Introducing: SNAFU with Ed Helms - podcast episode cover

Introducing: SNAFU with Ed Helms

Sep 27, 20223 min
--:--
--:--
Listen in podcast apps:

Episode description

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Transcript

Speaker 1

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

The temperature of a UK fabo is twenty million degrees.

Speaker 1

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,

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 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

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

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 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 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 wherever the hell you get your podcasts.

Speaker 2

I mean, it is a miracle. We did not all die like it's just goofy

Transcript source: Provided by creator in RSS feed: download file