Introducing: SNAFU with Ed Helms

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Man. I loved the eighties arcade games, fanny packs, acid
washed genes, Jane Fonda doing jazzer size. I mean, what's
not to like smiling and feeling so fine? Oh yeah,
the looming threat of nuclear war.

Speaker 2 (00:18):
The temperature of a UK fabo is twenty million degrees.

Speaker 1 (00:22):
Cooh boy, situation called We're all fucked ump Yep. The
nineteen eighties weren't all Robotron and Rube's cubes. There was
also that out of control nuclear arms race between the
United States and the Soviet Union, and a lot of
people spent the eighties deeply existentially terrified of nuclear war,

(00:46):
including me. But what most people don't know is, in
November of nineteen eighty three, the United States and the
Soviet Union almost started an actual nuclear war entirely by accident,
and none of us knew anything about it, which makes

(01:07):
me think of a story. I'm at Helms and I'm
hosting a new podcast called Snapfu. It's a show about gaffes,
the disasters, history's greatest screw ups. On season one of Snaffo,
the story of Able Archer eighty three, the NATO military
exercise that nearly triggered World War three, you know.

Speaker 2 (01:26):
This is more like two drunks in a bar circling
one another. And it's not so much that anybody would
deliberately choose to start the war. It's just that things
would spiral out of control. This is a true.

Speaker 1 (01:39):
Story about what really happens in the highest echelons of power, deception, espionage,
political miscalculation, all while the fate of the human race
hangs in the balance. It's a story with an a
list cast, a Hollywood actor turned president. It did give
me a real understanding of the communist menace. A paranoid

(02:01):
Soviet dictator, Ohmadica he's preparing a sudden cow consa two
trees and his spies totally immersed in this world of
espionage and surveillance. And a dauntless sleuth who wanted to
get to the bottom of it all. Hell out the folder.
Open it up, and it has this green card that
says every historian's nightmare classified. So what's the real story

(02:26):
of Able Archer eighty three that lies buried in government archives?
Is it just a story of an almost armageddon? Or
is it a mind game all its own? To find
out how close we were to doomsday and why most
of us have no idea it even happened. Subscribe to Snapo,
premiering October fifth, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or

(02:50):
wherever the hell you get your podcasts.

Speaker 2 (02:53):
I mean, it is a miracle. We did not all
die like it's just goofy