Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
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In the movie biz, there's something called the false defeat. It's a moment towards the end of a movie when things are going really well, too well. The hero's just had a victory and the finish line is in sight. And then a grave challenge presents itself. One that seems so insurmountable that for a brief moment the audience can't even fathom a happy ending.
It's like in Sleepless in Seattle when Annie is rushing to the top of the Empire State Building, but it's too late because Sam and Jonah are already in the elevator on their way down. I'm sorry, ma'am. Empty. It's like in Home Alone when after Kevin absolutely roasts Harry and Marv with all his booby traps, they finally catch up with him. Hiya, pal. We outsmarted you this time.
And it's like when our fearless history sleuth Nate Jones discovered that there was a top secret Piffy Ab report, 100 pages long, all about Abel Archer, and then found out that it would take decades to unseal, and he probably wouldn't see it in his lifetime. We were in big trouble. Nate had waited eight years for his Piffy Ab foyer when he finally faced the music. It just wasn't working. It was never gonna happen. Just kidding!
Another thing about a false defeat, the hero always finds a way. It's never the end of the road, I learned. That a boy, Nate. Filing a FOIA isn't the only way to get a secret document declassified. There's one other path, but it's a real Hail Mary. Called Mandatory Declassification Review. A.K.A. MDR. A.K.A. ICE CAP. Don't ask me why.
IceCap is effectively a side door into the government vaults. It's a small board of one representative of all of the intelligence agencies sitting at the National Archives.
Meaning instead of each agency taking years to approve declassification one by one, all the agencies sit down in a room and review it together at the same time. For a historian, it's kind of like the hottest ticket in town. Yeah, we're talking a hotter ticket than Macho Man Randy Savage versus Hulk Hogan WrestleMania 5 1989.
But there's a catch. If you want to try to get those ice cap tickets, you have to withdraw your FOIAs first. You can't do both, which meant Nate would need to withdraw a FOIA that was already eight years in progress. Then, if Ice Cap declined to review the PIFIAB, he'd have to start all over again. Eight years down the drain. But in the wise words of a risky Tom Cruise... Sometimes you gotta say, what the fuck?
Make your move. So we decided we were going to take a shot and do MDR and go for broke. If Ice Cap can't do it, we're pretty screwed. All right, my listeners, we have arrived at the final chapter. And we've had quite a ride here, haven't we? First, we heard about how Reagan's tough guy speeches, plus a new deployment of super fast earth destroying weapons, fueled the Soviets paranoia to the point that they convinced themselves the U.S. was going to nuke them.
At precisely the same time, NATO was rehearsing a nuclear war. But at the last minute, we were all saved by a couple of spies and Lieutenant General Leonard Perutz, who, in a tense moment, kept a cool head.
But then we learned that there isn't a record of this so-called war scare in Eastern archives, that two of the main eyewitnesses might be kind of unreliable, and that maybe the story of Able Archer 83 is nothing more than a Cold War myth. But one stone remains unturned, the piffy ab. This episode, we take one more shot at the most elusive facet of history, the truth.
I'm Ed Helms, and this is the season finale of Snafu, Able Archer 83. One day in 2015, Nate Jones woke up for work. It was his 32nd birthday. He took his time moseying into the office. Probably about 10 o'clock. I guess the nice thing about being a historian, you can go to work a little late. ♪
It was an ordinary day, save for a few happy birthdays, maybe a cupcake or two. And of course, that $30 check from grandma, which is so nice, but never seemed to keep up with the pace of inflation. Come on, grandma. Nate settled in at his desk, unaware that the best birthday present of all time was about to arrive. Certified delivery. It went through the mail slit, so there's kind of a thud onto the floor.
Nate Jones wondered, what could it be? That was about 100 pages thick with government address, government stamps. So I knew it might be good. So went and looked at it and then saw that it was from Ice Cap. My heart started beating a little bit. Ripped it open and saw the title.
The Soviet Warscare, President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, also known as PIFIAB. I still remember it. It had a bright red stamp, had seven code words. Top secret: Wintel, Nofron, Nocontract, Orcon, Umbra, Gamma. And all seven of them had a line through them, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, meaning that they were no longer classified.
