[00:00:03] So, Nathan, we are gathered here today to kind of change the way that my nuclear life is going to go in the next, I don't know how long. Nathan Yeah, I'm excited about this plan.
[00:00:17] Nathan Okay, so what's happened is it's kind of more difficult to get guests on the show. I don't know if maybe people are sick of podcasts or people are busier now or they're traveling more, but people have not been responding to my emails or have time to be on the show, except you. Nathan I like to think it's that people are out there living their best lives. Nathan Okay, that's what it is. Nathan And there just isn't space for it in their busy active schedules. I suspect what it might be is that increase in the future.
[00:00:47] Nathan André, surprisingly, human beings are becoming fairly rabidly antisocial. Nathan Oh, but you always respond to my call. Nathan Yeah, well, I'm only a borderline human being at best. Nathan Okay, and you tend to like the things that I talk about. Nathaniel That's also true. Nathaniel Because as we've discovered, we're kind of the same age. Nathaniel Yeah, kind of the same age and have been through a lot of the same history. Nathaniel Yes. Nathaniel And have had a lot of the same interests and a lot of the same fears. Nathaniel True, yes.
[00:01:14] Nathaniel So the podcast is going to still do some interviews with people when I can get a hold of them. Nathaniel But we're going to start exploring one of our interests, which is kind of Cold War fear and Cold War bombs and Cold War... Nathaniel Almost catastrophes. Nathaniel Yes, which we've talked about when we get together to have drinks. Nathaniel Yeah. Nathaniel As two normal people do.
[00:01:42] Nathaniel Exactly. I'd say after one and a half drinks, the almost apocalypse has come up pretty frequently and pretty reliably. Nathaniel Yes, to the chagrin of people around us? Nathaniel I'd like to say to the delight. Nathaniel Delight. Nathaniel But I mean, yeah, chagrin is probably more accurate. Nathaniel But we don't care. Nathaniel Yeah, there's a fine line between delight and chagrin. Nathaniel It's true. And we never really care that they don't like it. Nathaniel Also true.
[00:02:07] Nathaniel Okay. So now we get to share this delight with the rest of the viewing audience. Nathaniel Yeah, or listening audience and your welcome audience. Nathaniel Yes. So if this is not something that you might be interested in, then I think you should just continue to listen to see if maybe you are interested in it. Nathaniel Yeah. Oh, no, it's going to be interesting. Nathaniel Oh, it's going to be fun. We are going to start with 1983, which I think is a year that we were closer to nuclear war than even the Cuban Missile Crisis.
[00:02:37] Nathaniel Yeah, the Cuban Missile Crisis gets a lot of press. If we were trying to figure out what was the moment in which we almost pitched into the abyss, into destruction, I think a lot of people would understandably say Cuban Missile Crisis, and they wouldn't be wrong. 1983, probably worse. Nathan Yes. We're eventually going to get to Abel Archer. Nathaniel Yeah.
[00:02:55] Nathaniel And I know podcast listeners have asked me about covering Abel Archer, but I think there's a lot of context that we need to cover before we actually get to Abel Archer, which happened at the end of 1983. Nathan Yeah. Nathaniel When did it actually happen? So what was Abel Archer? Nathaniel Able Archer was November. Nathan Okay. Nathaniel November of 83. Nathan And it was just a military exercise. Nathaniel Well, it was a simulation. It was a war simulation. It was a war simulation. It was a war simulation at possibly...
[00:03:27] Nathaniel Yes. Nathaniel And I guess that's what we'll get into today. Nathaniel We're going to get into the sort of the atmosphere. We're going to get into the fumes that the spark of Abel Archer might have ignited to basically cook the whole world. Nathan Yes. And all of which happened in 1983. Nathaniel Yeah. What a year. And we were alive because we were people who were alive in the late 1900s. Nathaniel Yes. Yes. Which we discovered is what the kids nowadays call it. Nathaniel So let me start off with a little bit of French. Nathaniel Before we get to the context.
[00:03:55] Nathaniel It's sort of the context of the context. It's the context context. Nathaniel Okay. Nathaniel And what I would like to say is comprendre et ne se pas indigné. Nathan And to those of us in the U.S. who don't know another language? Nathaniel What that means basically is to understand something is to not be horrified by it. Is to not be indignified by it. Nathaniel Okay. Nathaniel The more you understand something, the less you're irritated, the less you hate it.
[00:04:20] Nathaniel It's an interesting philosophy and I kind of see how it works a lot of the time, but not all the time. Nathaniel But there was actually a French philosopher named Henri Bersant. Nathan And writing after World War I, he said, quote, translated obviously, Nathaniel I should much prefer when in the presence of crime to give my indignation reign and not to understand.
[00:04:40] Nathaniel Happily, the choice does not need to be made. On the contrary, there are forms of anger which, by a thorough comprehension of their objects, drive the force to sustain and renew their vigor. Nathaniel In other words, sometimes the more you understand about something, the more irritating it is. Nathaniel Ah, so that kind of sets the stage for everything we're going to talk about.
