October 26, 2022 • 35 mins
The situation is getting dire. Mind games and twitchy nerves lead to tragedy in Russian airspace. Finger-pointing only makes it worse, and any chance for real diplomacy flies out the window. As we hurtle toward November ‘83, a glitchy missile detection system almost spells disaster. Produced by FilmNation and Pacific Electric Picture Co. in association with Gilded Audio.
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Ah. The summer of eighty three, across America, teenagers crammed
into theaters to see a new heart throb named Tom
Cruise makes the larger than life. Bad decisions in risky business,
sometimes you gotta say, what the fuck make you move?
It was such a smash hit, in fact, that all
over the country, and I'm speaking from personal experience here,
(00:27):
emergency rooms were flooded with teenagers with broken bones from
trying to replicate the infamous hardwood floor socks slide. It
was a simpler time, wasn't it. It was the summer
that gave us flash dance, those tasty mouth incinerating hot pockets,
(00:49):
and somewhere down under, a baby Chris Hemsworth entered the world.
But you know what they say, good things never last. Soon,
a humid, how sean summer would turn to fall and
things would get a little bit colder. I'd heard it
that seven forty seven and I'm missing, and seven forty
(01:10):
sevens just aren't missing. One story dominates the free world
news media tonight, the killing of two hundred and sixty
nine innocent people. I bought a Korean jumbo jet that
drifted into Soviet territory. The United States reacts with revulsion
to this attack. Loss of life appears to be heavy.
We can see no excuse whatsoever for this appalling act.
(01:35):
The United States is demanding that the Soviet Union explain
why it's shot down the Korean Airline's plane, the death
straight into Soviet airspace. I'm at Helms and this is Snapho,
a podcast about history's greatest screw ups. On season one,
we're telling you the story of a snaffhoo that is gigantic, terrifying,
(01:58):
and observe. It's called Able Archer three, NATO military exercise
that may have almost triggered a real nuclear war. By
(02:31):
this point in the season, we've learned that the Spring
of Three firmly ended anything resembling a good relationship between
the United States and the Soviet Union. In geopolitical technical terms,
we've been downgraded from frenemies to enemies. Ronald Reagan was
casually slinging around evil Empire insults. NATO announced that it
(02:51):
would be deploying medium range Persian two missiles in Europe,
and Reagan got his pet project going s d I
a k A Star Wars. The Soviet Union whipped themselves
into a nuclear frenzy, sending their spies all around town
to confirm what they already believed to be true. That
America was preparing a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union.
(03:13):
But somehow things were about to get even harrier. In
this episode, spirals out of control. In the months leading
up to Able Archer, the Soviets and Americans weren't joyfully
sliding around in socks so much as they were dancing
on a razor's edge. Now that's what I call some
real risky business. It's June three. The front page of
(03:41):
the New York Times reads and drop Off meets with Harriman,
asks for better ties. The Harriman referenced here is Avril Harriman,
a ninety one year old who used to be the U.
S Ambassador to the Soviet Union back when Stalin was
in power and the Soviets were American allies. The article
said Harriman was traveling to Moscow as a private citizen.
(04:02):
He wasn't on official US business, But it also said
that before he left for Moscow, he met with the
Secretary of State George Schultz, and that he took a
State Department translator with him to the meeting. He essentially
went as a official, unofficial envoy. This is Nate Jones,
are able archer sleuth. Nate wanted to know what was
(04:25):
really said in that meeting. I mean, it's not normal
for an elderly retired diplomat to be summoned out of
his lazy boy recliner to speak with the Soviet head
of state. Maybe there was a detailed record of Harriman's
conversation within drop off. Maybe there was some hint about
what was to come. So how could Nate find such
(04:47):
a thing? With a little help from a friend called FOYA?
The Freedom of Information Act, it gives us citizens the
right to request government documents. Believe me when I say
that Nate owns lives and breathe this foyers. He's currently
the FOYA director at the Washington Post. For you, Nate
is his Twitter handle, for God's sake. So the FOIA
(05:12):
process looks like this. The first most important step is
to figure out what records exists that you want to request.
In this case, he figured an important meeting between a
retired diplomat and the head of the Soviet Union. There's
got to be a report on that meeting, right or
like at least some notes. The next step is you
(05:33):
have to figure out which agency holds the document you want,
and there are, depending on how you count, some two
hundred fifty agencies and components in the federal government. So
part of the problem is finding the right one to
file too, and it's tricky. I think once you do
this long enough, you get kind of an intuition. Nate
figured if there was any record of this meeting between
(05:55):
and drop Off and Harriman, it would be in the
State Department. So next you file a FOIA, a simple
form letter that says, under the FOIA, I request this
document held by your agency, and then you wait. The
law says that they're supposed to release the records within
(06:16):
twenty working days. But twenty working days, okay, we're talking
about the government here. I'm sorry. It's just it never
takes twenty days. I mean, hell, it rarely takes twenty months.
It's not for the faint of heart. You have to
be in it for a long battle. Being a FOYA
warrior entails a lot of polite reminders. Hey, Sandra, me again. Um, yeah,
(06:42):
I'm still interested in that top secret document that you're
five years later in releasing. Any update on that or
you know, just let me know whenever you get a chance.
The State Department eventually answered Nate's foya. They had detailed
notes from the Herman meeting, which they released in Nate
totally unredacted. He was thrilled until he read it, and
(07:07):
then he was freaked out because the contents of the conversation.
We're very alarming everyel. Harriman said that and drop of
three times warned of the risk of nuclear war through miscalculation,
and told him explicitly and genuinely that he feared that
their Reagan administration maybe moving towards the dangerous red line
(07:28):
of nuclear war. Three times and drop Off warned of
potential miscalculation. Maybe the guy had a nuclear crystal ball
after all. Basically, and drop Off asked Harriman to tell
Reagan to please tone things down, make sure all this
tension doesn't keep ratcheting up or worse become normalized. He
(07:48):
asked for dialogue before they found themselves on an irreversible
path to the worst possible outcome. Please go back and
make sure that despite our differences, we don't have the
catastrophe of nuclear war. And drop Off said he'd wait
for Reagan's call. Harriman may as well have stayed at
home in the US that week hell, instead of spending
(08:10):
twenty hours on an airplane, he could have gone to
that new blockbuster War Games, which coincidentally came out that weekend,
because Reagan never picked up that phone. Do you think
(08:34):
that one of the reasons why this whole period was
so dangerous was because there were no channels of communication
between the two sides, that the completely different conceptions going on.