This is it. The report to end all reports. Was Abel Archer a Cold War myth, like some historians believed? A propaganda plot, like the CIA concluded in the 80s? Or a terrifying nuclear near-miss, like Leonard Perutz had insisted for so many decades?
Nate nervously began to flip through the piffy app, hoping, praying that what he was holding was not 100% redacted. And I flipped through and I saw way more text than redactions. And I said, oh my God, this is it. And then I actually read it for the content and I said, oh my God, this is revealing the secrets that I was so curious about. Finally, clarity.
All right, let's break it all down, shall we? The report confirmed a lot of things that Nate had already figured out from other sources, like those planes in East Germany loaded up with nukes,
But there was some new stuff, too. There's details about flights and helicopter flights, probably for surveillance of Abel Archer. The Soviets conducted over 36 reconnaissance flights monitoring Abel Archer. The report said that even though the Soviets monitored Abel Archer every year, this was more reconnaissance than any year before. And apart from these flights, all other Soviet flights were grounded.
Why is that important? The report author speculates that this was in order to have as many aircraft as possible at the ready for combat. "It's said that Soviet military reaction hadn't been like this since World War II." For example, the Soviets stopped production at their tractor factory and started using it to build tanks. The last time they did that was during World War II.
The report also pointed to the Soviets' own nuclear war games as evidence that they genuinely believed NATO might launch a surprise nuclear attack.
The war game they're talking about is called Druzeba, which, according to Google, translates to friendship. That's right, a war game called friendship. Who says the Soviets don't have a sense of humor? Anyway, in the years after Able Archer 83, in 1985, 86, and 87, the Druzeba war game scripts all began the same way.
with NATO launching a surprise nuclear attack during Autumn Forge, which is the NATO exercise that ends with Able Archer. Ultimately, the Able Archer mystery, the mystery of how close we really were to all dying that night in 1983, it really comes down to one question: How genuine was the Soviets' fear that the US was going to attack them? Were they terrified, finger hovering over the button?
Or were they pretending to be terrified? Well, the PIFIAB's take was this. - They concluded that during Naval Archer that US actions and Soviet actions put the world on a hair trigger away from nuclear war. - They said, "Knowing what we know now, it's very possible the Soviets were genuinely afraid that an attack was imminent." And they may have prepared their own nuclear weapons to fire first.
And I agree with his conclusion that the war scare was real and the war scare was dangerous. Nate immediately wrote up a summary. And the next day, he published the declassified piffy ab for all the world to see. I won't say I cried, but my eyes did get a little misty. I've had a lot of good birthdays, but that one might take the cake. Happy birthday, buddy. The end. Cue music. Roll credits.
Snafu is a production of iHeartRadio, Film Nation Entertainment, and Pacific Electric Picture Company. I'm kidding! It's not the end. People, there's always a twist. Nate's Piffy Ab win was supposed to be our hero's victory. Against all odds, the FOIA warrior fought for the Piffy Ab report, and finally, he solved the Able Archer mystery once and for all.
But it turns out this might be a false victory after the false defeat or something like that. Because even though Nate was convinced... Very good analysis, very good use of facts. Not everyone would agree.
You see, in the PIFIAB report's 100 pages, it didn't actually claim to solve the mystery of Abel Archer. It didn't say what definitely happened that night. It used a lot of equivocating phrases like may have and very possible. And the truth is, the conclusions that are drawn from the PIFIAB will differ depending on who's reading it.
The first time I read the PIFIAB report was when the National Security Archive managed to get a copy of it. This is Ben Fisher. He's the CIA historian who brought the Able Archer story into the public eye in the late 90s. The one who convinced the intelligence community at large that Able Archer may have been much more than a propaganda plot.
So you may be surprised to hear that by the time the PIFIAB report came out, Ben had this to say about it. I think that the PIFIAB study was an exaggeration. It's surprising that the guy who changed everyone's mind about Abel Archer would say such a blasphemous thing in light of, you know, everything we've talked about on this show.
The warmongering speeches, the Euromissiles, Operation Ryan, the stories of Oleg Gordievsky and Reiner Rupp, the airplanes on alert with nukes, potentially loaded, missile commanders called in for emergency shifts, not to mention the new details from the PIFIAB report, reconnaissance flights, tank production, and Soviet nuclear war games. But nonetheless... I began to move away from the countdown to Armageddon. The Able Arch alert was the night we almost went to war.
