S1E1: Not All Fun and WarGames

Hey there, it's your host ed helms.

Here.

Real quick, before we dive into this episode, I wanted to remind you that my brand new book is coming out on April twenty ninth. It's called Snaffo, The Definitive Guide to History's Greatest screw Ups, and you can pre order it right now at snafudashbook dot com. Trust me, if you like this show, you're gonna love this book. It's got all the wild disasters spectacular face plants we just couldn't squeeze into this podcast. And here's the kicker. I am also going on tour to celebrate that's right.

Great to meet you, Great to meet you too.

I'm ed by the way. Yeah that's Matthew Broadrick. He's a national treasure and also the star of Wargames, a movie about an almost accidental nuclear war that I watched maybe one hundred times as a kid, came out in nineteen eighty three, and it was Matthew's breakout role.

The fact that I had gotten the lead of a you know, studio movie was incredible, Yeah, absolutely incredible.

His character was a hacker, a tech genius. David Lightman was a moister at computer games, and Matthew was great in it. I mean, obviously, right, he's an incredible actor.

But wait, now do I adjust my volume? Can you speak?

You guys talking talking talking? Say?

Gee?

No, nodding because I want to now pretend that it's working. Okay, Yeah, so it's perfect.

Matthew Broderick is clearly not a tech genius in real life, but that's just further proof what a great actor he is. So in War Games, teenage hacker David Leitman tries to impress a girl at school, Jennifer, played by another eighties icon, Ali Sheety. Along the way, he accidentally hacks into a supercomputer that the US is using to game out World War three scenarios, hence wargamell.

How about global thermallear.

It gets misinterpreted as a real nuclear attack and almost starts World War three?

Launch detiction.

We have a story launch detction.

Terrifying.

Yeah, I am not charmed by that. I am terrified by that. When I was nine years old, wargames really captured my imagination in the sense that I became utterly convinced it was real. I even had a breakdown at summer camp because of it. All the other kids were having a grand old time. Meanwhile, I was just terrified that at any moment we'd all die in a fiery nuclear armageddon. Yeah, I guess I was a bit of a wet blanket while everyone else was just trying to

Right.

Eventually we all grow up and realize that movies aren't real. There are no accidental nuclear wars. Right, Well, my friends, imagine my surprise when I learned that the premise of Wargames was fucking real. Yeah, it came true only months after the movie's release. That's right. As it turns out, in nineteen eighty three, a real life military exercise, a wargame, almost started an actual nuclear war, just like Wargames. This

Wow, that's an amazing story.

I I'm surprised.

I don't know about that, but I don't think I do know about it.

Too bad they don't give out an oscar for best nuclear war prediction. The Wargames screenwriters would have been a shoe in. It's like kind of a perfect screenplay. I don't think they were too far off. When I first heard the story of Abel Archer eighty three, let's just

It's just this whole game of deception and count deception of who can you trust?

Oh wait, he's preparing a sudden.

I heard a young father saying, I love my little girls more than anything, and I would rather see my little girls die now than have them grow up under communism.

Really, for the first time in my life, I felt like there could be 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.

That's what we're.

Told, That's what we believed.

We were training to fight the end of the world.

It was a week just like every other week. Abral Archer eighty three was not anything out of the ordinary.

This is Jean Gay. He was a participant in the nineteen Able Archer wargame. Gene like a lot of men who participated in Able Archer that year recall it the same way, which is to say, they don't really recall much at all.

Nothing to me from that exercise at the time. You know, jumped out.

That's Colonel Spike Calendar and he says the same thing Nope, nothing of note to these men. That week in early November nineteen eighty three was just a week like any other week, just another week of standard military exercises, practicing how to fight the end of the world as one does.

The whole purpose of able Archer was the emphasis on the practice of the nuclear weapons release for caizures.

Able Archer was a NATO exercise in November of nineteen eighty three. The Able Archer players sat in a bunker in Belgium practicing how if it came to it, they'd fight a nuclear war against the Soviet Union. It's like a soccer team doing drills, but instead of training for a game, they're training for armageddon, which, like a soccer game, you can't use your hands because they got blown off.

The whole idea was if you ever had to do it, you know you didn't want to do it for the first time.

When Spike says do it, he's referring to the task of launching planet destroying weapons. It's an example of how military professionals are weirdly cavalier when they're talking about their work. It's kind of shocking how something so gnarly can sound so routine.

