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4. Dancing on a Razor’s Edge

2022/10/26
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SNAFU with Ed Helms

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Ed Helms
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Jeffrey Lewis
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Major Osipovich
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Nate Jones
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Reiner Rupp
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Ronald Reagan
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Simon Miles
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Svetlana Savrinskaya
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Taylor Downing
受访者
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主持著名true crime播客《Crime Junkie》的播音员和创始人。
Topics
播音员:1983年夏天,美苏关系开始恶化,局势变得紧张。 Ed Helms:本集讲述1983年北约军事演习‘能够射手83’,该演习险些引发核战争。1983年春,美苏关系恶化,双方已成为敌人。1983年,美苏关系极度紧张,如同在刀刃上跳舞。 Nate Jones:一位退休外交官与苏联领导人会面,暗示未来可能发生冲突。 受访者:美苏之间缺乏沟通渠道,导致双方认知差异巨大,加剧了危险性。 Reiner Rupp:苏联对里根可能发动突袭核攻击感到担忧。间谍通常通过物理方式传递信息,速度较慢。 Jeffrey Lewis:里根政府试图通过展示美国实力来对抗苏联。 Major Osipovich:苏联飞行员起初认为KAL 007是客机,而非间谍飞机。 Svetlana Savrinskaya:苏联民众对KAL 007事件感到震惊和困惑。 Ronald Reagan:里根谴责苏联故意击落KAL 007。 Simon Miles:苏联领导人担心美国会发动斩首行动。 Taylor Downing:苏联的OKO卫星系统存在缺陷。 斯坦尼斯拉夫·彼得罗夫:OKO系统发出警报,显示美国发射了巡航导弹。彼得罗夫对OKO系统的可靠性表示怀疑。彼得罗夫判断警报为误报,避免了一场潜在的核战争。彼得罗夫因未记录警报而受到处罚。

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The summer of 1983 saw significant cultural and political events that heightened tensions between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, including the release of 'Risky Business' and 'Flashdance', and the escalation of geopolitical tensions.

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For 25 years, Brightview Senior Living Associates have been committed to creating a vibrant culture and delivering exceptional services, making Brightview a great place to work and live. If you're looking for a rewarding opportunity to serve your local community and grow, we want you to join our team. Brightview Senior Living is growing and actively seeking vibrant associates to join our community teams, including directors, healthcare, activities, hospitality, and dining. Apply today at careers.brightviewseniorliving.com. Equal employment opportunities.

Text BVJOBS to 97211 to apply.

The fall season. We don't have to let it happen yet because summer doesn't stop in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. You can still get out and enjoy 60 miles of beaches, eat in the South's newest foodie haven with over 2,000 restaurants, and have endless fun at hundreds of attractions. Hold on to that sweet summer feeling a little longer at the beach. Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Plan your trip at visitmyrtlebeach.com. That's visitmyrtlebeach.com.

Ah, the summer of '83. Across America, teenagers crammed into theaters to see a new heartthrob named Tom Cruise make some larger-than-life bad decisions in risky business. "Sometimes you gotta say what to make you move." It was such a smash hit, in fact, that all over the country — and I'm speaking from personal experience here — emergency rooms were flooded with teenagers with broken bones from trying to replicate the infamous hardwood floor sock slide. "Oh, f---!"

It was a simpler time, wasn't it? It was the summer that gave us Flashdance, those tasty mouth-incinerating Hot Pockets, and somewhere down under, a baby Chris Hemsworth entered the world. But you know what they say, good things never last. Soon, a humid halcyon summer would turn to fall, and things would get a little bit colder. - I heard that a 747 was missing, and 747s just aren't missing.

One story dominates the free world news media tonight: the killing of 269 innocent people aboard 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. The United States is demanding that the Soviet Union explain why it shot down a Korean Airlines plane that had strayed into Soviet airspace.

I'm Ed Helms and this is Snafu, a podcast about history's greatest screw-ups. On season one, we're telling you the story of a snafu that is gigantic, terrifying, and absurd. It's called Able Archer 83, the 1983 NATO military exercise that may have almost triggered a real nuclear war.

