took place, the latest and
probably most alarming of these was the downing of Korean
Air Flight 007. The commercial flight was en route from

(13:56):
New York to Seoul with a stop in Anchorage to refuel.
After leaving Anchorage for reasons that aren't entirely clear, the
flight diverged from its planned course and wound up in
Soviet airspace. The Soviet Union, apparently believing it was a U.S.
spy plane, scrambled two fighter jets, which attacked the plane
with air-to-air missiles. The flight crashed into the sea, killing

(14:19):
all 269 people aboard, one of whom was U.S. Representative
Larry McDonald of Georgia. The incident sparked international outrage and
a slew of conspiracy theories, some of which still persist today.
The Soviet Union did not help the matter by being
incredibly secretive about the incident, at first not even admitting

(14:41):
that it had happened and not revealing whether it had
found the wreckage or flight data recorders. A lot of
the details remained completely unknown to the rest of the
world until after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and
some of the details are still a mystery. Three weeks
after the incident with Flight 007 on September 26th, Lieutenant

(15:02):
Colonel Stanislav Petrov of the Soviet Air Defense Forces was
stationed in a bunker known as Serpukhov-15, which was part
of the Soviet Union's newly enabled early warning satellite defense network.
At Serpukhov-15, satellite intelligence was received and analyzed, and in
the case of an attack, there was a telephone with
a direct line to commanding officers. Petrov's job there was

(15:26):
so secret that not even his wife knew where he
worked or what he did. By this point, both the
United States and the Soviet Union each had satellite systems
that were meant to help keep watch for the launch
of intercontinental ballistic missiles from the other. United States satellites
basically looked down on the Earth from above, but on

(15:47):
the Soviet side, the satellites looked at the planet on edge.
They were looking for missiles after they had already been launched.
It would sort of be silhouetted against the background of space.
In theory, this minimized the number of natural phenomena and
other non-threatening human activities that could cause a false alarm.
But on September 26th, just after midnight local time, a

(16:11):
false alarm did indeed happen, most likely thanks to sunlight
reflecting off of high-altitude clouds. The system detected the presence of,
at first, one missile. But in moments, that number grew
to five, all launched from the United States. The warning
of the detected incoming missile strike played out within the

(16:31):
Serpukhov-15 bunker like something out of a movie. There were
blaring alarms and warnings in huge red letters on the screens.
If you've ever seen a nuclear disaster movie in which
the launch happens and it's met with like giant wailing klaxons,
and the words LAUNCH in big red flashing letters on

(16:53):
the screen, and you thought, man, that looks ridiculous. Apparently,
that's really what happened. It looked exactly like that. Protocol
was for Petrov to immediately contact his superior officers to
report that the launch had been detected, but he had
some doubts that the report was accurate. This system was

(17:13):
brand new, and in his opinion, it had been rushed
into use when it was still, in his words, raw.
Five also seemed like an unusually low number of missiles
for a preemptive nuclear strike. He would later say, quote,
when people start a war, they don't start it with
only five missiles. You can do little damage with just

(17:34):
five missiles. So instead of contacting his superior officers to
say that a nuclear strike was incoming, he called to
report a false alarm. Even as he did, though, he
wasn't completely sure that he was right. It wasn't until
the missiles in question failed to reach the Soviet Union
that he knew for sure that his hunch had been correct. Yeah,

(17:56):
he was like, I thought it was maybe 50-50. And
he also later theorized that if someone else had been
on duty, it would not have been the same call.
By his own account, though, after this was all over,
he went home, he drank a whole lot of vodka,
and he slept for more than 24 consecutive hours. As
with the submarine B-59, the details of this incident only

(18:18):
became public much later. At the time, Petrov himself got
no recognition within the Soviet Union for what he had
done and the crisis averted under his watch. However, after
an investigation, he did get a reprimand for not keeping
a detailed enough log about what had happened. His explanation
was that he had a phone in one hand and

(18:38):
the facility's intercom in the other, and he couldn't juggle
both at once and also take notes. In the aftermath
of all this, the computer program that was designed to
filter out natural phenomena and other noise from the early
warning systems results was rewritten to account for this combination
of sun and high-altitude clouds. The world learned of Petrov's

(19:00):
actions about 15 years later when his commanding officer wrote
about it in his memoir. His wife learned of it
when a reporter came to their home following the publication
of that memoir. A documentary about this whole incident came
out in 2014, which was called The Man Who Saved
the World. That is not an error. It is the
same name as the one about the submarine. And we're