How do you look at what the requirements truly are, you know, for those weapons systems and the numbers of them. So it would be a matter of being counting and in some respects if you have a Soviet division, what is the number of weapons that might be required to reduce the effectiveness of that division to where it was no longer military capable?

See what I mean? My point is this, to men like Gene and Spike, there was nothing exceptional about gaming out of fictional war during a b large It was routine. But a few decades later Gene and Spike would learn that Able Archer eighty three was anything but routine.

I was in my own little world. I hate to use the word oblivious, but I've used that word before.

It was many years later they found out about it, that anything other than the exercise took place in the real world situation that occurred at during that time. I was not aware of that until years afterwards.

Yeah, I never heard of anything more about this exercise until what twenty or twenty five years later.

What Gene and Spike would come to learn is that while they were sitting in their bunker back in nineteen eighty three rehearsing the end of the world missiles to strike targets in Moscow. How the Soviets were listening, and they seemed to be convinced it was not a rehearsal at all. Soviet missile commanders were placed on high a. Soviet leaders retreated to their bunkers, fingers hovering over the proverbial big red button, and NATO had no idea.

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

This is Jeffrey Lewis. He's an expert on nuclear history and geopolitics, and he finds the whole story of Able Archer, what he calls the war Scare to be sort of funny.

Almost all of the war scare is totally self inflicted, which makes it like really darkly comic.

I have to agree. There's an old saying that tragedy plus time equals comedy. Well, if that's true, then a story about a nuclear near miss plus about forty years should be fucking hilarious.

Because if you step back, it sounds crazy, right, It sounds crazy that we could have had a serious nuclear crisis that nobody knew about. Like that's nuts.

It is nuts. Jeffrey because it's not just that able archer participants like Gene and Spike didn't know that a newnuclear crisis was unfolding under their noses. No one knew. Let that sink in for a second. If it's possible that a nuclear crisis could unfold right under our noses, that we were in danger without knowing it, does that mean it's still possible? All right, let's set the stage a little bit. It's the nineteen eighties. There was certainly

The heat this bomb on the zekes just as fast as you can.

Evening chimed in, I love that shit personally, I love that song, and I just love that Sting threw his hat right in the middle of an international conflict. Anyway, when it comes to examples of nuclear anxiety in nineteen eighty three pop culture, there's actually one that stands above all the rest. It was just a made for TV movie, but it became a cultural event and it would actually play a role in our Cold War mystery.

It was a movie like no other movie, and it had a profound impact on New York.

That's story.

Next, we'll hear from people who like you watch the Ultimate Disaster.

Movie the day after, a movie that would scare the living shit out of America.

More than seven hundred people packed Riverside Church tonight to watch the day after.

Many said they came here because they were afraid to watch it alone.

Everyone, and by everyone, I mean a hundred million people, almost half the US population at the time, gathered around their TVs on the evening of November twentieth, nineteen eighty three, and tuned into ABC to watch it.

Before the movie begins, I would like to caution parents about the graphic depiction of nuclear explosions and then devastating effects in a moment.

The day after that, gather around kids, time to fill your innocent little heads with deep, reverberating drama. Past the popcorn.

I tried to do my part in making people keenly aware of what the real consequences would be.

This is Ed Hume, he wrote the day after. The film is set at the border of Kansas and Missouri. That's where the US nuclear missile silos are. The main characters are average townspeople in the American heartland.

A bunch of people living in the Midwest doing ordinary things.

At first, the whole nuclear war thing isn't really front and center. It just kind of lurks in the periphery. But even as it creeps in, the characters can't accept their fate.

What was that. There's one saying where a woman is so in denial that she's running around making beds as they know that missiles are being launched.

Don't bother with the.

Bed just now, even we've got to get down below. Listen, those missiles have all gone off.

Oh my gosh, Wow, she really wants to make those beds.

And then it happens.

It happens, the heartland is evaporated. The rest of the film is stomach churning. To put it lightly, It showed what a nuclear war would actually look like. Flashes of light, lives instantaneously incinerated. But the whole explosion part isn't the worst of it, because you get to see what happens the day after nuclear fallout, radiation, poisoning, blistering skin and dying organs, piles of bodies and rubble, looting, hoarding, and

The general pabla, they were pardon my language, what they were scared of shutless.