[00:05:04] Nathaniel Exactly. As Bergson said, we have only to detach the inner meaning of this war and our horror for those who made it will be increased. Nathan That I can get behind. Nathaniel Yeah. Nathaniel And when did he say that? Nathaniel He said that after World War I. Basically arguing that the more you understand World War I, the stupider it gets. The more that you understand it, the less that you understand it.
[00:05:27] Nathan I think maybe, and perhaps this is just me, but, and I guess he wasn't privy to the wars that came after World War I. But in looking at the wars that came after World War I, or World War II, World War II makes a whole lot more sense than anything else that we fought after that. Nathaniel Yeah. World War II is often held up as the war. Like, if I had to go fight in a war, thinking of the wars of the 20th century, if I'd had to go fight in World War I, I would have been super irritated and I would have hated the whole thing. Nathaniel Yeah.
[00:05:57] Nathaniel If I'd had to fight in World War II, as my grandfather did for the Canadian Armed Forces, I would have been terrified. I would have been disturbed. I would have been broken. I would have been traumatized. And I also would have gone. Because that was a war that did make some kind of sense. You were confronted with the existential threat of fascism. Nathaniel Yes. Nathaniel And so in that case, it's World War II. You're like, okay, this is going to be horrifying, but I get it. I can see why my grandfather went. I would have gone as well. Nathaniel And then we get to the Cold War.
[00:06:27] Nathaniel Which includes Vietnam, which includes Korea, which includes Afghanistan. Nathaniel Angola. Nathaniel Grenada. Nathaniel Cuba. Nathaniel And all of these things that really, when you look back, or even at the time, you're unsure why. Nathaniel Well, this is the thing. We've been working together for years, sifting through the artifacts and leftovers of the Cold War. And one of the things that comes up often is your surprise that we would have been a lot of years. Nathaniel We weren't all killed. Nathaniel Yes.
[00:06:57] Nathaniel You are frequently. Nathaniel You are properly baffled by this. It's not even that you're thankful for it or grateful. You're just confused. Nathaniel A lot of times, yes. Nathaniel And this is understandable because from 1948 on, the world basically had a nuclear warhead of Damocles dangling over its head constantly. Nathaniel Almost like a guillotine. Nathaniel Yeah, exactly. To borrow a phrase from our time in the Diefenbunker, somehow, and we don't quite understand how, we managed to avoid turning this world into a radioactive world.
[00:07:25] Nathaniel I laugh only because you brought back sewage lagoon. Nathaniel Sewage lagoon. No, that was... Nathaniel A nice callback.
[00:07:34] Nathaniel Yeah, a nice callback to a documentary that we made a few years back where we were talking about, well, after you put yourself in this bomb shelter after the end of the world, how do toilets work? And one, they're on springs so that the toilets don't break when the ground is shaking from nuclear explosions. And two, they just sort of vent out into what was referred to as the sewage lagoon. Nathaniel Yes, absolutely.
[00:08:03] Nathaniel On one level, the fact that we managed to not turn everything into a radioactive sewage lagoon doesn't seem that impressive because almost nobody wanted it to happen. It should be the easiest thing in the world to not do something that almost nobody wants to do. Nathaniel Yes, except the actions that both sides took did not convey that message.
[00:08:28] Nathaniel That's the thing. And this is where, and this is why I'm on this podcast, not as an expert in science, but as somebody who can ramble on about philosophy. Nathaniel There is an American philosopher of technology named Lewis Mumford. Nathaniel And the Cold War turned into something that Mumford would have referred to as a mega machine.
[00:08:46] Nathaniel So what a mega machine is, it's a human-caused situation, often an undesirable one, often an absurd one, which starts to build momentum and inertia and develop an internal logic that justifies its continued existence and structure because of the industry that builds around it.
[00:09:10] Nathaniel It's a big, stupid thing, but it's a big, stupid, complicated thing with a lot of moving parts. Nathaniel And once that thing starts to roll, it basically takes on a life of its own and human beings just get thrown into it to oil the gears of this absurd, destructive mega machine. Nathaniel And that makes perfect sense because the Cold War machine was that of building weapons.
[00:09:36] It was a lot of war industry, right? The industry that built up during World War II had to keep going. You had to keep feeding it. Nathaniel Yeah, the military-industrial complex, despite the fact that President Eisenhower, as he was stepping away from office, said in his last speech to the American people,
[00:09:52] Nathaniel Guys, just so you know, there is a threat. There is an insidious threat to our way of life, to Americanism, to everything that we hold dear. There is something that is working its way into our economy, into our politics, into our spirituality. Nathaniel And what people would have expected him to say, I think, would have been communism. That's the insidious threat. Nathaniel Right. Nathaniel But what he actually said was, no, the threat is the military-industrial complex. Nathaniel How right he was.