By this point in the season, we've learned that the spring of 1983 firmly ended anything resembling a good relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union. In geopolitical-technical terms, we'd been downgraded from frenemies to enemies. Ronald Reagan was casually slinging around evil empire insults. NATO announced that it would be deploying medium-range Persian II missiles in Europe. And Reagan got his pet project going: SDI, aka 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. But somehow, things were about to get even hairier. In this episode, 1983 spirals out of control in the months leading up to "Abel 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 3rd, 1983. The front page of the New York Times reads, "Andrompov meets with Harriman. Asks for better ties." The Harriman referenced here is Avril Harriman, a 91-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. He wasn't on official U.S. business.

But it also said that before he left for Moscow, he met with the Secretary of State, George Shultz, and that he took a State Department translator with him to the meeting. "He essentially went as an official, unofficial envoy." This is Nate Jones, our Able Archer sleuth.

Nate wanted to know what was 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 with Andropov. Maybe there was some hint about what was to come. So how could Nate find such a thing?

with a little help from a friend called FOIA, the Freedom of Information Act. It gives U.S. citizens the right to request government documents. Believe me when I say that Nate Jones lives and breathes FOIAs. He's currently the FOIA director at The Washington Post. FOIA Nate is his Twitter handle, for God's sake. So the FOIA process looks like this.

The first most important step is to figure out what records exist 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 have to figure out which agency holds the document you want.

And there are, depending on how you count, some 250 agencies and components in the federal government. So part of the problem is finding the right one to file to. 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 Andropov 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 20 working days. 20 working days? Okay, we're talking about the government here. I'm sorry, it just, it never takes 20 days. I mean, hell, it rarely takes 20 months. It's not for the faint of heart. You have to be in it for a long battle.

Being a FOIA warrior entails a lot of polite reminders. Hey, Sandra, me again. Yeah, I'm still interested in that top secret document that you're five years late 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 FOIA. They had detailed notes from the Harriman meeting, which they released to Nate, totally unredacted. He was thrilled until he read it.

And then he was freaked out because the contents of the conversation were very alarming. Avril Harriman said that Andropov three times warned of the risk of nuclear war through miscalculation and told him explicitly and genuinely that he feared that the Reagan administration may be moving towards the dangerous red line of nuclear war.

Three times, Andropov warned of potential miscalculation. Maybe the guy had a nuclear crystal ball after all. Basically, Andropov 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 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 Dropoff said he'd wait for Reagan's call. Harriman may as well have stayed home in the U.S. that week. Hell, instead of spending 20 hours on an airplane, he could have gone to that new blockbuster War Games, which coincidentally came out that weekend. "Shall we play a game?" Because Reagan never picked up that phone.

Do you think 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 there's complete different perceptions going on? This is from an interview that was conducted for the documentary 1983: The Brink of Apocalypse. In this particular period of Riyan, as we know,

And that's Reiner Rupp, Agent Topaz. You remember him from last episode, Stasi man infiltrating NATO, spying for the East alongside his wife.

Rupp 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 Ryan. They truly believed a surprise nuclear attack was imminent. I was asked to keep my eyes open. I also had systems to relay back information very fast.

Which was actually very unusual. It's just not easy for a spy 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 surefire way to get caught. I mean, 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 1983, Rupp met with his handlers. They presented him with a brand new spy tool that would 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 would code it into numbers. Type the numbers into this sneaky spy calculator. And this little machine would then condense all this into a very short sound, like a "pfft" or a "beep." He'd take this magic calculator to a payphone. A normal telephone. Payphones were normal in 1983, 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 phrase that would signal this "grandma" to start recording the call. Rupp would hold up the calculator to the phone... Put that thing on the receiver. ...and transmit the coded message. Now, for anyone surveilling the call... It would just sound like a crackling in the line.

They hang up, grandma then calls the Stasi, they rush over, retrieve the recording, and then... Decipher it and see the message. The intel is transmitted in minutes instead of days. So that was in case of emergencies. Emergencies. Well, turns out there would only be one emergency that was so urgent, Reiner Rupp had to use this system. It was a day in November 1983, during Exercise Abel Archer.

But before we get to that fateful day, the U.S. 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 going to workshop that. I'll get back to you. Because in the middle of the most tense time in the Cold War, Reagan would 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. OK, OK, I'm just kidding. You know, this is the kind of thing you could put in a kid's book about, like, standing 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 kid's book, the bully backs down. And so he's looking at the global military posture, and 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. So he gave the order for the military to execute psychological operations or PSYOPs.