This is from an interview that was conducted for the
documentary three The Brink of Apocalypse. In this particular period
(08:57):
Orion as we know, they see to have broken down
and there was no understanding anymore. And that I think
is what made that particular period in the court was
so dangerous. And that's Rhiner Rupp. Agent Dopez, you remember
him from last episode Stasi man infiltrating NATO spying for
(09:19):
the East alongside his wife. Rep recalls the moment when
he could sense the Stasi were getting a bit more nervous.
It became clear to him that the Soviets were preoccupied
with Bryan. They truly believed a surprise nuclear attack was imminent.
I was asked to keep my eyes opened. I also
(09:40):
had systems to relay back information very fast, which was
actually very unusual. It's just not easy for us by
to get messages across the Iron Curtain quickly. You can't
call up your handler and say, hey, boris, guess what
secret documents I perused in my NATO job today. That
would be a surefi our way to get caught. I mean,
(10:01):
come on, no, spies usually handed off messages physically, so
getting a message to the other side of the Iron
Curtain took time days at best. But if NATO was
preparing a nuclear attack, the East wouldn't have days. So
one day in early Rup met with his handlers. They
presented him with a brand new spy tool that would
(10:23):
significantly speed things up. It looked like an electronic calculator,
a classic espionage gadget, an ordinary item rewired to do
something extraordinary. I would write my message down I've liked,
coded into numbers, type the numbers into this sneaky spy
calculator on this little machine would then condense all this
(10:45):
into a very short sound, like a beat. He'd take
this magic calculator to a payphone. Normally telephone payphones were normal.
Kids just roll with it, and then he'd dial a
number for an elderly woman in East Germany. He'd say, Grandma,
I'd like to come visit you, which was a code
(11:05):
phrase that would signal this Grandma to start recording the call.
Rup would hold up the calculator to the phone, put
that thing on the receiver and transmit the coded message. Now,
for anyone surveiling the call, it would just sound like
a crackling in the line. They hang up. Grandmo then
caused the Stazi. They rush over, retrieve the recording and
(11:27):
then decipher it. See the message. The intel is transmitted
in minutes instead of days. So that was in case
of emergencies emergencies. Well, it turns out there would only
be one emergency that was so urgent. Ryner Rupp had
to use this system. It was a day in November
(11:47):
during Exercise Able Archer. But before we get to that
fateful day, the US and the Soviet Union were about
to be further downgraded from enemies to I don't know
what's worse than enemies, arch enemies. I'm gonna workshop that.
I'll get back to you, because in the middle of
the most tense time in the Cold War, Reagan would
(12:10):
make a batshit crazy decision. He was already poking the
bear publicly humiliating the Soviet Union and backing them into
a nuclear corner. But now it's almost like he wanted
to start stabbing the bear. And you don't stab bears,
just kids. You know, this is the kind of thing
you could put in a kid's book about, like standing
(12:32):
up to a bully. This is everyone's favorite nuclear historian
Jeffrey Lewis talking about Reagan and his administration. To them,
the Soviet Union was big and powerful and a bully,
and they were going to stand up. And you know,
at the end of the kids book, the bully backs down.
And so he's looking at the global military posture and
(12:52):
he's trying to imagine ways to restore the strength and
the impressiveness of the United States. In order to do this,
Reagan needed to know what the Soviets were capable of.
And as we've established, he's not going to call and
drop off, of course, not that would be too easy.
So instead he decided to test their abilities and their resolve.
(13:16):
So he gave the order for the military to execute
psychological operations, or psy ops. Here's how these psy ops
went down. A big navy fleet would cross the Pacific
and approach the Soviet Union from the east, and then
day after day, US fighter jets would fly right up
to Russian airspace and then at the last minute turn
(13:39):
around and come back home. And then they do it
again and again and again, but sometimes they would actually
cross the line. One ship shut off its electronics and
approached Soviet waters. Then six navy planes took off. They
actually flew over Russian islands, zipping through Soviet air space.
(14:00):
As one writer put it, they flew up Ivan's nose,
putting the fear of God like literally into the Soviet
The goal of the exercise was twofold. Number one observed
their defenses. Number two just funk with their heads a
little or maybe a lot. If you're the Soviets and
you are seeing aircraft and ships doing unexpected things and
(14:25):
probing your defenses, possibly that's an exercise. Possibly that's a
signal to show you that they that the US means business.
But it also looks a lot like reconnaissance foreign attack.
It looks a lot like a dry run of something
you might do later. It looks like probing defined weakness.
And so again, any deviation from a typical exercise pattern
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is going to naturally raise alarm bells because the other
side is like, why are you doing this? So they're
feeling anxious and constantly worried about it. People are kind
of putting it together like in this is like unwise.
It was creating a total panic inside the Soviet Union.
That panic started from the top, but it went all
(15:09):
the way down the chain of command because the Soviet
leaders put out the word the first radar operator who
spotted any planes off the coast was going to get
a nice, fat bonus. One of the sad legacies of
those psy ops is that the Soviet leadership offers financial
rewards to air crews if they shoot down aircraft that
(15:33):
are entering Soviet airspace. In other words, paid ay for
taking down suspicious planes. It was risky business for both sides,
and it wouldn't be long before it caused a disaster.
On September one, flight k A L zero zero seven
departed from New York City, flying west towards Seoul, South Korea.
(15:56):
The same night, the Soviets conducted a missile test. Soviet
radars were active, and the officers that the controls weren't
surprised to see that the US Air Force had sent
a spy plane to keep tabs on them, classic psy ops.
The Soviet radar operators caught it on their scopes, but
the plane was keeping its distance following the normal flight paths.
Nothing to worry about. The Soviet radar operators did what
(16:20):
they always do. They assigned the American spy plane a
little tracking number to keep tabs on it through the night.
But the spy plane wasn't alone, and the hours before dawn,
another object appeared on the radar, flying fast from the
Pacific Ocean. The Russians watched as it approached the spy plane,
and then the two crossed paths. For just a moment,
(16:42):
it was impossible to tell the two aircraft apart on
the radar, but as they went their separate ways, the
Russian radar operators had to make a choice which tracking
label should go with which plane. They hoped, maybe prayed,
that they didn't mix them up. They mixed them up,
and when they did, the radar showed that the air
(17:03):
Force plane was headed straight for Russia. But it wasn't
the air Force plane. It was actually k A L
zero zero seven, a commercial flight with two hundred sixty
nine civilians on board. Soviet pilots scrambled in minutes, Russian
fighter jets were up in the air, catching up to
the plane. For a moment, the Russian pilots were confused.
(17:26):
The plane they were looking at wasn't exactly acting like
a military flight, lights flashing on its outstretched wings. It
was practically a homing beacon. A military plane wouldn't have
any lights on at all. This is Soviet pilot Major Assupovic.