[00:10:20] Nathaniel Yeah. And fortunately, everybody listened to him and everything was fine. Nathaniel Oh, fine. And it goes back to when the scientists at Los Alamos finished with the bomb, they expected the lab to be closed and everyone to go back to their academic positions. And, you know, our job is done here. Let's go home. And that's not what happened. Nathaniel No, because not only had they constructed a device, they had also constructed a mega machine. And that mega machine was going to develop
[00:10:50] Nathaniel And then it was going to develop its own internal logic. And then the next thing you know, we were going to leave the world dangling over an abyss for decades and decades because of the internal logic based on a series of flawed but compelling maxims of the Cold War. One of the main ones, I think, is something called Manichaeism. Nathaniel Manichaeism.
[00:11:13] Nathaniel Manichaeism. Manichaeism is a worldview. It's like an existential battle between opposing forces of good and evil. That's how you see the world. There isn't gray. There isn't sort of room for conversation. There is good and there is evil. There is light and there is darkness. There's no gray. Nathaniel Manichaeism. No other solution is possible other than the elimination of the enemy because the enemy isn't just an adversary. They are demonic. They are inhuman.
[00:11:43] And that was communism, which was the Soviet Union. Nathaniel Manichaeism. That was the kind of thinking that was running wild on both sides of the conflict. Because in the Soviet Union, their interpretation of Marxism meant that worldwide communism was like a historical inevitability. It had to happen. It was part of their theory that history was working its way towards communism. So like the whole world was going to be communism?
[00:12:07] The whole world was going to have to be communist. Anything that stood in the way of that was a threat to mankind and the flourishing that would inevitably result from Soviet-style communism spreading around the world. Yes, that sigh was justified. But over in the United States, of course, communism was a godless abomination that needed to be eradicated before it poisoned the minds of the rest of the world. So two opposing philosophies.
[00:12:33] Yeah, and in a way, two opposing megamachines. The megamachine of Soviet communism. The megamachine of American capitalism. The Soviets also had their own military-industrial complex. Yeah, did they ever. And there was so much that was tied up with it. And making the war about ideology meant that the front lines were everywhere. The front lines were the entire world.
[00:13:00] And so that's just part of the internal logic of the Cold War, the sort of Manichean thinking. The battle between these two opposing political systems and economic systems, neither of which could stand the existence of the other. Just the very existence of the other threatened each of them. And politically, this had implications for the world as well, because NATO then started right after World War II.
[00:13:29] Yep. And the Soviets had their own pack, right? Yeah, the Warsaw Pact. The Warsaw Pact. So then politically, there were two opposing sides as well. Yeah, which just played into that Manicheism, that binary view of the world. And the rest of the world, even if they had no interest in this battle, there was no escaping this battle.
[00:13:51] There was no escaping this battle for a couple reasons. One, because it was a war of ideology, each side was trying to spread their ideology through the world and also combat the other's ideology throughout the world. And so that's one reason why the entire world became a battleground. And the other reason is because if it had gotten to the point of nuclear exchange, we all get to be part of that. It doesn't matter where you are. If there's a nuclear exchange at that level in the world, it's happening to all of us.
[00:14:19] We've talked about our favorite nuclear movies in the past, but you see this just in the culture about how obsessed the whole world was and all cultures were about this idea of a nuclear exchange. So there's movies across all languages, across all genres about a nuclear war because it is in the minds of people.
[00:14:46] Yeah. And we see that in music, for example. We've never talked about this. I don't know how. Do you have a favorite nuclear war song? Well, yes. There's so many good ones. What's your favorite? I am a big fan of Tom Laird. Oh, yeah, of course. Great musical satirist. Great American musical satirist. Yes. So he's got a lot of good nuclear bomb songs.
[00:15:07] Oh, 100 percent. There's a lot of good English bands that came up with nuclear war songs, American bands. There is a Nigerian band that I'm very fond of, the Lajado Sisters in the 1970s. Fantastic group. And they sing about atomic bombs as well in Nigeria because, again, we're all in this together.
[00:15:30] Wow. Yeah. So I have a whole episode on nuclear songs. It's mostly, you know, English language songs that they discuss and how songs were used to protest nuclear weapons a lot.
[00:15:41] Again, Lajado Sisters, highly recommend them. And there's a reason why even in like a Nigerian funk band, they're forced to think about nuclear war. And that's because by that time, by the 70s, both sides had built up these stockpiles and these capabilities that basically guaranteed annihilation. And that's another one of the maxims of the Cold War, that internal logic of that mega machine. To prevent complete annihilation, you had to be capable of annihilation.
[00:16:12] Uh-huh. Because as destructive as conventional weapons had become, I mean, World War II, you had skies full of bombers that had destroyed entire cities in a night. The nuclear weapon is just a fundamentally different device. It's not just capable of mass destruction of physical space. The nuclear weapon destroys time. What do you mean destroys time?
[00:16:32] It reaches forward in time and continues the destruction. Like the danger is not over because the event is over. The future ramifications of a nuclear exchange would be generational. It keeps killing long after that initial attack with fallout, ash clouds, mutations, climate change. Yep. You're not just burning away the ground underneath it. The nuclear weapon burns away the future. Spoken like a philosopher. Spoken like a philosopher from the late 1900s.