Here's how these PSYOPs went down. A big Navy fleet would cross the Pacific and approach the Soviet Union from the east. And then, day after day, U.S. fighter jets would fly right up to Russian airspace. And then, at the last minute, turn around and come back home. And then they'd 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 airspace. As one writer put it, they flew up Ivan's nose. Putting the fear of God, like, literally into the Soviets.

The goal of the exercise was twofold: number one, observe their defenses. Number two, just fuck 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 probing your defenses, possibly that's an exercise, possibly that's a signal to show you that the U.S. means business. But it also looks a lot like reconnaissance for an attack. It looks a lot like a dry run of something you might do later. It looks like probing to find weakness.

And so, again, any deviation from a typical exercise pattern 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, you know, this is like unwise. It was creating a total panic inside the Soviet Union. That panic started from the top, but it went all 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 PSYOPs is that the Soviet leadership offers financial rewards to air crews if they shoot down aircraft that are entering Soviet airspace. In other words, payday for taking down suspicious planes. It was risky business for both sides, and it wouldn't be long before it caused a disaster.

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On September 1, flight KAL-007 departed from New York City flying west towards Seoul, South Korea. The same night, the Soviets conducted a missile test. Soviet radars were active, and the officers at the controls weren't surprised to see that the U.S. Air Force had sent a spy plane to keep tabs on them. Classic PSYOPs. 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 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. In 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, 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 Force plane was headed straight for Russia. But it wasn't the Air Force plane. It was actually KAL 007, a commercial flight with 269 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. 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 Osipovich. He says, I see it, I'm locked onto the target.

He takes note that the plane resembles a passenger aircraft. He doesn't believe that it's a spy plane. So then he tries to call the plane on the radio, demands that it change course. He says the target isn't responding to the call. Osipovich is commanded to fire a warning shot. He does so. Still no response. KAL 007 just kept barreling on in total radio silence. Then,

The Soviet generals on the ground made the call. "KAL 007!" Destroy the target. Osipovich has his orders. He fires. "I have executed the launch," he says. Missiles shred the wing and tail of KAL 007. It spirals into the ocean, a trail of fire signaling its fatal dive. Osipovich confirms the hit. "The target is destroyed."

And just like that, 269 innocent people are dead. One story dominates the free world news media tonight. The killing of 269 innocent people aboard a Korean jumbo jet that drifted into Soviet territory. At the university, we were just shocked. That was very profound. That I remember talking to my friends about, like,

Who did that? Who would shoot down an airliner full of civilians? This is Svetlana Savrinskaya recalling the confusion of Soviet citizens when news broke about the downing of flight KAL 007. The Soviets issued the denial that they did not shoot the airliner, that this is all American provocation. Nobody shot at the liner. We don't know where it is. It went somewhere. Maybe it crashed, 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 explain why it shot down a Korean Airlines plane that had strayed into Soviet airspace. A week later, the Soviets admitted that they actually shot down the airliner. 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, Moscow claims it was a spy plane. Later, the pilot, Osipovich, revealed that Soviet officials forced him 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 Osipovich 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 razor up to the mic to try to mimic the sound of a cockpit,

Yep, definitely what I'm seeing here is an American warplane just absolutely covered with weapons. Oh yeah, it's got American flags painted all over it, there's an Uncle Sam riding on top, I mean, this is unmistakable. Oh well, nice try guys. Unlucky for them, the Japanese had intercepted the original transmission that night, and 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 reveal that, yes, shooting down 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 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 barbarism." 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 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 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. Preparation for war.

Reagan must 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 imminent. And what do the Russians do when they're scared? They build a computer.

In the military space, the key 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 U.S. was going to attack in what's called a decapitating strike, which is exactly what it sounds like. Chopping off the head of the Soviet Union, killing the leaders in one fell swoop, leaving nobody to retaliate. The solution? Hit back even if the leaders were dead with an automatic computerized nuke launching system.

Utterly terrifying. Basically a Strangelovean doomsday device. About time somebody brought up that old Stanley Kubrick chestnut. The doomsday machine. The doomsday machine? What is that? A device which will destroy all human and animal life on Earth.

Dr. Strangelove is fiction, but yeah, the Soviets did build a system that would do basically the exact same thing. They called it perimeter. When we found out about it in the U.S., 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 fantastic, Strangelove. How can it be triggered automatically? Well, it's remarkably simple to do that.