He says, I see it. I'm locked onto the target.
He takes note that the plane resembles a passenger aircraft.
(17:49):
He doesn't believe that it's a spy plane. So then
he tries to call the plane on the radio, demands
that it changed course. He says, the target isn't responding
to the call. ASA Povich is commanded to fire a
warning shot. He does so, still no response. K A
(18:11):
L zero zero seven just kept barreling on in total
radio silence. Then the Soviet generals on the ground made
the call destroy the target. As Povich has his orders,
he fires, I have executed the launch, he says. Missiles
(18:32):
shred the wing and tail of k A L zero
zero seven. It spirals into the ocean, a trail of
fire signaling its fatal dive. As Povich confirms the hit,
the target is destroyed, and just like that, two d
sixty nine innocent people are dead. One story, don't the
(19:00):
it's the Free World news media tonight, the killing of
two hundred and sixty nine innocent people. I bought a
Korean jumber jet that drifted into Soviet territory at the university,
who were just shocked. Zada was very profound. Dad, I
remember talking to my friends about, like, who did that?
Who would shoot down an airliner full of civilians. This
(19:24):
is vet Lana sevran Skaya recalling the confusion of Soviet citizens.
When news broke about the downing of flight k a
L zero zero seven, the Soviets issued the denial that
they did not shoot the airliner and that this is
all American provocation. Um, nobody shot at the liner. We
don't know where it is that went somewhere. Maybe it crashed,
(19:45):
but we had nothing to do with it. Maybe the
plane just crashed. Not exactly believable, but they were desperate
to cover their asses. The United States is demanding that
the Soviet Union explained why it shot down the Korean
Airlines plane the death straight into Soviet airspace. A week later,
the Soviets submitted that they actually shot down the airliner.
(20:08):
It wasn't long before the Soviets realized that they were
not going to get away with this lie, so the
story changed. Yes, they shot down the plane, but it
wasn't actually their fault. As outrage mounts over the downed
Korean airliner and Moscow claims it was a spy plane. Later,
the pilot Asa Povich revealed that Soviet officials forced him
(20:30):
to record a fake radio exchange from a script. The
idea was to replace the original transmission, rewriting the facts
of that night's events, scrubbing the fact that Assapovich did
actually warn his commanders that the plane in question looked
like a passenger aircraft before those commanders ordered him to
shoot it down. They even had him hold an electric
(20:51):
razor up to the mike to try to mimic the
sound of a cockpit. Yep. Definitely what I'm seeing here
as an American warplane, just absolutely covered with webbon and
oh yeah, it's got American flags paid it all over it.
There's an Uncle Sam riding on top. I mean that
this is unmistakable. Oh well, nice, try, guys. Unlucky for them,
the Japanese had intercepted the original transmission that night, and
(21:14):
they had already shared the recording with Ronald Reagan. He
knew the truth, and he was going to make sure
everyone knew what the Soviets had done. Days after the attack,
Reagan addressed the nation from behind the desk in the
Oval Office. They deny the deed, but in their conflicting
and misleading protestations, the Soviets revealed that, yes, shooting down
(21:36):
a plane, even one with hundreds of innocent men, women, children,
and babies, is a part of their normal procedure if
that plane is in what they claim as their airspace.
He said, no way, this could be a mistake. The
Russians knew these were civilians. They didn't care. That's the
communist way. He played recordings of the Soviet radio chatter
(21:56):
to a horrified audience. There is no way a pilot
could mistake this for anything other than a civilian airliner.
It was an act of barbarigin. But here's the thing,
it was a mistake. The shooting was a tragic mistake.
The United States knew practically immediately because they were able
(22:18):
to get the intercepts of the Russian military communications that
the shooting was actually a tragic mistake, that it was
not deliberate, that they actually thought they were shooting at
an American spy plane. So if Reagan knew it was
an accident or at worst a miscalculation, why was he
(22:39):
going on television to say the Soviets killed innocent civilians
on purpose. To the Soviet elite, it felt like they
were doing it intentionally to prepare their own population and
the European populations to a new round of tension, or
maybe a preparation for war, reparation for war. Reagan must
(23:04):
be spinning the Korean air tragedy as propaganda priming the
world for a war against the Soviet Union. Right, it
was the only explanation that made any sense to the
Soviet leaders. They were terrified that a surprise nuclear attack
was eminent. And what do the Russians do when they're scared?
They build a computer. In the military space, the key
(23:32):
issue is reaction time, decision making speed, and also eliminating
the human element from carrying out those decisions. This is
Simon Miles, Assistant Professor at Duke. He says, the Soviet
leaders were increasingly concerned that the US was going to
attack in what's called a decapitating strike, which is exactly
(23:54):
what it sounds like, chopping off the head of the
Soviet Union, killing the leaders in one fell swoop, leeving
nobody to retaliate. The solution hit back, even if the
leaders were dead, with an automatic computerized nuke launching system,
orderly terrifying, basically a strange loving and doomsday device. About
(24:16):
time somebody brought up that old Stanley Kubrick chestnut, the
doomsday machine. With the doomsday machine, what is that? The
device which will destroy old human and animal life on earth? Doctor?
Strange love is fiction? But yeah, the Soviets did build
a system that would do basically the exact same thing.
(24:37):
They called it Perimeter. When we found out about it
in the US, we called it dead hand. Nuclear weapons
are stationed under these massive walls of concrete and rebar
in sort of the far flung portions of the Soviet Union.
But this is a fantastic strange land. How can it
be triggered automatically? That it's a marculd is simple to
(24:59):
do with that. First, a system uses a wide range
of temperature sensors, pressure sensors, seismographs and things like that
which are calibrated basically to read the symptoms of a
nuclear strike. So the way that you get the signal
(25:19):
to them is by launching smaller rockets at them. Are
you following all this? It's insane. If U S nukes
hit the Kremlin in response, Soviets fire a bunch of
little missiles at their own big missiles, which then triggers
a big underground computer to launch a bunch of nuclear
missiles at the US and doomsday. It is another thing
(25:52):
to saying man would do. The dooms machine is designed.
We all know what happens next, which is that either
all human life has wiped out on the planet or
and what is probably a worse outcome, we all become
more people, or rather a very small subset of us
who survive become more people. And so because of the
automated and irrevocable decision making process which rules out human mettling,
(26:15):
the doomsday machine is terrifying. Gee I wish we had
one of the doomsday machines. Stating the way perimeter a
k a dead hand really works is a deeply buried secret,
but Simon Miles believes that it still had some small
human element to it, that it required the Soviet leaders
(26:38):
to turn it on. So a computer wouldn't be launching
nukes entirely on its own, not unless the leadership was
incapacitated and gave it permission to. Plus, it's not clear
whether or not dead Hand was fully operational in but
what we do know is that the Soviet Union fully
believed in fighting the Cold War with technology, even when
(26:59):
that technology was not yet perfected. The system was rushed in.