Ben says despite the way it looks, there could be another reasonable explanation for everything. Let's start with the Soviets' military mobilization during Able Archer, shall we? Especially during the Able Archer alert, the Soviets did take certain actions. The strip alert for the aircraft is one thing. They may have put some of their forces on alert. Senior officials may have repaired to their underground bunkers.
How do I interpret this? I think it's what we call signaling. It's sending messages to the other side by doing things rather than saying things. Like, hey, we see you doing your big exercise over there. We're watching and we're ready, so don't try any funny business. It's like the war game equivalent of that, like, I'm watching you thing where you point at your eyes and then point at the other guy's eyes and then point at your eyes again. ♪
Ben says that if the Soviets were truly on the brink, we should be seeing a lot more military activity than we did. Entire armies at the ready, Navy ships, submarines and tanks. Anything smaller? Just signaling. Okay, so what's Ben's take on our two spies? You know, the two men who just so happen to have their own stories about the Soviets getting really freaked out during Able Archer? When it was a flash telegram, it was a super urgent telegram.
Do you remember sending a message during that time? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I remember sending. You know, we always have this problem with people who defect, you know, how much of what they say is true, how much of it's not true, how much of it is slanted in a certain direction.
We reached out to both Gordievsky and Rupp to try to get to the bottom of all this. Oleg Gordievsky was unavailable due to his health, plus the fact that he's in a safe house hiding from Putin's assassins, and we just never heard back from Rainer Rupp. So ultimately, we can't ask them these questions. But for what it's worth, Ben doesn't think Oleg Gordievsky is a liar.
Oleg Goryevsky was absolutely the best Soviet agent of the Cold War. I've met him a couple of times. A good man who risked his life, obviously. I think he reported what he believed and what he saw and what he heard. There's a bigger question of what about the people above him? I mean, to what extent were they serious? ♪
By "they," Ben means the KGB leaders who, under Operation Ryan, commanded their spies in the West to report back any indication of NATO war preparation. You remember that proverbial tic-tac-toe board of death, the batshit crazy nuclear crystal ball. But Ben thinks Operation Ryan may have actually been more down to earth, that the Soviets were just doing due diligence in a period of heightened nuclear tension. Simple.
They were concerned that the balance of power was tipping against them. They wanted to be prepared for if and when that happened. Yeah, they did send messages to their spies saying the adversary could attack us at any moment. But maybe they were just saying that to encourage thorough espionage. Civil unions fall apart. They've got all kinds of problems. You need to keep the morale of your troops up. How do you do this?
Well, you give them a task. And the task is to go out and collect information related to the possibility of a surprise nuclear missile attack on the Soviet Union. OK, this gives people something to do. So back to the central question. Just how close of a call was Abe Larcher? How scared were the Soviets? I'm from Oklahoma. I'm a country boy. And the phrase I use that they were worried, but they weren't shaking in their boots.
Ben believes that there was at least some element of truth to the Soviet fear in 1983. If they weren't afraid at all, they wouldn't have shot down that Korean Airlines flight.
If they weren't afraid at all, they wouldn't have spent billions of dollars building underground bunkers. If they weren't afraid at all, they wouldn't have practiced a nuclear war game that begins with NATO attacking under cover of Autumn Forge. So yeah, they were scared, but they weren't, quote, shaken in their boots. In other words, Ben doesn't think Yuri Andropov was anywhere close to pushing that button. It was a serious matter, but it wasn't almost the end of the world.
That said, Ben admits he doesn't know for sure. Hold on, Ben. That's kind of terrifying.
These intelligence agencies hold the fate of the world in their hands, and you're telling me there's rarely concrete evidence of this or that? It's an art? Intelligent and honest people on both sides of the same issue. People are not bad because they have one point of view, or they're not good because they have another point of view. They're human beings struggling to make sense of what's going on around them.
The Able Archer mystery is riddled with maddening contradictions. As a result, rational people can look at the same information and draw startlingly different conclusions. No matter what's found, I think that the debate will continue. That's history, arguing both sides with the best evidence you have.