First, the 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 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 U.S. And doomsday.

No, sir. It is not a thing a sane man would do. The Doomsday Machine is designed to... We all know what happens next, which is that either all human life is wiped out on the planet, or, in what is probably a worse outcome, we all become mole people. Or rather, a very small subset of us who survive become mole people. And so, because of the automated and irrevocable decision-making process which rules out human meddling, the Doomsday Machine is terrifying?

Gee, I wish we had one of them doomsday machines, don't you? 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 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 1983. But what we do know is that the Soviet Union fully believed in fighting the Cold War with technology, even when 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 Taylor Downing again. He's talking about OKO, which is another semi-functional Soviet system, a network of satellites hovering above America's missile silos, watching for a nuclear launch.

The Oko 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 Abel Archer, a glitch in the Oko system would nudge the Soviets a little closer to the brink.

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It's September 26, 1983. Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov reported to work at the Oko Control Center. The control center where all of this information came in and was interpreted was at a place called Serpukhov 15, which was a top secret military site about 80 miles south of Moscow.

Petrov was an engineer. He knew computers. He knew satellites. He knew communications. In fact, he was the deputy chief of the Department of Military Algorithms. Cool 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, 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 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. All is perfectly normal, quiet. Petrov even remembers that he made himself a cup of tea. His men were at their stations, and time ticked by. Until about quarter past 12 in the morning, just after midnight, a klaxon suddenly starts blaring.

And a signal, a giant signal in red letters comes up on the screen in front, which is the Russian word for "launch." It comes up flashing, "Launch, launch, launch." 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 the United States, in 30 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 confidence in it. He knew it had been rushed. Its installation had been rushed.

He knew that lots of corners had been cut, that the glitches would be worked out once it was operational. Petrov 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 5 pinged again. He shut it off. And then another. He shut it off. He waited. And then it happened again. The screen warned him. Launch detected.

He later says that he felt his legs had sort of collapsed underneath him. He said it was like sitting 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.

A few minutes passes, he holds his position. And by this point, had there been a launch attack, other systems, the Soviets had radar stations on the North Pole, other systems would have picked up incoming missiles and there's nothing there. Hallelujah. Hand to God, even 40 years after this all happened, I still almost wet myself just thinking about it.

Eventually, the lights blinked out. Satellite number 5 had malfunctioned. It detected flashes of light, yeah, but they weren't the trails of launched nuclear missiles. They were flashes of light that came from the sun reflecting off a pillar of clouds. 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, 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 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 their breaking point.

NATO was staging a massive military exercise, concluding with a rehearsal for nuclear war called Able Archer 83. Next time on Snafu, the Soviets watch as NATO practices a nuclear war. It wasn't a question of would it happen? It was a question of 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. Saying the Americans are now in the middle of their exercise, so be ready for everything. And the fate of the world hangs in the balance. And he had to report to him, hey, sir, there's some anomalies. Soviet forces seem to have, air forces have gone on a heightened alert. I knew it was a dramatic moment.

Snafu is a production of iHeartRadio, Film Nation Entertainment, and Pacific Electric Picture Company in association with Gilded Audio. Our lead producers are Sarah Joyner and Alyssa Martino. Our producer is Carl Nellis, associate producer Tori Smith. It's executive produced by me, Ed Helms, Milan Popelka, Mike Falbo, Andy Chug, and Whitney Donaldson.

This episode was written by Carl Nellis and Sarah Joyner with additional writing from Elliot Kalin and Whitney Donaldson. Our senior editor is Jeffrey Lewis. This is like unwise. Olivia Canney 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 design by Dan Rosato. Additional editing from Ben Chugg.

Some archival audio from this episode originally appeared in Taylor Downing's fantastic film 1983, The Brink of Apocalypse. Thank you, Mr. Downing, for permission to use it. Special thanks to Allison Cohen and Matt Eisenstadt.

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Text BVJOBS to 97211 to apply. This episode is brought to you by FX's The Old Man. The hit show returns starring Jeff Bridges and John Lithgow. The former CIA agent sets off on his most important mission to date, to recover his daughter after she's kidnapped. The stakes get higher and more secrets are uncovered. FX's The Old Man premieres September 12th on FX. Stream on Hulu.