The Soviets brought it in very quickly. They saw it
as an issue of major national emergency to install a system.
This is Tailor Downing again. He's talking about OCO, which
is another semi functional Soviet system, a network of satellites
hovering above America's missile silos watching for a nuclear launch.
(27:23):
The ECO technology wasn't yet perfected, still a little glitchy,
and in the days immediately after the Korean air tragedy,
while the Soviets were still reeling and only months before
able Archer, a glitch in the ECO system would nudge
the Soviets a little closer to the brink. E September,
(27:47):
Lieutenant Colonel Stuntslav Petrov reported to work at the OCO
Control Center. The control center where all of this information
came in and was interpreted was a place called Sepakov fifteen,
which was a top secret military site about eighty miles
south of Moscow. Petrov was an engineer. He knew computers,
(28:10):
he knew satellites, he knew communications. In fact, he was
the deputy chief of the Department of Military Algorithms Gold
job title Alert. Anyway, Petrov was at his post with
a dozen men under his command. His job was to
monitor the seven Russian satellites as they orbited over American
missile silos, scanning for a launch. If he saw one,
(28:31):
Petrov would immediately alert Soviet leadership at the highest levels.
They would have mere minutes to decide whether to launch
a retaliatory strike. He is sitting in a gallery like
looking down on the main control room, and in front
of him and in front of everybody is a giant
screen with a map on it. The North Pole is
in the center of the map. The United States sort
(28:53):
of spreads out to the top of the map, and
the Soviet Union spreads out across the bottom, kind of
an unusual perspective, but this map was all about tracing
intercontinental ballistic missiles and probably Santa too, but that's top secret.
Paul is perfectly normal. Quiet. Petrov even remembers that he
made himself a cup of tea. His men were at
(29:14):
their stations, and time ticked by until about quarter past
twelve in the morning. Just after midnight, a classon suddenly
starts glaring and a signal A giant signaling red letters
comes up on the screen in front, which is the
Russian word for launch, comes up, flashing launch, Launch, Launch
(29:37):
on screen. It said High Reliability Satellite number five had
detected the rocket flare of an American cruise missile. Petrov hesitated.
All the heads in the room turned to face him.
The men under his command were waiting to see how
he would respond. Petrov knew how the system was supposed
to work. If a nuclear missile had been fired from
(29:57):
the United States in thirty short minutes, a nuclear blast
would decimate Moscow. Every single moment he hesitated was one
moment less that Soviet leaders could sound the alarms, one
moment less for his own family to run to their bunkers.
He'd been part of the setting up of this system,
and we now know that he didn't have that much
(30:18):
confidence in it. He knew it had been rushed, its
installation had been rushed. He knew that lots of corners
have been cut, that the glitches would be worked out
once it was operational. Pedrov orders his men to reset
the system. He gets on the phone to his command
center and says, I believe I have a false alarm.
But then satellite five pinned again. He shut it off,
(30:43):
and then another He shut it off. He waited, and
then it happened again. The screen warned him launched detected.
He lay just says that he felt his legs had
sort of collapsed underneath him. He said it was like
(31:03):
sitting in a in a frying pan. Stanislav had to
decide was his instinct right or was the system right.
In interviews, Stanislav would later say that he didn't know
exactly why he made the call he did. He just
went with his gut and maintained it was a false alarm.
(31:26):
A few minutes passes, he holds his position and by
this point had there been a launch attack other systems.
They Soviets had radar stations on the north pole other
systems would have picked up incoming missiles, and there's nothing there. Hallelujah,
(31:46):
Hand to God. Even forty years after this all happened,
I still almost wet myself just thinking about it. Eventually
the lights blinked out. Satellite number five had malfunctioned. It
detected lashes of light. Yeah, but they weren't the trails
of launch nuclear missiles. They were flashes of light that
came from the sun reflecting off a pillar of clouds.
(32:10):
That's right. The Soviets built a system that almost blew
all of us to Kingdom Come because the dawn's early
light got cozy with some cumulus clouds. Now, had Petrov
done what he was supposed to do, he would have
called up to a Soviet leader who very well could
have given a launch order that was protocol. But instead
(32:33):
he was cool headed, rational. He saved the world by
doing nothing at all. We're very lucky that Petrov held
his line. The Soviets didn't see it that way. He
was reprimanded for failing to log the alarm and discharged
from his position. He spent the rest of his life
in squalor and poverty. Some reward. The truth is the
(32:56):
Soviets weren't the only ones who had these kinds of
false alarms. The Americans did too. Both sides relied on
faulty technology to navigate the nuclear conundrum, that is, mutually
assured destruction. All I know is that we're damn lucky
the sun hit those clouds in September and not two
months later, because two months later the Soviets would hit
(33:18):
their breaking point. NATO was staging a massive military exercise
concluding with a rehearsal for nuclear war called Able Archer three.
Next time on Staffoo, the Soviets watch as NATO practices
a nuclear war. It wasn't a question of what it happened.
(33:41):
It was a question when was it going to happen.
We were preparing to fight armageddon. We were training to
fight the end of the world. The Soviets put their
spies on alert the exercise, so be reiful and the
fate of the world hangs in the balance. And he
(34:02):
had to report to him, Hey, sir, there's some anomalies.
Soviet forces seemed if the air forces I have gone
on a heightened alert. I knew it was Snapp who
is a production of I Heart Radio film Nation Entertainment
and Pacific Electric Picture Company in association with Gilded Audio.
(34:24):
Our lead producers are Sarah Joyner and Elissa Martino. Our
producer is Carl Nellis. Associate producer Tory Smith. It's executive
produced by me Ed Helms, Milan Papelka, Mike Falbo, Andy Chug,
and Whitney Donaldson. This episode was written by Carl Nellis
and Sarah Joyner, with additional writing from Elliott Callen and
Whitney Donaldson. Our senior editor is Jeffrey Lewis. This is
(34:47):
Like Unwise. Olivia Kenny is our production assistant. Our creative
executive is Brett Harris. Additional research and fact checking by
Charles Richter. Engineering and technical direction by Nick Dooley. Original
music and sound designed by Dan Rosato. Additional editing from
Ben Chug. Some archival audio from this episode originally appeared
in Taylor Downing's fantastic film three, The Brink of Apocalypse.