[00:17:02] And the other thing that the nuclear weapon does that's fundamentally different, there's always been this battle between defense and offense. As long as there's been conflict. Caveman days. Medieval times, there's always been, you have a better weapon, I get better armor. But the nuclear weapon heavily tilts the defense-offense balance in favor of offense. Yes, which is why you have so many weapons.
[00:17:25] Yeah, because that's all that's available. The ability to destroy far reaches the ability to defend. And so your best defense is something that was officially called deterrence. It's still officially called deterrence. Officially called deterrence, but of course we call it mutually assured destruction. Which was never like an official designation, but it's certainly perfect because it's apt and because the acronym is MAD. Mad.
[00:17:55] And so in order to have adequate deterrence, you need to be able to react quickly and lethally in the face of a threat. The other thing that comes up here, if you have all these weapons, then you always think your opponent is going to strike first.
[00:18:14] Yeah, because there's such an advantage to striking first. And this is where something like decapitation comes in. Because there was game theorists in the American government. We've talked about John von Neumann a lot in the past because I'm obsessed with game theory.
[00:18:30] And those game theorists, they argued that since compromise was impossible, this Manichean worldview meant there's no conversation, there's no compromise. There can only be absolute victory. All you can do is try to minimize your own losses. And because defense is impossible, the best way to minimize your own losses is to maximize their losses.
[00:18:51] Which is crazy because when you're talking about nuclear weapons, this is where megadeath is defined. So now you're not just talking about hundreds of thousands of people. You're talking about how many millions. As inconceivable as that is. As inconceivable as hundreds of thousands of people are. And when you're talking about World War II, you're talking about millions of people. But now you're talking about, you don't even say 3 million or 4 million. So now you're just giving it a prefix. Instead of saying million, you're just saying mega.
[00:19:21] Yeah. And because it's easier to use that language, it becomes easier to start to talk about something inconceivable. I was going to say, you're dehumanizing it even more. So now you're saying three megadeaths instead of 3 million people who are killed.
[00:19:36] Yep. And that becomes the way to win. And we've come across these conversations in memos and in meetings where there are people arguing, oh, we'd only lose this many megadeaths of people, whereas they would lose this many, which means that if you tally it up on the scoreboard, we've won. We've won. We've won. Hooray? Question mark? By a megadeath. Yeah. We beat the spread. And that's the crazy thing. The thought that you could win a nuclear war.
[00:20:05] Yeah. And when you step outside of the internal logic of that mega machine, it's inhuman. It's horrifying. It's unimaginable. But within the internal logic of that mega machine, it's just people trying to work with a mechanism and coming up with what they consider victory based on that metric.
[00:20:26] Oh, OK. So with all that being said, we're kind of what is at the end of the Cold War in 1983. Yeah, we're getting there. But it's a very pivotal time. It is. So, you know, the Cold War kind of officially begins at the end of World War II. So, you know, kind of 1946. And I think people, I don't know, I just figured it ends when the wall comes down in 89.
[00:20:53] Yeah, that's certainly when I was growing up, that's how I felt. I think officially it ends a little later than that. You know, actually, I would make the argument, thinking back to my childhood, the Berlin Wall coming down obviously was a big deal. Yeah. But there was something else very small that happened that when I was a kid, I felt a great sense of relief. I thought maybe I'm not going to see mushroom clouds over my hometown of Orangeville, Ontario. Maybe this is going to be OK. And it sounds ridiculous. I was a kid.
[00:21:21] But you know what that thing was, that tiny little thing that happened? A McDonald's opened in Moscow. That was it? That was it. For me as a kid, I was like, wait a second. A McDonald's opened in Moscow. I think this thing might be done. I think this thing might be over. What year was that? That's a good question. Well, I mean, we've got a little machine here that will tell us. Yeah. But I recall that being before the Berlin Wall fell. I mean, that must have been in Perestroika. Yeah, during Gorbachev. Oh, no, it was actually after. It was 1990.
[00:21:50] 1990. Oh, so. So it was after. Yeah. So the pessimistic little Nathan was like, oh, the wall comes down. No, no, no. Oh, McDonald's? There we go. Oh, the McDonald's opened up. Now, now I feel relief. But it does show you that it was such an ideological battle. Even if I didn't understand those terms back then, I still recognize that, well, certainly two nations that each have McDonald's aren't going to nuke each other.
[00:22:14] Of course not. And the official Cold War days are 1947 to 1991. Yeah, because it wasn't until the collapse of the Soviet Union that you would say, OK, now that Manichaean battle has finally come to an end. We thought. And so tensions rise and fall. But I think, you know, once Reagan bastard gets into office. Oh, we'll get to Reagan today.
[00:22:39] It really kind of ramps up. And, you know, 83 is kind of this explosive year. Well, that's because going back to Manichaeism, there is kind of a response to Manichaean thinking. If you are a Manichaean thinker and you see the world in black and white and good and evil and angels and demons, well, there's only one possible solution to that. Destroy the enemy? Destroy the enemy. And so something that tends to come from Manichaeism is millenarianism. You're throwing a lot of a lot of social science at me here.