In the end, Able Archer is a Rorschach test. In other words, how you see it might just be a reflection of your personality. How optimistic or cynical or fearful you might be. I don't know. If you ask me, no matter how it makes you feel, the fact that intelligent people can still argue about how close we came to Armageddon means we came too damn close.
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.
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While we go on believing that the Soviets are plotting against us and mean us harm, maybe they're scared of us and think we are a threat.
This is an entry from his diary. It was written right around the same time that Reagan first read a detailed report listing the specifics of the Soviet reaction to Abel Archer. And even though his own CIA analysts claimed that there was absolutely nothing to worry about, that these Soviet reactions were all part of a propaganda campaign, that wasn't Reagan's takeaway. To him, it seemed possible that the Soviets were preparing for war on his watch, without his knowing.
In the end, Reagan ignored the advice of his own analysts. He believed that the Able Archer war scare was, quote, very scary. He decides to set up a face-to-face meeting with the new Soviet leader, the first time he would do this in over three years of being president. He writes, and I quote, I have a gut feeling we should do this. No shit. This is what I tell people. The war scare is actually a good news story.
Okay? There's always a room for miscalculation. There's always a room for hubris. There's always a room for mistakes. But what came out of the war scare? Well, President Reagan learned for the first time in his life that the Soviets were scared of us.
And from that, you can draw a straight line to his second term, where he says he wanted to be known not as the man who waged the Cold War, but the man who would end it. And he realized that to do this, he was going to have to deal with the Soviet leaders. He was going to have to talk to them.
This is tomorrow morning's Washington Post. Reagan-Gorbachev signed nuclear missile treaty. As you can see, it is very big news here in the United States. On December 8th, 1987, over four years after Abel Archer, President Reagan and Soviet General Secretary Gorbachev signed the historic Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, aka INF.
This ceremony and the treaty we're signing today are both excellent examples of the rewards of patience. On the Soviet side, over 1,500 deployed warheads will be removed. On our side, our entire complement of Pershing II and ground-launched cruise missiles with some 400 deployed warheads will all be destroyed. It's almost a miracle in some ways because eventually it did lead to the end of the Cold War.
At the signing of the INF, the entire globe heaved a giant sigh of relief. At last, the Cold War was coming to an end. Now, I wish I could say that at this point, we collectively threw aside all of the geopolitical theater that led us to Able Archer 83, that we got smarter, that we approached the nuclear dilemma with a little more humility and a little less trash-talking.
But unfortunately, that's not what happened. Mr. President, Winston Churchill once said that trying to maintain a good relationship with the communists was not unlike trying to woo a crocodile. That when it opened its mouth,
You never could be quite certain whether it was trying to smile or eat you up. This is from an interview with Reagan after news about the INF Treaty broke. You may or may not be surprised to hear that he got a lot of criticism from his own party about being too weak. Americans respect you, love you, and are pulling for you. But they're concerned that perhaps you are going to or already have allowed Gorbachev to eat you and us up.
Certain phrases come to mind at a time like this. Old habits die hard. You can't teach an old dog new tricks. Nancy's astrologer made me do it.
You see, even after Ronald Reagan had his Able Archer epiphany, even after he reached across the Iron Curtain and negotiated a groundbreaking treaty publicly, he wasn't prepared to let go of his tough guy persona. In other words, according to Reagan, the Cold War didn't simply end through a mutual detente. He, the American cowboy, had finally conquered the evil communist villain, and the U.S. had won the Cold War with pure brute strength.
The men in those positions are so confident. Here's Jeffrey Lewis talking about the people in power during the Cold War. They believe that they are like the masters of the universe and that they are in complete and total control and nothing will happen without them allowing it to happen. And that you're this incredibly clever man
Brinksman who will always pull back at the last moment because you know what you're doing because you don't know what the fuck you're doing. Thank you, Jeffrey. And that brings me to my next point where it all went wrong.
It was almost a scolding tone. That's Nate Jones again. He's talking about the PIFIAB. The report chronicled the events leading up to Able Archer in a lot of detail, and it tried to identify all the mistakes that allowed things to get to that point. The idea was maybe if we can find what went wrong, we could avoid, I don't know, accidentally stumbling into a nuclear war moving forward.
And in the end, the authors focus on one root cause of the whole snafu, what they call overconfidence.