(35:10):
Thank you, Mr Downing for permission to use it. Special
thanks to Alison Cohen and Matt aisen Stat
Ah. The summer of eighty three, across America, teenagers crammed
into theaters to see a new heart throb named Tom
Cruise makes the larger than life. Bad decisions in risky business,
sometimes you gotta say, what the fuck make you move?
It was such a smash hit, in fact, that all
over the country, and I'm speaking from personal experience here,
(00:27):
emergency rooms were flooded with teenagers with broken bones from
trying to replicate the infamous hardwood floor socks slide. It
was a simpler time, wasn't it. It was the summer
that gave us flash dance, those tasty mouth incinerating hot pockets,
(00:49):
and somewhere down under, a baby Chris Hemsworth entered the world.
But you know what they say, good things never last. Soon,
a humid, how sean summer would turn to fall and
things would get a little bit colder. I'd heard it
that seven forty seven and I'm missing, and seven forty
(01:10):
sevens just aren't missing. One story dominates the free world
news media tonight, the killing of two hundred and sixty
nine innocent people. I bought a Korean jumbo jet that
drifted into Soviet territory. The United States reacts with revulsion
to this attack. Loss of life appears to be heavy.
We can see no excuse whatsoever for this appalling act.
(01:35):
The United States is demanding that the Soviet Union explain
why it's shot down the Korean Airline's plane, the death
straight into Soviet airspace. I'm at Helms and this is Snapho,
a podcast about history's greatest screw ups. On season one,
we're telling you the story of a snaffhoo that is gigantic, terrifying,
(01:58):
and observe. It's called Able Archer three, NATO military exercise
that may have almost triggered a real nuclear war. By
(02:31):
this point in the season, we've learned that the Spring
of Three firmly ended anything resembling a good relationship between
the United States and the Soviet Union. In geopolitical technical terms,
we've been downgraded from frenemies to enemies. Ronald Reagan was
casually slinging around evil Empire insults. NATO announced that it
(02:51):
would be deploying medium range Persian two missiles in Europe,
and Reagan got his pet project going s d I
a k A Star Wars. The Soviet Union whipped themselves
into a nuclear frenzy, sending their spies all around town
to confirm what they already believed to be true. That
America was preparing a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union.
(03:13):
But somehow things were about to get even harrier. In
this episode, spirals out of control. In the months leading
up to Able Archer, the Soviets and Americans weren't joyfully
sliding around in socks so much as they were dancing
on a razor's edge. Now that's what I call some
real risky business. It's June three. The front page of
(03:41):
the New York Times reads and drop Off meets with Harriman,
asks for better ties. The Harriman referenced here is Avril Harriman,
a ninety one year old who used to be the U.
S Ambassador to the Soviet Union back when Stalin was
in power and the Soviets were American allies. The article
said Harriman was traveling to Moscow as a private citizen.
(04:02):
He wasn't on official US business, But it also said
that before he left for Moscow, he met with the
Secretary of State George Schultz, and that he took a
State Department translator with him to the meeting. He essentially
went as a official, unofficial envoy. This is Nate Jones,
are able archer sleuth. Nate wanted to know what was
(04:25):
really said in that meeting. I mean, it's not normal
for an elderly retired diplomat to be summoned out of
his lazy boy recliner to speak with the Soviet head
of state. Maybe there was a detailed record of Harriman's
conversation within drop off. Maybe there was some hint about
what was to come. So how could Nate find such
(04:47):
a thing? With a little help from a friend called FOYA?
The Freedom of Information Act, it gives us citizens the
right to request government documents. Believe me when I say
that Nate owns lives and breathe this foyers. He's currently
the FOYA director at the Washington Post. For you, Nate
is his Twitter handle, for God's sake. So the FOIA
(05:12):
process looks like this. The first most important step is
to figure out what records exists that you want to request.
In this case, he figured an important meeting between a
retired diplomat and the head of the Soviet Union. There's
got to be a report on that meeting, right or
like at least some notes. The next step is you
(05:33):
have to figure out which agency holds the document you want,
and there are, depending on how you count, some two
hundred fifty agencies and components in the federal government. So
part of the problem is finding the right one to
file too, and it's tricky. I think once you do
this long enough, you get kind of an intuition. Nate
figured if there was any record of this meeting between
(05:55):
and drop Off and Harriman, it would be in the
State Department. So next you file a FOIA, a simple
form letter that says, under the FOIA, I request this
document held by your agency, and then you wait. The
law says that they're supposed to release the records within
(06:16):
twenty working days. But twenty working days, okay, we're talking
about the government here. I'm sorry. It's just it never
takes twenty days. I mean, hell, it rarely takes twenty months.
It's not for the faint of heart. You have to
be in it for a long battle. Being a FOYA
warrior entails a lot of polite reminders. Hey, Sandra, me again. Um, yeah,
(06:42):
I'm still interested in that top secret document that you're
five years later in releasing. Any update on that or
you know, just let me know whenever you get a chance.
The State Department eventually answered Nate's foya. They had detailed
notes from the Herman meeting, which they released in Nate
totally unredacted. He was thrilled until he read it, and
(07:07):
then he was freaked out because the contents of the conversation.
We're very alarming everyel. Harriman said that and drop of
three times warned of the risk of nuclear war through miscalculation,
and told him explicitly and genuinely that he feared that
their Reagan administration maybe moving towards the dangerous red line
(07:28):
of nuclear war. Three times and drop Off warned of
potential miscalculation. Maybe the guy had a nuclear crystal ball
after all. Basically, and drop Off asked Harriman to tell
Reagan to please tone things down, make sure all this
tension doesn't keep ratcheting up or worse become normalized. He
(07:48):
asked for dialogue before they found themselves on an irreversible
path to the worst possible outcome. Please go back and
make sure that despite our differences, we don't have the
catastrophe of nuclear war. And drop Off said he'd wait
for Reagan's call. Harriman may as well have stayed at
home in the US that week hell, instead of spending
(08:10):
twenty hours on an airplane, he could have gone to
that new blockbuster War Games, which coincidentally came out that weekend,
because Reagan never picked up that phone. Do you think
(08:34):
that one of the reasons why this whole period was
so dangerous was because there were no channels of communication
between the two sides, that the completely different conceptions going on.
This is from an interview that was conducted for the
documentary three The Brink of Apocalypse. In this particular period
(08:57):
Orion as we know, they see to have broken down
and there was no understanding anymore. And that I think
is what made that particular period in the court was
so dangerous. And that's Rhiner Rupp. Agent Dopez, you remember
him from last episode Stasi man infiltrating NATO spying for
(09:19):
the East alongside his wife. Rep recalls the moment when
he could sense the Stasi were getting a bit more nervous.