I for one, felt that it was just devastating.

Like every horror story you've ever read. Roamed to one story.

We got a glimpse of what is really at stake in a nuclear war.

I just want to go die, went to blast and not have to live and start all over again.

Oh okay, didn't heed the parental advisory. This is how that clip makes me feel. Okay. So yeah, in nineteen eighty three, there was a general sense of nuclear doom. Hell, it's why I had a mental break down at summer camp. But we didn't know that there was a specific crisis to be afraid of. We didn't know that we might have almost had a nuclear war. During NATO's annual able archer exercise. So then the question becomes why.

Not there is and you probably need it. About now, there is some good news.

This is Ted Copple from Nightline. He's hosting a live panel about the day after right after the movie aired.

If you can take a quick look out the window, it's all still there.

Wow, deeply reassuring Ted. Anyway, Celebrity scientist Carl Sagan was there, telling an already nauseous audience that he thought the film's portrayal of nuclear war was actually not as bad as it would be if it really happened. Yeh boy. Henry Kissinger was there too, probably talking about feasting on the souls of innocent children or something, but before the panel began.

Joining us live from his home in suburban Washington is the Secretary of State, mister George Schultz.

Ted Copple brings out US Secretary of State George Schultz, President Reagan's right hand man. He was a serious man, loyal to the president, famously bragged about enjoying staring contests with the Soviets, waiting for them to blink, comforting and so. Mere minutes after the American public watched this horrifying film, hearts still in their stomachs. The man who would be standing next to the button pusher in chief answers the burning question at the front of every viewer's mind.

The future as we've just viewed it tonight. Is that the future as it will be, or only the future as it may be?

Neither that is not the future at all. The film is a vivid and dramatic portrayal of the fact that nuclear war is simply not acceptable, and that fact and the realization of it has been the policy of the United States for decades now, the successful policy of the United States.

If you watch the clip, George Schultz is shifty as hell. His eyes keep flickering just to the right of the camera and then back again, like he's reading Q cards. He looks scared. Ted Season's journalist that he is smells a little bullshit, he presses George.

Mister Schultz, that is the answer of a Secretary of State to a reporter. And that's fair enough, because that's what you and I, respectively are. But what would a George Schultz who is talking to a member of his family say in response to the same question, same answer, Well, I would give the same answer.

I'll tell you why I think George is nervous. It's because eleven days before this interview able Archer eighty three could have caused a nuclear war. A man in Schultz's position would have known about that, right. Surely he was shitting his slacks for the past eleven days trying to figure out how such a colossal fuck up could have happened. Now would be a great time to come clean, to say, yeah, we're gonna shake things up with our nuclear policy, because

Scare, it's a very different kind of crisis because it's so clumsy.

Here's Jeffrey Lewis again.

You know, 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.

The two drunks here are, of course, the United States and the Soviet Union their drink bombs. And I'm not talking Jaeger. Here's the part of the show where I give you a crash course on the Cold War. Get out your pencils, kids, Welcome to Arms Race one oh one.

An ADAM bomb destroys or injures in three ways by blast, heat, and radioactivity.

The og atomic bomb was invented by the Americans in the forties, you know, the one Hiroshima, Nagasaki. It only took the Soviets five years to figure it out for themselves, and once they had the bomb too, it began a decades long race for bigger and better death machines.

The fun thing about the Cold War is that there were a huge variety of nuclear weapons and nuclear yields.

Jeffrey and I have very different definitions of fun.

So pretty soon after the end of World War II, the United States developed a much more powerful nuclear weapon than even the sea the destroyers that we saw dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and these were called therma nuclear weapons.

This is the early fifties. A thermonuclear weapon uses the radiation from the initial blast to ignite an even bigger blast, a bomb within a bomb. The result is a warhead that's about the same size as the atom bomb, but way more destructive, like a million tons of explosive power instead of ten thousand. In other words, it was economical a bigger catastrophe for a smaller cost. You can't argue with savings like that.

Once the United States, followed by other countries, developed therm nuclear weapons, there was no limit to how large a nuclear weapon one could make. The freeze that came to be used about the amount of nuclear destructive power was overkill because each side was worried that the other side would strike them first, so they needed to have backups

Back in the sixties, the US had enough nuclear weapons to destroy the Soviet Union fifty times over, you know, just in case some little cockroach escaped the first forty nine blasts, which set the table quite nicely for this.