Essentially saying that the intelligence did not accurately present the picture of the danger at the time. The report says, look, even with the benefit of hindsight and access to more intel than ever before, we still don't know exactly what happened that night. And back then, the CIA had so much less information, and yet their conclusion was very specific and very confident that it was all propaganda.
But how could they have known that? Well, they simply couldn't have. Not with 100% certainty. "There is too much confidence that a nuclear war can never happen or that the Soviets would never think that." The report says the CIA analysts in the '80s should have entertained all possible explanations. You know, maybe it's propaganda, or maybe the Earth is hurtling towards imminent demise.
Or at the very least, they could have reevaluated as new intel came in. Instead, they just kept doubling down again and again. And Epipheab says that was insanely risky. With something with such catastrophic results, even if the risk is low, it's an unacceptable risk. Exactly. Because it's not just the immediate damage of a nuclear explosion, the tens of millions of people instantaneously incinerated.
After the initial blast, there's a domino effect. A recent study said that if only 3% of today's nuclear stockpile was used in a nuclear exchange, there'd be firestorms, soot rising into the atmosphere to block the sun. We'd plummet into an ice age, lose a majority of our food production, and in the end, an estimated one-third of the world's population would die from starvation.
So yeah, I'd say the stakes are high. But alas, the report couldn't really pinpoint a specific blunder that caused this whole mess. There's no single incident where somebody got definitive proof of an impending nuclear war and then shredded the document or ate it or something. In the end, the errors were psychological. The real mistake? Hubris. Refusing to accept the possibility of being wrong.
We've got to always be very careful to make sure that we're not
just seeing what we want to see or, you know, what we're frightened of seeing or, you know, what we don't want to see, you know, that we're pushing back against it. And that we've always got to kind of question the context. This is Fiona Hill, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. She's a former member of the National Security Council with an expertise in Russian affairs. Fiona says there's a common pitfall in human psychology. It shows up everywhere from marital spats to geopolitical standoffs.
And it's called mirror imaging. Mirror imaging, you know, projecting your own rationale, failing to really understand the perspective of the other and where they're coming from and to really kind of get into, you know, deeper understanding of the mindsets of the individuals. Mirror imaging happens when two parties have trouble understanding each other. So their minds fill in the blanks and they project their own logic onto the other.
Because you try to think about, well, what would I do? What's rational for me? But you're not living in that context and you don't fully understand what the information the other side has at their fingertips. And ultimately, we never fully understand the other's perspective. And we always engage in quite a lot of mirror imaging. Ronald Reagan and his intelligence analysts knew that the United States would never start a nuclear war with the Soviet Union. And they assumed that Yuri Andropov and the rest of the Soviets knew this.
The U.S. officials couldn't conceive of a reality where the Soviets would think anything different. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union had a history of sneak attacking other countries under cover of military exercise. And so to them, this was a completely plausible strategy for the Americans. Reagan and Adropov never spoke in person or on the phone, not once. But they made plenty of assumptions about one another, and those assumptions cascaded into a slew of miscalculations.
The fact of the nuclear age is that you share interests with your enemy and you have to talk to them. And that stuff is just like so unpopular. The idea of talking to your mortal enemy is unthinkable. And to be fair, it's unpopular today.
When people talk about like, well, maybe we should negotiate with the Chinese or maybe we should like strike a deal with the Iranians. There is a huge outcry that we're somehow contaminating ourselves or staining our legacy by talking to these evil people. It is so much easier to just tell them to blow off and build some more bombs. And it is absolutely crazy to me that people who do not want to talk to the enemy are perfectly happy talking.
to live in that kind of arrangement. Like talking to them is like so much less scary. Like they have little cookies and tea and you know, you go see like a cultural thing after the talk. It's nice. It's way less scary than nuclear deterrence. - Me personally, I'm all about the cookies and tea. - The answer is like, stop imagining that you can use force in this way. - Well, at least we learned from it. Right, Jeffrey?
Yeah, there's no learning. I mean, not only is there no learning, there was a refusal to accept it happened at the time. And those of us who were like, you know, you people really almost fucked up. Like, people don't want to hear that.
So the lesson that I draw from it is that people don't learn that we make the same mistake over and over again. It's a tragedy, basically, where we are now. We haven't learned enough from those previous crises. Here's Fiona Hill again. She was in Moscow training as a translator in 1988, just after Reagan and Gorbachev signed the INF Treaty.