It became clear to him that the Soviets were preoccupied
with Bryan. They truly believed a surprise nuclear attack was imminent.
I was asked to keep my eyes opened. I also
(09:40):
had systems to relay back information very fast, which was
actually very unusual. It's just not easy for us by
to get messages across the Iron Curtain quickly. You can't
call up your handler and say, hey, boris, guess what
secret documents I perused in my NATO job today. That
would be a surefi our way to get caught. I mean,
(10:01):
come on, no, spies usually handed off messages physically, so
getting a message to the other side of the Iron
Curtain took time days at best. But if NATO was
preparing a nuclear attack, the East wouldn't have days. So
one day in early Rup met with his handlers. They
presented him with a brand new spy tool that would
(10:23):
significantly speed things up. It looked like an electronic calculator,
a classic espionage gadget, an ordinary item rewired to do
something extraordinary. I would write my message down I've liked,
coded into numbers, type the numbers into this sneaky spy
calculator on this little machine would then condense all this
(10:45):
into a very short sound, like a beat. He'd take
this magic calculator to a payphone. Normally telephone payphones were normal.
Kids just roll with it, and then he'd dial a
number for an elderly woman in East Germany. He'd say, Grandma,
I'd like to come visit you, which was a code
(11:05):
phrase that would signal this Grandma to start recording the call.
Rup would hold up the calculator to the phone, put
that thing on the receiver and transmit the coded message. Now,
for anyone surveiling the call, it would just sound like
a crackling in the line. They hang up. Grandmo then
caused the Stazi. They rush over, retrieve the recording and
(11:27):
then decipher it. See the message. The intel is transmitted
in minutes instead of days. So that was in case
of emergencies emergencies. Well, it turns out there would only
be one emergency that was so urgent. Ryner Rupp had
to use this system. It was a day in November
(11:47):
during Exercise Able Archer. But before we get to that
fateful day, the US and the Soviet Union were about
to be further downgraded from enemies to I don't know
what's worse than enemies, arch enemies. I'm gonna workshop that.
I'll get back to you, because in the middle of
the most tense time in the Cold War, Reagan would
(12:10):
make a batshit crazy decision. He was already poking the
bear publicly humiliating the Soviet Union and backing them into
a nuclear corner. But now it's almost like he wanted
to start stabbing the bear. And you don't stab bears,
just kids. You know, this is the kind of thing
you could put in a kid's book about, like standing
(12:32):
up to a bully. This is everyone's favorite nuclear historian
Jeffrey Lewis talking about Reagan and his administration. To them,
the Soviet Union was big and powerful and a bully,
and they were going to stand up. And you know,
at the end of the kids book, the bully backs down.
And so he's looking at the global military posture and
(12:52):
he's trying to imagine ways to restore the strength and
the impressiveness of the United States. In order to do this,
Reagan needed to know what the Soviets were capable of.
And as we've established, he's not going to call and
drop off, of course, not that would be too easy.
So instead he decided to test their abilities and their resolve.
(13:16):
So he gave the order for the military to execute
psychological operations, or psy ops. Here's how these psy ops
went down. A big navy fleet would cross the Pacific
and approach the Soviet Union from the east, and then
day after day, US fighter jets would fly right up
to Russian airspace and then at the last minute turn
(13:39):
around and come back home. And then they do it
again and again and again, but sometimes they would actually
cross the line. One ship shut off its electronics and
approached Soviet waters. Then six navy planes took off. They
actually flew over Russian islands, zipping through Soviet air space.
(14:00):
As one writer put it, they flew up Ivan's nose,
putting the fear of God like literally into the Soviet
The goal of the exercise was twofold. Number one observed
their defenses. Number two just funk with their heads a
little or maybe a lot. If you're the Soviets and
you are seeing aircraft and ships doing unexpected things and
(14:25):
probing your defenses, possibly that's an exercise. Possibly that's a
signal to show you that they that the US means business.
But it also looks a lot like reconnaissance foreign attack.
It looks a lot like a dry run of something
you might do later. It looks like probing defined weakness.
And so again, any deviation from a typical exercise pattern
(14:49):
is going to naturally raise alarm bells because the other
side is like, why are you doing this? So they're
feeling anxious and constantly worried about it. People are kind
of putting it together like in this is like unwise.
It was creating a total panic inside the Soviet Union.
That panic started from the top, but it went all
(15:09):
the way down the chain of command because the Soviet
leaders put out the word the first radar operator who
spotted any planes off the coast was going to get
a nice, fat bonus. One of the sad legacies of
those psy ops is that the Soviet leadership offers financial
rewards to air crews if they shoot down aircraft that
(15:33):
are entering Soviet airspace. In other words, paid ay for
taking down suspicious planes. It was risky business for both sides,
and it wouldn't be long before it caused a disaster.
On September one, flight k A L zero zero seven
departed from New York City, flying west towards Seoul, South Korea.
(15:56):
The same night, the Soviets conducted a missile test. Soviet
radars were active, and the officers that the controls weren't
surprised to see that the US Air Force had sent
a spy plane to keep tabs on them, classic psy ops.
The Soviet radar operators caught it on their scopes, but
the plane was keeping its distance following the normal flight paths.
Nothing to worry about. The Soviet radar operators did what
(16:20):
they always do. They assigned the American spy plane a
little tracking number to keep tabs on it through the night.
But the spy plane wasn't alone, and the hours before dawn,
another object appeared on the radar, flying fast from the
Pacific Ocean. The Russians watched as it approached the spy plane,
and then the two crossed paths. For just a moment,
(16:42):
it was impossible to tell the two aircraft apart on
the radar, but as they went their separate ways, the
Russian radar operators had to make a choice which tracking
label should go with which plane. They hoped, maybe prayed,
that they didn't mix them up. They mixed them up,
and when they did, the radar showed that the air
(17:03):
Force plane was headed straight for Russia. But it wasn't
the air Force plane. It was actually k A L
zero zero seven, a commercial flight with two hundred sixty
nine civilians on board. Soviet pilots scrambled in minutes, Russian
fighter jets were up in the air, catching up to
the plane. For a moment, the Russian pilots were confused.
(17:26):
The plane they were looking at wasn't exactly acting like
a military flight, lights flashing on its outstretched wings. It
was practically a homing beacon. A military plane wouldn't have
any lights on at all. This is Soviet pilot Major Assupovic.
He says, I see it. I'm locked onto the target.
He takes note that the plane resembles a passenger aircraft.