[00:23:08] Yes. It's an exciting episode. Millenarianism is like the rapture. OK. This idea that there's an event coming and this event is going to make everything good forever. And this is a very seductive idea to human beings. We've had this since the early days of religion. Zoroastrianism has Frascika Reddy, the making wonderful, that the only way to deal with this good and evil situation is if evil is finally just burned.
[00:23:34] And that's the millenarian moment when you have a rapture or you have a mass murder or you have some kind of event where you finally destroy evil forever. And nuclear weapons promise to provide that ability. We can bring about the apocalypse. We don't have to wait for an asteroid or something. We can be our own asteroid. We can burn away evil.
[00:24:00] But that destroys us, too. Like, we didn't figure out a way to do it without impacting us. That's the thing. And that's when you step outside of the megamachine and look in, you ask questions like that. But when you're within that megamachine, only working within the mechanisms that it deems reasonable, you don't have those kind of options to see. So I want to bring some fun stuff to the 1983. Right. Typical of you. Well, no, I'm actually bringing fun stuff.
[00:24:28] I looked up what was going on in 83 just so that we can kind of flash back to our childhood. Sure. The number one hit in 1983. Do you know what it was? 1983. I'm going to... Thompson Twins? The... I don't know. The hit by the police, Every Breath You Take. Oh, that song's aged well. Yeah. The anthem of every stalker out there. Yeah. Also on the charts, Michael Jackson's Billie Jean and Beat It.
[00:24:57] Oh, boy. I mean, good songs. However... For a problematic artist. Yeah, I thought you'd appreciate that. However, something that I think you and I will both think aged well was a rock anthem by the Violent Femmes. Oh, okay. Violent Femmes released their self-titled debut album with Blister in the Sun. Blister... No. See, now we're talking... Now we're talking. That actually has aged well. I still listen to that. It has aged very well. Very well.
[00:25:26] That whole album is a classic. Yeah. No notes. And The Cure released their puppy song Love Cats. Oh, okay. So there was some good stuff going on. Yep. Yep. So there was some good music that we were bopping to in the 80s. Okay. 1983. Although it was also an extremely dangerous, hazardous moment. Yeah. But you could like bop around to Love Cats and try your guitar riff on Blister in the Sun.
[00:25:50] Yeah. I think later on was Nina singing 99 Red Balloons. That was, I think, later on in that decade. Okay. I mean, you got to bring me down again. Yeah. One of the finest of the Cold War songs. Do you want to hear what movies were playing? Oh, 1983. There must have... Empire Strikes Back? Wrath of Khan? Return of the Jedi. Return of the Jedi. Okay. All right. I remember waiting in line to see Return of the Jedi. Yeah. Maybe the last good Star Wars movie. Maybe.
[00:26:19] Definitely the last good Star Wars movie. There you go. Scarface was number one. Okay. Which I've never seen. And one of our favorite Cold War movies came out that year. 83. War Games? Yes. Amazing. You got it. Yeah. I mean, that... Wow. That is... Man, they had their finger on the pulse of the zeitgeist with that one. They really did. They did not know what was going on and they kind of nailed it.
[00:26:44] And they sort of accidentally, like, fumbled their way into kind of describing what was about to almost happen to all of us. Yes. Exactly. Because it was such... Despite the fact that the violent femmes came out, which I am eternally grateful for. Yes. Same. It was an extremely dicey time. And we were coming out of a time of a bit of promise. Because in the 1970s, the Cold War kind of thawed a little bit. We had a détente. More French. That's French.
[00:27:12] Which was the thawing of the relationship between the West and the Soviets. We had Nixon going to China, the end of the Vietnam War, as horrifying as that had been. And things like SALT, the 1972 SALT, strategic arms limitation talks. There was an anti-ballistic missile treaty in 1972. Yeah.
[00:27:31] In order to try to protect, Matt, this idea that if we start coming up with ways to protect ourselves from nuclear weapons, then that's going to destabilize the situation. The main thing that protects us from nuclear war is just how terrible nuclear war is. Yes.
[00:28:01] That's off the table. This was fascinating. They actually said, okay, we need to prevent ourselves from coming up with ways to protect ourselves from nuclear war in order to protect ourselves from nuclear war. Yep. And there was the prevention of nuclear war agreement in 1973, which was a commitment based on things like what happened in Cuban Missile Crisis. A commitment to maintaining communications and discussion during those tense confrontations. So this is when the red phone comes up.
[00:28:28] Exactly. We've got to keep talking. We had the Moscow Treaty in 70, the Basic Treaty in 72, the Helsinki Accord in 75, and they're all establishing kind of an order, borders, human rights, freedoms, economic interactions. So this all sounds great. We're talking, we're making progress, we're reducing our nuclear weapons. Yeah. It seems like things are going kind of well. What goes wrong, and this really goes wrong, and this is one of the all-time disasters in my opinion,
[00:28:59] 1979, Soviet Union invades Afghanistan. What prompted that? That's a very long and complicated conversation that would take hours and hours to discuss. I mean, there was something called the Brezhnev Doctrine, and the Brezhnev Doctrine said that if a country becomes communist, it has to stay communist.