Good evening, my fellow citizens.

That's John F. Kennedy back in nineteen sixty two telling the world in a televised speech from the White House that a nuclear crisis was unfolding in Cuba. US biplanes had discovered that the Soviet Union was building nuclear missile sites on the Caribbean island nation, a little too close to the United States for comfort.

The purpose of these bases can be none other than to provide a nuclear strike capability against the Western Hemisphere.

The US Navy set up a blockade, trying to prevent any Soviet ships from bringing their nukes anywhere near the island. The Soviet Chips approached the blockade nuclear weapons in tow It was a full fledged nuclear standoff. The news coverage of the Cuban missile crisis was impossible to ignore. A major world event became television drama. For thirteen days, Americans sat glued to their televisions until finally it was over.

Under aerial surveillance, the missiles that had threatened the United States went back where they came from.

Everyone breathed a sigh of Marlborough smoke filled relief. And did we learn our lesson? Did we scale down operations at the bomb factory and literally cool our jets? No, No, my dear listener, of course we didn't. In the late sixties and seventies, the US would build more weapons. The Soviets would build a lot more weapons, We'd get rid of some and then build some more. By the early nineteen eighties, our nuclear fruit basket contained big nukes, small nukes, extremely precise nukes.

And so the question naturally arises, like, why the hell did we do that? And I think the answer lies in the fact that we didn't have a better idea. I'm just going to build as many nuclear weapons as I can to keep the bad guys away from me. How am I going to think about it any more than that? And that's a very powerful, simple idea, wrong

And that just about sums up that successful nuclear policy George Schultz was talking about earlier.

The successful policy of the United States.

Each side made a gamble that if they could just build enough weapons, their adversary wouldn't dare test them, so they didn't need diplomacy. They were bound by the contract of mutually assured destruction. It was a horrific game of nuclear chicken, and it would lead right to Able Archer eighty three, which some say is the closest we came to a nuclear war since the Cuban Missile crisis. But here's the thing. Able Archer isn't anything like the Cuban

If the Reagan administration nearly sleepwalked into a nuclear war, that suggests those people shouldn't be let anywhere near positions of power. And if the intelligence community the fact that the Reagan administration was sleepwalking toward nuclear war, that suggests we need different analysts.

If all that's true, then it makes perfect sense the Reagan administration would not want to leak a snaffoo this massive, so the public would never hear about Abel Archer eighty three. Instead, it would become nothing more than a Cold War rumor, a myth only whispered about in the back hallways of the Pentagon. And it might have stayed that way if it wasn't for Nate Jones.

Walking through.

This is the vault.

It really looks like the warehouse at the end of Indiana. Jones of just boxes, boxes, boxes. Sometimes I used to come here and just do a little bit of work because the atmosphere of thousands of boxes looming over and me helps me work.

This is Nate Jones, an historian. Actually he's really more of a sleuth, like a history detective who has dedicated almost twenty years of his career to you uncovering what the hell really happened during Able Archer eighty three.

My desk is overrun with Foyer requests. It looks like at least ten thousand pages of Foyer requests and responses. So it's definitely a tree unfriendly business. But the government works on paper, so we got to work on paper.

This FOYA that Nate is talking about, like everything in government, it's an acronym. It stands for the Freedom of Information Act. And if you can't tell it has dominated his life for the past decade. For ten years, Nate worked at the National Security Archive, where he and his colleagues used the Freedom of Information Act to pry classified information about able Archer eighty three out of the government's clause. I like to picture them wrestling with a very stubborn bald eagle.

And he said, I really think this is an unsolved mystery of the Cold War. And I was pretty hooked right there.

Like me, Nate heard about the mysterious able Archer eighty three story and asked himself, why doesn't anyone know about it? If we narrowly escaped nuclear armageddon, shouldn't there be a national holiday or something? We should have Able Archer Day, a day that commemorates our wonderful avoidance of nuclear annihilation. I'm not just saying this because I want an extra Monday off work, not dying that's caused for celebration. All

We're not exactly sure, but it was a very tense situation and we were worried.

There was only one primary source available that even mentioned Able Archer eighty three by name, a CIA document written shortly after it happened.

So here we have so this is implications of recent Soviet military political activities, and this is the first CIA report on what happened during the war scand what happened during n Able Archer.