(17:49):
He doesn't believe that it's a spy plane. So then
he tries to call the plane on the radio, demands
that it changed course. He says, the target isn't responding
to the call. ASA Povich is commanded to fire a
warning shot. He does so, still no response. K A
(18:11):
L zero zero seven just kept barreling on in total
radio silence. Then the Soviet generals on the ground made
the call destroy the target. As Povich has his orders,
he fires, I have executed the launch, he says. Missiles
(18:32):
shred the wing and tail of k A L zero
zero seven. It spirals into the ocean, a trail of
fire signaling its fatal dive. As Povich confirms the hit,
the target is destroyed, and just like that, two d
sixty nine innocent people are dead. One story, don't the
(19:00):
it's the Free World news media tonight, the killing of
two hundred and sixty nine innocent people. I bought a
Korean jumber jet that drifted into Soviet territory at the university,
who were just shocked. Zada was very profound. Dad, I
remember talking to my friends about, like, who did that?
Who would shoot down an airliner full of civilians. This
(19:24):
is vet Lana sevran Skaya recalling the confusion of Soviet citizens.
When news broke about the downing of flight k a
L zero zero seven, the Soviets issued the denial that
they did not shoot the airliner and that this is
all American provocation. Um, nobody shot at the liner. We
don't know where it is that went somewhere. Maybe it crashed,
(19:45):
but we had nothing to do with it. Maybe the
plane just crashed. Not exactly believable, but they were desperate
to cover their asses. The United States is demanding that
the Soviet Union explained why it shot down the Korean
Airlines plane the death straight into Soviet airspace. A week later,
the Soviets submitted that they actually shot down the airliner.
(20:08):
It wasn't long before the Soviets realized that they were
not going to get away with this lie, so the
story changed. Yes, they shot down the plane, but it
wasn't actually their fault. As outrage mounts over the downed
Korean airliner and Moscow claims it was a spy plane. Later,
the pilot Asa Povich revealed that Soviet officials forced him
(20:30):
to record a fake radio exchange from a script. The
idea was to replace the original transmission, rewriting the facts
of that night's events, scrubbing the fact that Assapovich did
actually warn his commanders that the plane in question looked
like a passenger aircraft before those commanders ordered him to
shoot it down. They even had him hold an electric
(20:51):
razor up to the mike to try to mimic the
sound of a cockpit. Yep. Definitely what I'm seeing here
as an American warplane, just absolutely covered with webbon and
oh yeah, it's got American flags paid it all over it.
There's an Uncle Sam riding on top. I mean that
this is unmistakable. Oh well, nice, try, guys. Unlucky for them,
the Japanese had intercepted the original transmission that night, and
(21:14):
they had already shared the recording with Ronald Reagan. He
knew the truth, and he was going to make sure
everyone knew what the Soviets had done. Days after the attack,
Reagan addressed the nation from behind the desk in the
Oval Office. They deny the deed, but in their conflicting
and misleading protestations, the Soviets revealed that, yes, shooting down
(21:36):
a plane, even one with hundreds of innocent men, women, children,
and babies, is a part of their normal procedure if
that plane is in what they claim as their airspace.
He said, no way, this could be a mistake. The
Russians knew these were civilians. They didn't care. That's the
communist way. He played recordings of the Soviet radio chatter
(21:56):
to a horrified audience. There is no way a pilot
could mistake this for anything other than a civilian airliner.
It was an act of barbarigin. But here's the thing,
it was a mistake. The shooting was a tragic mistake.
The United States knew practically immediately because they were able
(22:18):
to get the intercepts of the Russian military communications that
the shooting was actually a tragic mistake, that it was
not deliberate, that they actually thought they were shooting at
an American spy plane. So if Reagan knew it was
an accident or at worst a miscalculation, why was he
(22:39):
going on television to say the Soviets killed innocent civilians
on purpose. To the Soviet elite, it felt like they
were doing it intentionally to prepare their own population and
the European populations to a new round of tension, or
maybe a preparation for war, reparation for war. Reagan must
(23:04):
be spinning the Korean air tragedy as propaganda priming the
world for a war against the Soviet Union. Right, it
was the only explanation that made any sense to the
Soviet leaders. They were terrified that a surprise nuclear attack
was eminent. And what do the Russians do when they're scared?
They build a computer. In the military space, the key
(23:32):
issue is reaction time, decision making speed, and also eliminating
the human element from carrying out those decisions. This is
Simon Miles, Assistant Professor at Duke. He says, the Soviet
leaders were increasingly concerned that the US was going to
attack in what's called a decapitating strike, which is exactly
(23:54):
what it sounds like, chopping off the head of the
Soviet Union, killing the leaders in one fell swoop, leeving
nobody to retaliate. The solution hit back, even if the
leaders were dead, with an automatic computerized nuke launching system,
orderly terrifying, basically a strange loving and doomsday device. About
(24:16):
time somebody brought up that old Stanley Kubrick chestnut, the
doomsday machine. With the doomsday machine, what is that? The
device which will destroy old human and animal life on earth? Doctor?
Strange love is fiction? But yeah, the Soviets did build
a system that would do basically the exact same thing.
(24:37):
They called it Perimeter. When we found out about it
in the US, we called it dead hand. Nuclear weapons
are stationed under these massive walls of concrete and rebar
in sort of the far flung portions of the Soviet Union.
But this is a fantastic strange land. How can it
be triggered automatically? That it's a marculd is simple to
(24:59):
do with that. First, a system uses a wide range
of temperature sensors, pressure sensors, seismographs and things like that
which are calibrated basically to read the symptoms of a
nuclear strike. So the way that you get the signal
(25:19):
to them is by launching smaller rockets at them. Are
you following all this? It's insane. If U S nukes
hit the Kremlin in response, Soviets fire a bunch of
little missiles at their own big missiles, which then triggers
a big underground computer to launch a bunch of nuclear
missiles at the US and doomsday. It is another thing
(25:52):
to saying man would do. The dooms machine is designed.
We all know what happens next, which is that either
all human life has wiped out on the planet or
and what is probably a worse outcome, we all become
more people, or rather a very small subset of us
who survive become more people. And so because of the
automated and irrevocable decision making process which rules out human mettling,
(26:15):
the doomsday machine is terrifying. Gee I wish we had
one of the doomsday machines. Stating the way perimeter a
k a dead hand really works is a deeply buried secret,
but Simon Miles believes that it still had some small
human element to it, that it required the Soviet leaders
(26:38):
to turn it on. So a computer wouldn't be launching
nukes entirely on its own, not unless the leadership was
incapacitated and gave it permission to. Plus, it's not clear
whether or not dead Hand was fully operational in but
what we do know is that the Soviet Union fully
believed in fighting the Cold War with technology, even when
(26:59):
that technology was not yet perfected. The system was rushed in.