[00:29:23] No communist country can fail. Because if a communist country fails, that challenges the ideology of communism itself. Okay. It challenges the historical inevitability that communism is going to happen. So basically, if you break it, you bought it. So then when Afghanistan, for all sorts of complicated reasons that I would love to, don't have time to get into, becomes communist, even though Brezhnev, it was like, oh boy, I don't want Afghanistan, but I guess we have Afghanistan now.
[00:29:49] And then when a reaction within Afghanistan develops against the Soviets, then the Soviets start to put in more advisors and more enforcement. And then they bomb the hell out of the city of Herat. And I talked to somebody who was there at the time, and she was talking about playing outside. The alarms went, she went into the basement, she came back up, and the city was gone. The Soviet air force had destroyed the city. Oh my God.
[00:30:17] In retaliation for some Soviet advisors being killed there. And then the Soviets find themselves in an asymmetrical war where they don't understand the culture. They can't fight very well on the terrain, the mountains and the deserts. Just a little note, that would never happen again. Oh, no. No, we would always learn our lessons. And the Americans, having just come out of Vietnam, which was an asymmetrical war in which they couldn't fight in the terrain and didn't understand the culture and didn't understand the area.
[00:30:47] And the Soviets used the Vietnam War as a proxy to bleed America. Mm-hmm. The official story is the American government looks at the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and says, hey, we can stick it to them now there, the way they stuck it to us in Vietnam. That's the official story.
[00:31:04] The unofficial story that I've been piecing together with Dr. Lee Kunla for the last decade is there does seem to be evidence that the CIA had a considerable presence in Afghanistan and amongst Afghans in American universities before the Soviet invasion. And it's entirely possible that there were people who were working to create the conditions that made a Soviet invasion more likely. Ah, that wouldn't surprise me.
[00:31:31] So it wasn't necessarily such a matter of the CIA responding to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, but maybe the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan had been to a degree encouraged by some of the actions of the CIA in order to create a Soviet Vietnam. Or at least create the right conditions. Certainly contributory cause. So, I mean, I would love to get into that as horrifying as it is, but that's it for detente.
[00:31:59] Yeah. Kind of like, all right, we're done now. And so that's 79. That's 79. That's followed up in 1980 by the election in the states of Ronald Death Valley Days Reagan. One of your favorite historical figures. Yeah. It's kind of a reaction now that when I hear his name, I have to swear. But why? He seemed so, he was the... Great communicator.
[00:32:24] The great communicator. He was, I mean, he was great in those movies with Bonzo, the monkey movies. So what are some of the issues you have with Reagan? I'm not frozen. How much time do you have? That was a long, that was a long pause. Was it his horrifying, maybe even weaponized mishandling of the HIV crisis? Yes.
[00:32:48] Was it possibly working actively to keep American hostages in Iran in order to help win the election? Possibly, yes. Was it the activities that were done in Nicaragua? Was it the funding and the training of the murderous Contras? Yes, yes. And the selling of weapons illegally to Iran. Was it any of these things? Yeah. Those are contributing factors. Okay, but he liked jelly beans.
[00:33:17] Oh, yeah. That was sweet. Yeah, that was very humanizing. Yeah, among other domestic policies, yes. Right. Well, of course, the... You know, killing unions, gutting education. Yep. Making it so... Mental health. Mental health. You know, little things like that. But here's the thing about Reagan that's interesting for our purposes. He was this weird mix of Christian
[00:33:39] fundamentalism and capitalist fundamentalism. And in 1983, he makes one of the famous speeches, his evil empire speech. Evil empire. I have that on here as... The evil empire speech. Which is something that U.S. presidents after that, Baby Bush talks about the evil empire being... The axis of evil.
[00:33:59] The axis of evil. And now the current administration talks about evil empires. So, you know, it kind of starts this whole wave of people who are evil and against the U.S. Manichaeism. Call back to earlier in the episode. Oh, see, I'm learning. All of this is reinforcing this Manichaean concept. And he gives the evil empire speech in March 1983. What a year. Wait, what day? Because I've got something that happens in March of 83 by him, too.
[00:34:28] Oh, wait, was that when he accidentally said that the missiles were on their way? No, something... I forget when... ...much more important to our story. Okay, we'll come back to that then. Yeah, so the evil empire speech is delivered, importantly, to the National Association of Evangelicals. Why? Why is that important? Or why did he deliver it? Well, why did he deliver it to them? He delivered it to them because they were trying to build a coalition that would basically last forever.
[00:34:57] And the evangelicals were a voting bloc that had sort of kept separate spheres. They said, you know, there is the worldly sphere and there is the heavenly sphere, and they don't really mix. And so evangelicals for the 50s and 60s, they didn't really get very politically active. But under Nixon, they realized we could mobilize these guys. If we come up with some divisive culture war stuff, then we could win this big group of people over and basically have them vote as a bloc for us. And that happened.
[00:35:26] And that absolutely happened and explains a lot of the things that happened in American politics since. And this is why Reagan is really pushing her. Despite being a divorced Hollywood actor, he is able to kind of like become this Christian hero. And in this speech, he talks about the importance of rebuilding America's military capacity, which I'm reasonably familiar with the Gospels.
