Ah.
The summer of eighty three, across America, teenagers crammed into theaters to see a new heart throb named Tom Cruise make some larger than life bad decisions in risky business.
Sometimes you gotta say, what the fuck 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.
Fuck.
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 house in summer would turn to fall and things would get a little bit colder.
I'd heard that of a seven forty seven missing, and seven forty sevens just aren't missing.
One story dominates the free world news media tonights, the killing of two hundred and sixty nine innocent people. I bought a Korean jumbo jip 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 explained why it's shot down a Korean airline's plane that had strayed into Soviet airspace.
I met Helms and This is Snafu, a podcast about history's greatest screw ups. On season one, we're telling you the story of a snaffoo that is gigantic, terrifying, and observed. It's called Able Archer eighty three, the nineteen eighty three 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 nineteen eighty three 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 Persion two 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 harrier in this episode, nineteen eighty three spirals out of control. In the months leading up to Able 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 third, nineteen eighty three. The front page of the New York Times reads and drop Off meets with Harriman, asks for better ties. The Harriman referenced here is Avril Harriman, a ninety one year old who used to be the US ambassador to the Soviet Union back when Stalin was in power and the Soviets were American allies. The article said Harriman was
travel to Moscow as a private citizen. He wasn't on official US business, But it also said that before he left for Moscow, he met with the Secretary of State George Schultz, 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 within drop off. 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 FOYA the Freedom of Information Act. It
gives us citizens the right to request government documents. Believe me when I say that Nate ownes, lives, and breathes foyas he's currently the FOYA director at the Washington Post. Foya Nate is his Twitter handle, for God's sake. So the FOYA process looks like this.
The first most important step is to figure out what records exists 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 two hundred and fifty 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 and Drop Bob and Harriman, it would be in the State Department. So next file a FOYA.
A simple form letter that says, under the FOYA, I request this document held by your agency, and then you wait. The law says that they're supposed to release the records within twenty working days.
Twenty working days, okay, we're talking about the government here. I'm sorry, it just it never takes twenty days. I mean, hell, it rarely takes twenty months.
Is not for the faint of heart. You have to be in it for a long battle.
Being a FOYA 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. You know, just let me know whenever you get a chance. The State Department eventually answered Nates Foya they had detailed notes from the Harman meeting, which they
released a 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.
Aevrel Harriman said that and drop Off three times warned of the risk of nuclear war through miscalculation, and told him explicitly and genuinely that he feared that their Reagan administration may be moving towards the dangerous red line of nuclear war.
Three times and drop Off warned of potential miscalculation. Maybe the guy had a nuclear crystal ball after all. Basically, and drop Off asked Harreman 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.
Drop off said he'd wait for Reagan's call. Harriman may as well have stayed home in the US that week hell, instead of spending twenty hours on an airplane, he could have gone to that new blockbuster of war games, which coincidentally came out that weekend, 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 the complete different perceptions going on.
This is from an interview that was conducted for the documentary nineteen eighty three, The Brink of Apocalypse.
In this particular period o Rhon as we were in know they see to have broken down and there was no understanding anymore. And that I think is what made that particular period in the Code War was so dangerous.
And that's Ryner Rupp, agent Dopez, you remember him from last episode Stazi man infiltrating NATO spying for the East alongside his wife. Rupper calls the moment when he could sense the Stazi 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 of 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 surefi 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 nineteen eighty three, 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.
This little machine would then condense all this into a very short sound like a World Beat.
He'd take this magic calculator to a payphone the normal telephone. Payphones were normal in nineteen eighty three. 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. Rub 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 SAZI. They rush over, retrieve the recording, and then.
De sigh for 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 Ryan or Rupp had to use this system. It was a day in November nineteen eighty three, during Exercise Able Archer. But before we get to that faithful day, the US 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. Okay, just kidding any get cat.
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 in 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 syops.