This document is a crucial piece of the Able Archer puzzle because it reveals what the CIA thought about the crisis at the time, and it provides a hint as to why the public wouldn't learn about it until decades later. Classic CIA bullshit. I mean, they still haven't told us why they killed Kennedy. It was written in May of nineteen eighty four, six months after Able Archer, and it says, yeah, during the Able Archer eighty three exercise, it sort of looked like the Soviets were getting battle.

Ready, and it listed all these alarming things. But it came to the conclusion that quote, we believe strongly that Soviet actions are not inspired and Soviet leaders do not perceive a genuine danger of imminent conflict or confrontation with the United States.

The report says, yeah, sure it looks scary, but in hindsight, we don't think the Soviets were actually gonna do anything.

So the conclusion was that the war scare is not real.

That's right. The reason nobody knows about the Able Archer war scare is because for decades the CIA would deny that anything dangerous happened during that exercise, but rumors still swirled in the intelligence community. Maybe there was more to the story, which you've probably guessed because there's a bunch more episodes left in this podcast. Nate Jones, fresh out of college, had a hunch that he could piece together the truth about Able Archer given access to the right records.

We couldn't really tell a good history without the records, and we couldn't get the good records without a fight against the government.

Oh it's on now, might be a good time to introduce another main character.

I don't know whether you know it or not, but I have a new hobby. I am collecting stories.

Ronald Wilson Reagan, the man knew the power of a good anecdote. I mean, the guy could really spin a yarn.

But I remember the story of a fellow, which makes me think of a story. Everything makes me think of a story. I wanted to tell a story, whether anything reminded me or not.

He also famously loved movies. No surprise there. He was a movie star. Only president ever to make a movie with a chimp. To be fair, Calvin Coolidge was in a play with a baboon once, but it's not the same thing, and it's also not true. Where was I? Reagan hosted regular screenings at Camp David throughout his presidency. In fact, he loved movies so much he used to write film reviews in his diary Saturday, February fourteenth, nine to five. Funny, but one scene made me mad, A

When action is called for, we're taking it. Our response can make the difference between peaceful change or disorder in violence.

In fact, he played the part so well that he may have pushed it a little too far. Now if you ask just about anybody how the Cold War ended, you'll get one of two answers. Either A. Ronald Reagan was strong, showed those Soviets who was boss and they backed down. Or B. Reagan was just lucky enough to be the guy sitting in the White House when a young Soviet leader stepped in and reformed the Joint. But what if there was an entirely different reason the Cold

He was Ronald evil Empire. Reagan talked a tough game against the Soviets, engaged a military build up.

Meet Beth Fischer. She's an historian and author of a book called The Reagan Reversal, where she writes about a drastic shift in Ronald Reagan's attitude towards the Soviet Union and listeners. That shift has very interesting timing.

I was doing my doctoral research and it was on US foreign policy, and I was going through a lot of speeches from the Reagan administration from the early eighties.

Beth says that Reagan's speeches were pretty consistent from nineteen eighty one to about October thirty first, nineteen eighty three, just before able Archer.

The Reagan administration was pretty confrontational. They charged that the Soviet Union was immoral, they lied, they cheat, They were the greatest source of international insecurity.

One of a society which wantonly disregards individual rights and the value of human life, and seeks constantly to expand and dominate other nations.

The next major speech came on January sixteenth, nineteen eighty four.

In his first major speech since Able Archer, Ronald Reagan steps on stage and the American public meets a very new president.

During these first days of nineteen eighty four, I would like to share with you and the people of the world my thoughts on a subject of great importance to the cause of peace, relations between the United States and the Soviet Union. Just suppose with me for a moment. But an Ivan and an Anya could find themselves, say in a waiting room, or sharing a shelter from the rain or a storm, with a Jim and Sally, and there was no language barrier to keep them from getting acquainted.

President Reagan told this little story about these two couples, Ivan and Anya, and Jim and Sally.

Ivan and Anya, a lovely couple from Moscow, and our beloved Jim and Sally from I don't know Toledo. They just feel Midwestern to me.

And as they went their separate ways, maybe Anya would be saying to Ivan, wasn't she nice? She also teaches music. They might even have decided they were all going to get together for dinner some evening soon.