[00:35:52] I don't recall Jesus talking about the importance of rebuilding military capacity. Are you sure? I'm pretty sure. I mean, he talks about turning the other cheek. He talks about blessed are the peacemakers. He talks about the meek inheriting the earth. He does say that he comes with a sword, but that was probably more of a rhetorical device. But this goes back to what Eisenhower was warning people about.
[00:36:15] When your country depends on war, every aspect of your country, including your spirituality, is going to be altered. And so American Christianity in the 1980s, you see this odd movement away from the teaching of the Gospels towards this odd apocalyptic millenarian worldview that the only way out was going to be this apocalyptic moment.
[00:36:41] And we've talked about cults that use this cleansing, this nuclear cleansing apocalyptic moment. Yeah, because it's such a powerful motivator. And the other thing that Reagan does in the Evil Empire speech is he urges religious leaders to reject a nuclear freeze proposal. Oh, which was gaining momentum at that time. Yeah, which was gaining momentum. The other thing that Reagan does, of course, is he opposes Matt.
[00:37:08] The thing that, as ridiculous as it was, had kept us from going to actual war, Reagan's like, no, no, no. I don't want Matt. I want them destroyed. And this is what brings me to, I don't know if this was the same speech, but on March 23rd, 1983 is when he announces the Star Wars project. Yeah, well, we're going to get to, and that entirely comes about because of his opposition to Matt. And we had talked about how in the 1970s there was a realization.
[00:37:37] If we try to work on technologies that can prevent mutual issue destruction, then we could destroy the world. Whereas Reagan in 83 is like, you know what? Let's get on this. Let's build technology that can shoot these missiles out of the sky and protect ourselves. Let's destabilize stuff. So that's what's going on very briefly in the American side. But then over in the Soviet side, things are bad too.
[00:38:04] Because the general secretary of the Communist Party is Yuri Andropov. I got notes on Andropov as well. Now, the most important thing is that there's something, have you noticed something about Soviet leadership that's a bit odd? Having to do with their heads? No. Okay, so starting with Lenin, bald guy. Okay. Then Stalin, hairy guy. Famously hairy guy. Then Khrushchev. Bald. Bald guy. Then Brezhnev.
[00:38:33] Hairy? Hairy. Then Andropov. I'm going to guess bald. Bald. So weirdly, all throughout the Soviet history, they go between like balding and hairy. Probably doesn't mean anything. Interesting to note. Now, Andropov, former head of the KGB. Oh, sweet man then. Yeah, sweet, gentle, understanding man. So just knowing that he's the former head of the KGB and had been for some time, what would that tell you about Andropov?
[00:39:02] Just knowing that one data point about him, what does that tell you about him? Already said, sweet guy. Yeah, totally sweet guy. Yeah. He's a pussycat. He, uh... Gentle. Gentle. He would be one that would write a letter to a fifth grader inviting her to the Soviet Union. Exactly. Empathetic. Sympathetic. And all of this obviously is sarcastic. He was paranoid, ruthless. He was a Soviet fundamentalist. Responsible for the suppression of dissidents, crackdowns on freedoms.
[00:39:29] And that paranoia resulted in a program that started up when he was head of the KGB and continued when he was the general secretary. Operation Ryan. I have not heard about Operation Ryan. What was it called in Russian? They probably would have pronounced it Rian. Okay. But actually spelled the same. Spelled, just coincidentally, spelled like the American name Ryan. Okay. But it probably would have been pronounced more like Rian. And so what Operation Rian is, is that Soviet leadership has become convinced, in part because
[00:39:59] of the increased Manichean-Millinarian dialogue coming out of the United States, that the Americans are going to do a decapitation strike. The Americans are going to launch a first nuclear assault. They become absolutely convinced in Soviet leadership of this. But how can you tell when it's about to happen? Because we had moved from bombers to missiles, and not only land-based missiles, but submarine missiles that are just off the coast. With bombers, you've got hours to do something. Yep.
[00:40:27] With land-based missiles, you have less time. And with submarine missiles, you've got no time at all. No, you have no idea. And you've got to get your stuff up before their stuff lands, or you're not going to be able to take revenge. I believe it's use it or lose it. Exactly. And so what Operation Rian or Rian does is it's trying to find patterns, trying to use a bunch of different data points to detect when is the moment that the Americans are going
[00:40:57] to launch their first strike. And so they look at pretty obvious things like the movement and distribution of nuclear weapons, or if the Americans start doing increased evacuation preparation, or increased civil defense. But also some odder things, blood bank levels. Oh. Monitor the amount of blood in American blood banks. Well, that's smart. It's pretty smart. Also things, because increasingly this millenarian political movement had gotten itself so tied
[00:41:26] with fundamentalism, the Soviets were also monitoring the activities of church leaders. But even going so far as to ask questions like, how many lights are on right now in certain key buildings? How full is the parking lot in certain buildings? So are people at the Pentagon staying late? Exactly. Is this pizza restaurant near the Pentagon more active tonight than it normally is? These tiny little tea leaves that they're trying to read. I mean, that's really good, though. I mean, that's really good thinking.