She recalls watching as the two heads of state strolled through Red Square in a public display of diplomacy. It was just mind-blowing and just an amazing feeling that the world had turned, the axis of the world had turned. And maybe, maybe, just maybe, after these war scares and all of this misunderstanding of each other, we were going to go off into a different path. Well, we did for a while, but then not so much. ♪
The INF Treaty that both leaders signed that year reduced the world's nuclear stockpile by thousands. But today, there are still more than 12,000 nuclear weapons. Some big, some small, some just right. No, I'm kidding. None of them are just right. They're all terrifying. And still plenty enough to destroy the world. Then, in 2019, the United States withdrew from the INF Treaty altogether.
We kept hoping that we would find some golden key to arms control that might even lead to nuclear zero.
But we obviously haven't achieved that because we've had proliferation of nuclear weapons. It's not just China, the United States, Russia, France and the UK, but we've got Pakistan and India. We've got lots of others we think have nuclear weapons, but we don't say it openly that we kind of know they do. And we've got loads of others who aspire to have nuclear weapons. You know, Iran, North Korea, where we can easily see that
What they've taken away from all of these lessons from the past is that you can blackmail other countries with nuclear weapons, that you can force people to do things that they don't want to do, or you can force them to reckon with you, even as they otherwise might ignore you in world affairs.
So, you know, we're back to kind of the Euromissile Crisis feeling, where we're all sort of sitting thinking, how did we get here? How did we get to this point? We kind of obviously totally misjudged and misunderstood and have been really poor at communicating. And we've got all this more information than we had before. And yet we've done it again.
And so there's no learning, you know? And it makes me crazy because people are like, well, we got through that crisis. Nobody was killed. Like, other than the airliner full of dead people, like, you people are gambling with normal people's lives. And the reason I find Able Archer so interesting is precisely because there are other moments where you watch crises kind of start to spiral out of control and you see all the same dynamics at play. We now believe that only force...
We'll make him leave. We can't let the world's worst leaders blackmail, threaten. We would be prepared to act without delay, diplomacy, or wonder war just by walking away from it. That's victory for the other side. With the blood of our citizens.
And the strength of our worry tonight about China's new missile capability. President Trump writing, will someone from his depleted and food starved regime please inform him that I, too, have a nuclear button? But it is a much bigger and more powerful one than his. And my button. Why don't we use them? Trump.
projected strength. Those weapons of mass destruction have got to be somewhere. Putin parading his nuclear arsenal this past week. Ominous nuclear language. Is President Putin threatening nuclear war? This is not a bluff. And those who try to blackmail us with nuclear weapons should know that the prevailing winds can turn in their direction.
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.
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love my Hyundai. Now, one of my favorite aspects is Hyundai's fun to drive lineup. I love these cars. I mean, these EVs are tech infused with standard safety features like highway driving assist and blind spot collision warning. Being a mom, these safety features are extremely important to me. And what's better than knowing my family is safe in our vehicle while also knowing I look stylish at the same time?
Kind of nothing. You also get America's best warranty with a 10-year, 100,000-mile limited electric battery warranty. Hyundai's EV lineup has everything you've been yearning for in your next or your first EV, boldly captivating your senses.
Learn more about Hyundai EVs at HyundaiUSA.com. Call 562-314-4603 for complete details. America's best warranty claim based on total package of warranty programs. See dealer for limited warranty details. See your Hyundai dealer for further details and limitations.
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It's just way too complicated a problem for us to be cleanly and easily dealing with. This is John Battam.
I'm John Battam. I'm the director of War Games. That's right, my friends. We're going to bring it all home right where we began, with the movie that started it all. At least for me. Sir, we got a problem. WAPR is not letting me log back on. I can't get in to stand on the missiles. In the movie War Games, the plot comes to a climax when WAPR, that's the U.S. Department of Defense's supercomputer, goes rogue and is about to start launching nuclear weapons at the Soviet Union.
Well, can't they get in and stop it? No, they can't. Time is running out. At NORAD, buried deep inside Cheyenne Mountain, the entire U.S. Nuclear Command is running around like chickens with their heads cut off, trying to figure out how to stop the computer from starting a nuclear war. But none of the adults in the room can fix it. The world's only hope? The kid. David Lightman, played by National Treasure Matthew Broderick. Well, what are we going to do? I don't know. Do you?