Here's how these syops went down. A big navy fleet would cross the Pacific and approach the Soviet Union from the east, and then day after day, US 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 air. 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 observed 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 they that the US 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, well, 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. On September, first flight KAL zero zero seven 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 US Air Force had sent a spy plane to keep
tabs on them. Classic syops. 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, and 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. 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 KL zero zero seven, a commercial flight with two hundred and sixty nine 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 Osipovic. 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 changed 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. Ka L zero zero seven just kept barreling on in
total radio silence. Then the Soviet generals on the ground made the call destroy the target. Osipovich has his orders. He fires. I have executed the launch, he says. Missiles shred the wing and tail of KL zero zero seven. It spirals into the ocean, a trail of fire, signaling its fatal dive. Ossipovitch confirms the hit. The target is destroyed, and just like that, two hundred and sixty nine innocent people are dead.
One story, it's the Free World news media tonight, the killing of two hundred and sixty nine innocent people. I bought a Korean jumper jet that drifted into Soviet territory at.
The university, who 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 Vetlana Savranskaya recalling the confusion of Soviet citizens. When news broke about the downing of flight KL zero zero seven.
The Soviets issued the denial that they did not shoot the airliner and 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 explained why it shot down a Korean Airlines plane that had straight into Soviet airspace.
A week later, the Soviets submitted 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 down to Korean airliner in Moscow claims it was a spy plane.
Later, the pilot Osipovitch 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 weapon. Oh yeah, it's got American flags paid it all over it. There's an Uncle Sam riding on top. I mean, this is unmistakable. Oh well, nice, try, guys. Unlucky for them that 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 barbarigim.
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 spyplane.
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.
Reparation 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 US 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. Nobody to retaliate. The solution hit back, even if the leaders were dead, with an automatic computerized nuke launching system, utterly terrifying.
Basically a strange lovey and 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 old human and animal life on earth?
Doctor 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 US, 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 strange love.
How can it be triggered automatically?
It's so markab be simple to do with that.
First new 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 US nukes hit the Krimlin 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 US and doomsday.
No sa it is another thing a saying man with the doomsday machine is designed.
We all know what happens next, which is that either all human life is wiped out on the planet or and 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 mettling, so toombsday machine is terrifying gee.
I wish we had one of them doomsday machines.
States.
The way Perimeter aka 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 nineteen eighty three, 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 OCO, which is another semi functional Soviet system, a network of satellites hovering above America's missile silos watching for a nuclear launch. The OCO 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 able Archer, a glitch in the ecosystem would nudge the
Soviets a little closer to the brink. It's September twenty sixth, nineteen eighty three, Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov reported to work at the OCO Control Center.
The control center where all of this information came in and was interpreted was a place called Sepikov fifteen, which was a top secret military site about eighty 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.
Col 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.
Paul 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 twelve in the morning. Just after midnight, a clason suddenly starts blaring and a signal, A giant signaling red letters comes up on the screen in front, which is the Russian word for launch, 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 thirty 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 five pinged again. He shut it off, and then another he shut it off. He waited, and then it happened again. The screen warned him launched detected.
Says that he felt his legs that sort of collapsed underneath him. He said it was like sitting in a in a frying pan.
Stanislov had to decide was his instinct right or was the system right. In interviews, Stanislov 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.
Halujah, Hand to God. Even forty years after this all happened, I still almost wet myself just thinking about it. Eventually the lights blinked out. Satellite number five had malfunctioned. It detected flashes of light. Yeah, but they weren't the trails of launch 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. 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 eighty three. Next time on STAFU, 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 Americans, so now in the middle of their exercise, so be ready for ever received.
And the fate of the world hangs in the balance and he had to report to him.
Hey, sir, there's some anomalies the Soviet forces seemed if the air forces have gone on a heightened alert.
I knew it was a dermatic 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 Tory Smith. It's executive produced by me Ed Helms, Milan Papelka, Mike Falbo, Andy Chug, and Whitney Donaldson. This episode was written by Carl Nellis and Sarah Joyner, with
additional writing from Elliott Kalen and Whitney Donaldson. Our senior editor is Jeffrey Lewis.
This is like a Wise.
Olivia Kenny 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 rose Otto. Additional editing from Ben Chugg. Some archival audio from this episode originally appeared in Taylor Downing's Fantastic film nineteen eighty three, The Brink of Apocalypse.
Thank you, mister Downing for permission to use it. Special thanks to Alison Cohen and Matt Aisenstadt.