(19:25):
going to take another quick break before we talk through
one more of these. The last of these incidents that
we are going to talk about today is way more
recent than we generally get into on the show. We
have kind of a rule of thumb window. You know,

(19:47):
it's this is definitely newer than that but as i
was going through the surprisingly many events of this type
it stood out for reasons that are going to become
clear uh by this point the soviet union had dissolved
so the nuclear superpowers at play were the united states
and russia And we have a little less detail on
this one than we did on the other two in

(20:08):
part because any United States documents pertaining to it are
probably still classified. On January 25, 1995, Russian radar operators
near the coast spotted a fast-moving object that appeared to
be a missile. It was over the Barents Sea, roughly
between Russia's northern coast and the Arctic Ocean. And then

(20:30):
as it moved, the object separated into multiple pieces. It
was behaving like a Trident missile, and judging from where
it originated, it could have been launched from a U.S. submarine.
The radar technicians feared that this was an American nuclear
warhead set to detonate high in the atmosphere and to
put all of Russia's early warning satellite system, which was

(20:54):
still being maintained in spite of the end of the
Cold War, out of commission. That system, though, had not
detected any launches, but it was also primarily focused on
missile sites in North America. There was apparently also some
cloud cover. The satellite operators notified their commanding officers that
a suspected launch was in the works. In the United States,

(21:17):
Russia and other nations that have nuclear weapons, a specially
outfitted satchel known as the nuclear briefcase accompanies the head
of state. The briefcase's actual contents are secret, and the U.S.
version weighs about 45 pounds. Its purpose is to make
sure the head of state has all the necessary documentation
on hand, while also allowing them to receive information, make decisions, and,

(21:41):
if necessary, order a nuclear strike. The U.S. has also
noted that part of the briefcase's purpose is being able
to identify that it really is the president making the call.
Russia had a clear protocol in the event of a
missile launch. First, signal the president's nuclear briefcase, at this

(22:01):
point accompanying President Boris Yeltsin. Then, assess the situation, and
within 10 minutes, make a decision on whether to retaliate.
According to Russian defense protocols, incoming missiles didn't have to
actually strike anything before the retaliatory strike was ordered. In
spite of the discrepancy between what the radar operators and

(22:23):
the early warning satellites were reporting, about five minutes into
that 10-minute window, word went out to submarine commanders in
the area to maintain a state of readiness and prepare
for further instruction. Eight minutes into the 10-minute window, the
mystery objects on the radar fell into the sea, and everyone, thankfully,

(22:44):
stood down. And the culprit in this case was the
Black Brant 12, a sounding rocket, which is a scientific
rocket used to take measurements and conduct tests. A sounding
rocket typically has a rocket and a payload designed to
separate from it at a certain altitude. Often, once it's
taken its measurements or conducted its experiment, the payload portion

(23:06):
comes back to Earth with its descent slowed down by
a parachute. That separation of the instruments and the payload
from the rocket is is what the radar detectors had
interpreted as the separation of a Trident missile. It was
really a Norwegian rocket that was being used to study
the Northern Lights. And where it gets, yeah, where it

(23:27):
gets a little unnerving is that the Norwegian and American
team that was responsible for this thing had notified multiple
other countries, including Russia, of what was about to happen,
but nobody had told these satellite operators who raised money
the alarm about it. And apparently nobody made the connection
between this report of a launch from the coast and

(23:50):
the launch of a scientific rocket that was already known
to everyone. Like nobody connected those two things together. However,
the thing that made this so notable and made me
want to include it in today's episode, in spite of
its recency, is it's the only known time in world
history that a head of state has actually activated their

(24:11):
nuclear briefcase. I can't help but think how frustrating it
would be for the science team to be like, we
did everything right, and yet... We literally told you. Inadvertently,
we could have set off a horrible global incident, despite
having gone through the checklist and done everything we were

(24:32):
supposed to. To our knowledge, there is no movie or
TV show about this particular incident yet. But since this
incident was about 10 minutes of a long and sometimes
controversial political career for Boris Yeltsin, they will probably title
it something besides The Man Who Saved the World. Although
you never know. Maybe so. Maybe that's just the title

(24:55):
of all nearly near all incidents of just barely averting
Nuclear catastrophe. They will all be called the man who
saved the world. That does seem to definitely be the pattern. Yeah.
Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. If

(25:18):
you'd like to send us a note, our email address
is historypodcast at iheartradio.com. And you can subscribe to the
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