I told you not to start playing games with that thing. It's games. Games! Try it. Wants to play a game, then play it.
See, Whopper uses games to teach itself. Chess, poker, you name it. And David Lightman knows that the only hope in saving humanity is to somehow teach the computer to understand what mutually assured destruction really means. And eventually he does come up with a solution that, you know, kind of stymies the computer, which is playing tic-tac-toe. Tic-tac-toe.
Tic-Tac-Toe, one of the simplest games in the universe. Put X in the center square. No. As Whopper narrows in on the launch codes, it begins playing Tic-Tac-Toe. And we've all played it, so you know what happens next. Game after game ends in a tie. There's no way you can win that game. I know that. It doesn't. It hasn't learned.
What David Lightman knows that the supercomputer does not is that tic-tac-toe is a futile game. There's no point in playing it at all because there's no winning. "It's a doing." "It's learning." That's when the computer realizes, just like tic-tac-toe, when it comes to nuclear war, every scenario ends the same way: in a tie. Everyone is equally dead. "The only winning move is not to play."
The only winning move is not to play. It's such an obvious answer, but one that all the big adult brains running around NORAD couldn't possibly consider. Because being buried in nuclear strategy and tactics for so many years had blinded them to a simple truth found in a rudimentary children's game.
So how close were we to all dying in November of 1983? Well, my dear listeners, there are only a few people who can definitively answer that question once and for all.
The Soviet leaders themselves. And their answers are forever buried, along with them, in the Kremlin wall necropolis. So unless the CIA lets me borrow their time machine and their mind-reading device, we're just never going to know exactly how close Andropov was to pushing the button that night. But ultimately, yeah, we don't know. Unfortunately for the people that want to know how close was the finger to the button, we won't know.
The truth: that elusive Holy Grail may be buried in Moscow for good. But there's no denying: the Able Archer story is still absolutely absurd.
It is absurd that it's even remotely possible we all almost perished in an unintentional nuclear war in 1983, and that the actions of just a few people could have been our saving grace. People like Stanislav Petrov and Oleg Gordievsky and Reiner Rupp, who in their own small ways intervened. And Leonard Perutz, who after hearing that the Soviets were going on alert, decided to do nothing, decided not to play the game.
If it wasn't for these people, we might all be tiny radioactive particles floating through a barren, scorched atmosphere. Their actions are inspiring, sure. But it's not exactly hopeful, is it?
Because it reinforces an unacceptable nuclear reality, one where the fate of humanity can sometimes depend on a few people trying to thwart disaster while the leaders of the world double down on public trash-talking, attempted mind-reading, and shows of strength in lieu of diplomacy.
So where the hell does this leave us? Well, maybe not all is lost. Maybe we can begin to approach the nuclear dilemma with a little humility. Maybe we don't have to accept the status quo. Leonard Perutz didn't accept it when, after Abel Archer, he wouldn't stay quiet about the intelligence failures he believed led us to the brink. Nate Jones didn't accept it when he dedicated his life to bringing Abel Archer out of obscurity and into the light.
And by the way, Nate Jones is still at it. I'm still voiding footnotes to go even deeper. I think there's still more stuff to find. Soldier on, Nate Jones. You and those like you represent the real hope in this mess. Maybe, just maybe, through your tireless efforts, the situation normal won't always be fucked up. I don't know, listener, when it's all said and done, I think the real hero here is me.
I don't know how, and I don't know why. Somehow, it just feels right. So, you're welcome, everyone. Snafu is a production of iHeartRadio, Film Nation Entertainment, and Pacific Electric Picture Company, in association with Gilded Audio. It's executive produced by me, Ed Helms, Milan Popelka, Mike Falbo, Andy Chug, and Whitney Donaldson. Our lead producers are Sarah Joyner and Alyssa Martino. Our producer is Carl Nellis, associate producer, Tori Smith.
This episode was written by Sarah Joyner with additional writing from me, Elliot Kalin, and Whitney Donaldson. Our senior editor is Jeffrey Lewis. Like they have little cookies and tea and, you know, it's nice. 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. 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.