The Soviets brought it in very quickly. They saw it
as an issue of major national emergency to install a system.
This is Tailor Downing again. He's talking about OCO, which
is another semi functional Soviet system, a network of satellites
hovering above America's missile silos watching for a nuclear launch.
(27:23):
The ECO technology wasn't yet perfected, still a little glitchy,
and in the days immediately after the Korean air tragedy,
while the Soviets were still reeling and only months before
able Archer, a glitch in the ECO system would nudge
the Soviets a little closer to the brink. E September,
(27:47):
Lieutenant Colonel Stuntslav Petrov reported to work at the OCO
Control Center. The control center where all of this information
came in and was interpreted was a place called Sepakov fifteen,
which was a top secret military site about eighty miles
south of Moscow. Petrov was an engineer. He knew computers,
(28:10):
he knew satellites, he knew communications. In fact, he was
the deputy chief of the Department of Military Algorithms Gold
job title Alert. Anyway, Petrov was at his post with
a dozen men under his command. His job was to
monitor the seven Russian satellites as they orbited over American
missile silos, scanning for a launch. If he saw one,
(28:31):
Petrov would immediately alert Soviet leadership at the highest levels.
They would have mere minutes to decide whether to launch
a retaliatory strike. He is sitting in a gallery like
looking down on the main control room, and in front
of him and in front of everybody is a giant
screen with a map on it. The North Pole is
in the center of the map. The United States sort
(28:53):
of spreads out to the top of the map, and
the Soviet Union spreads out across the bottom, kind of
an unusual perspective, but this map was all about tracing
intercontinental ballistic missiles and probably Santa too, but that's top secret.
Paul is perfectly normal. Quiet. Petrov even remembers that he
made himself a cup of tea. His men were at
(29:14):
their stations, and time ticked by until about quarter past
twelve in the morning. Just after midnight, a classon suddenly
starts glaring and a signal A giant signaling red letters
comes up on the screen in front, which is the
Russian word for launch, comes up, flashing launch, Launch, Launch
(29:37):
on screen. It said High Reliability Satellite number five had
detected the rocket flare of an American cruise missile. Petrov hesitated.
All the heads in the room turned to face him.
The men under his command were waiting to see how
he would respond. Petrov knew how the system was supposed
to work. If a nuclear missile had been fired from
(29:57):
the United States in thirty short minutes, a nuclear blast
would decimate Moscow. Every single moment he hesitated was one
moment less that Soviet leaders could sound the alarms, one
moment less for his own family to run to their bunkers.
He'd been part of the setting up of this system,
and we now know that he didn't have that much
(30:18):
confidence in it. He knew it had been rushed, its
installation had been rushed. He knew that lots of corners
have been cut, that the glitches would be worked out
once it was operational. Pedrov orders his men to reset
the system. He gets on the phone to his command
center and says, I believe I have a false alarm.
But then satellite five pinned again. He shut it off,
(30:43):
and then another He shut it off. He waited, and
then it happened again. The screen warned him launched detected.
He lay just says that he felt his legs had
sort of collapsed underneath him. He said it was like
(31:03):
sitting in a in a frying pan. Stanislav had to
decide was his instinct right or was the system right.
In interviews, Stanislav would later say that he didn't know
exactly why he made the call he did. He just
went with his gut and maintained it was a false alarm.
(31:26):
A few minutes passes, he holds his position and by
this point had there been a launch attack other systems.
They Soviets had radar stations on the north pole other
systems would have picked up incoming missiles, and there's nothing there. Hallelujah,
(31:46):
Hand to God. Even forty years after this all happened,
I still almost wet myself just thinking about it. Eventually
the lights blinked out. Satellite number five had malfunctioned. It
detected lashes of light. Yeah, but they weren't the trails
of launch nuclear missiles. They were flashes of light that
came from the sun reflecting off a pillar of clouds.
(32:10):
That's right. The Soviets built a system that almost blew
all of us to Kingdom Come because the dawn's early
light got cozy with some cumulus clouds. Now, had Petrov
done what he was supposed to do, he would have
called up to a Soviet leader who very well could
have given a launch order that was protocol. But instead
(32:33):
he was cool headed, rational. He saved the world by
doing nothing at all. We're very lucky that Petrov held
his line. The Soviets didn't see it that way. He
was reprimanded for failing to log the alarm and discharged
from his position. He spent the rest of his life
in squalor and poverty. Some reward. The truth is the
(32:56):
Soviets weren't the only ones who had these kinds of
false alarms. The Americans did too. Both sides relied on
faulty technology to navigate the nuclear conundrum, that is, mutually
assured destruction. All I know is that we're damn lucky
the sun hit those clouds in September and not two
months later, because two months later the Soviets would hit
(33:18):
their breaking point. NATO was staging a massive military exercise
concluding with a rehearsal for nuclear war called Able Archer three.
Next time on Staffoo, the Soviets watch as NATO practices
a nuclear war. It wasn't a question of what it happened.
(33:41):
It was a question when was it going to happen.
We were preparing to fight armageddon. We were training to
fight the end of the world. The Soviets put their
spies on alert the exercise, so be reiful and the
fate of the world hangs in the balance. And he
(34:02):
had to report to him, Hey, sir, there's some anomalies.
Soviet forces seemed if the air forces I have gone
on a heightened alert. I knew it was Snapp who
is a production of I Heart Radio film Nation Entertainment
and Pacific Electric Picture Company in association with Gilded Audio.
(34:24):
Our lead producers are Sarah Joyner and Elissa Martino. Our
producer is Carl Nellis. Associate producer Tory Smith. It's executive
produced by me Ed Helms, Milan Papelka, Mike Falbo, Andy Chug,
and Whitney Donaldson. This episode was written by Carl Nellis
and Sarah Joyner, with additional writing from Elliott Callen and
Whitney Donaldson. Our senior editor is Jeffrey Lewis. This is
(34:47):
Like Unwise. Olivia Kenny is our production assistant. Our creative
executive is Brett Harris. Additional research and fact checking by
Charles Richter. Engineering and technical direction by Nick Dooley. Original
music and sound designed by Dan Rosato. Additional editing from
Ben Chug. Some archival audio from this episode originally appeared
in Taylor Downing's fantastic film three, The Brink of Apocalypse.
(35:10):
Thank you, Mr Downing for permission to use it. Special
thanks to Alison Cohen and Matt aisen Stat
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