Ah, dinner, How cute. Two months ago, Reagan would have ended that story with Jim poking Ivan's eyeballs out and Sally shoving Anya in front of a bus for freedom.

And it was really different. It was different in tone, it was different in substance.

We do not threaten the Soviet Union. Our two countries have never fought each other. There's no reason why we ever should let us begin now than cute.

The media picked up on Reagan's shift, the Ivan and Anya tail would go down and speech writing history. But when Beth came across this speech, what caught her attention was one sentence, so slight, so discreet, that if you didn't know what to listen for, you might miss it all together.

Let's see, I have a quote here. We need to find meaningful ways to reduce the uncertainty and potential for misinterpretations. Surrounding military activities. I eventually learned that early drafts of the speech had been circulating within Washington in mid December.

And remember the old Reagan, the tough guy, was still giving hard line speeches right up until November one.

So my question became, what happened between November one and mid December? And that's when I discovered Able Archer.

Two months ago, a very secret nuclear near fuck up may have unfolded during November's Able Larger exercise. And then all of a sudden, this very aggressive, very anti communist president is talking about Sally braiding Anya's hair. All of a sudden, he's worried about reducing the potential for misinterpretation surrounding military activities. Pretty interesting timing. I mean, I'm know erk Gio Plaurot, but seem like there might be a connection here.

To reduce the uncertainty and potential for misinterpretations surrounding military activities.

And boom, did you hear that? That's Able Archer right in the speech. Over twenty years after Able Archer, Nate Jones began his quest to find out what really happened. As a student of history and a living human being, he was more than a little concerned about how a nuclear near miss was just a rumor in academic circles. Was George Schultz hiding something when he spoke to Americans during that panel? And is it just a coincidence that Reagan changed his tune so dramatically Only months later? Nate

I go to the Ronald W. Reagan Presidential Library and go through all the boxes.

Looking through reams and reams of paperwork from our government's past, hoping to discover some shred of evidence amongst the redactions for anything to do with able Archer eighty three, the National Security Advisors files US military documents, documents from our allies, anything that could paint a picture of how a NATO exercise might have changed the course of history. And as you might assume, the archive isn't small. Presidential libraries contain a lot of stuff.

It really essentially is a dumping ground.

But hidden amongst all of them, there could be a needle in the haystack.

Well, when I was there, if my spidy senses went up.

Nate finds a box. He blows off decades of cobwebs. He opens it, swats away the moths as they see light for the first time in twenty No, I'm being dramatic. The point is the box is important. It's labeled NATO Military Exercises November nineteen eighty three, jackpot.

So I go through that and pull out the folder, open it up and it has this I believe it's a green card that says every historian's nightmare withheld classified. Go to the next folder, same thing. So it's a little bit heartbreaking.

But this young historical treasure hunter will not be deterred.

But I go to the archivist on duty and say, hey, what's the mechanism for getting this withheld stuff released. And I still remember he kind of gave me a kind of a mean laugh. He said, well, you could file a foyer or a review request, but don't hold your breath. You can file, but you'll never get it.

What a motherfucker god bureaucratic piece of self righteous do dag motherfucker? Am I right?

Then?

I go too far?

I went too far.

I felt that we had a right to know what happened. It's possible that it shows this danger unacceptable danger of nuclear weapons. And if they're that dangerous in the world, was that dangerous then in nineteen eighty three and might still be that dangerous now? That danger shouldn't be hidden your classification. And that right there got me a little bit angry and said, you know what, I'm gonna fight this until the end. And I don't think the government

Here's a message to that asshole who worked as the arkivist on duty at the Reagan Presidential Library in the year two thousand and four, our fearless for your warrior. Get the dacks and what would they show? A very alarming account of what really went down in nineteen eighty three, spurred by intelligence failures, reckless policies, failed diplomacy, and outright arrogance. Buckle up, boys and girls. That's going to be a

It did give me a real understanding of the communist menace.

Ronald Reagan, having campaigned on being top, is not going to stand up and say.

Oh, that was just for the cameras.

I'm actually an old softie.

I love borsh.

Really, for the first time in my life, I felt like there could be nuclear.

Warf 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 Tory Smith. It's executive produced by me Ed Helms, Milan Papelka, Mike Falbo, Andy Chug and Whitney Donaldson. This episode was written by Sarah Joyner, with additional writing from me Elliott Kalen, and Whitney Donaldson.