[00:41:57] Oh, it's brilliant. It's brilliant. It's great paranoia. But there's a fundamental flaw to it. And the fundamental flaw is that it's looking for patterns. And we're humans. We will always find a pattern. We are so good at finding patterns. And we're good at finding patterns even when no pattern exists. That is true. We do. And when we are feeling threatened, and this is something that Lee and I talk a lot about when we're talking about conspiracy theories, false ones, when we feel threatened, when
[00:42:26] we feel out of control, our brains just naturally provide us with more patterns as we frantically try to detect threats around us. Because we're trying to make sense of the world. We're trying to make sense of the world. And the more threatening the world is, the more desperate we are to make sense of it. The way we make sense of it is trying to find patterns. And something familiar. And something familiar and something sensical. But sometimes it's just a bunch of random stuff that's going on.
[00:42:51] The example that I often tell my students is, imagine for a second you're in a relationship. You feel a sense of trust and security. And I let them feel that way for a bit and just enjoy it. And in that relationship of trust and security, your partner checks their cell phone a little bit more often. They get a haircut. And they're going to the gym. What does that add up to? Just a bunch of stuff. Who cares? On the other hand, now put yourself in a situation where you don't feel trust. You feel insecure.
[00:43:21] And you notice that your partner is checking their cell phone more often. They got a haircut. And they got a haircut. And now suddenly they're going to the gym. And all of a sudden they're going to the gym. So what's going on? It's a threatening pattern. They're cheating on you. So this is the problem when you're trying to detect patterns from a position of paranoia. And think about the Soviet system. If the head of the KGB is paranoid, and he will be. But hold on.
[00:43:50] The head of the KGB, it's his job to be paranoid. That's like job description number one. Are you paranoid? Yes. Head of KGB. Yeah. Because if you're not paranoid, you're going to get bumped off. Yeah. And so that paranoia kind of makes sense. But then all of the underlings who are trying to survive in this system, are they going to challenge the paranoia? Or are they going to feed the paranoia? What's more politically expedient? I mean, in that system, you're going to be paranoid too.
[00:44:17] No one's going to challenge the person in power if that means you're going to be killed. Yeah. There's psychological reasons for individuals to find patterns where none exist. And there's also political and structural reasons that reinforce and encourage finding those patterns. Which means that Operation Rion, which is looking at tea leaves, which is looking at like pizza restaurants and parking lots and church attendants. Are you going to be able to look out through a paranoid lens at the United States and say, wait a second, I think they're about to launch something?
[00:44:47] If you think the U.S. is about to launch something, then you're going to find the pattern that supports that. This is the danger. This is the feedback loop. This is the feedback loop of paranoia. And then you're going to be more prepared for it. That preparation that you're doing is going to cause the other side to say, whoa, look at all this preparation. What do they know? What do they know? What are they up to? Why are they preparing like that? We better prepare. We better order some more pizza and fill these parking lots. We better stay late trying to figure out what they're doing.
[00:45:16] We better stay late to figure out what they're doing. And then all of the KGB Operation Rion agents are like, oh, they're staying super late. Why are they staying late and ordering pizza? Yep. They must be planning something. And the internal logic of the mega machine crawls us towards something that nobody wants. Is this 1983? This is 1983. Oh, my God. So in March, Reagan gives his Star Wars speech. And so now the Soviets are like, wait a minute.
[00:45:43] I thought we agreed we weren't going to prepare any sort of scientific anti-missile defense system. Yeah, they had the anti-ballistic missile treaty back in 72. The whole point of it. And although the Soviets have Riyadh, it's certainly not an active defense system. No, it's a passive information gathering system. But the U.S. was doing that too, right? Oh, yeah, of course. You know, spy missions, flying over, all of that. We were both doing that.
[00:46:12] So we were both, I mean, Operation Riyadh would have been intelligence gathering, basically. Yeah. And we were certainly doing that as well. Oh, yeah. Although, interestingly, the Soviets tended to rely more on that kind of human-based information gathering. Interesting. The Americans were more into spy planes and SIGINT. What's SIGINT? Gathering signals.
[00:46:36] Flying an airplane outside of Soviet territory with a bunch of technology on it that you could then gather signal information with. So like satellites positioning all the kind of like hard data. Yeah, exactly. Or you could, for example, the Americans could fly one of their intelligence planes close to Soviet territory to see what kind of response is generated and so that they could test the Soviet responses by playing chicken.
[00:47:00] So this is something that happened in 83 that I think is just, is dastardly the right word or stupid the right word? Probably both. So you're in a heightened situation with your enemy. And then you freaking go poke the bear. Yeah. Is literally what they're doing.
[00:47:19] We're flying our jets as close to Soviet airspace as we possibly could get, if not sometimes inside Soviet airspace, just to see how long it takes them to respond to us piercing their airspace. And to see which radar systems light up and to see where those radar systems are and to see how quickly it takes the Soviet MiGs and Sukhoi fighter planes to scramble. All of those things. That's great information. It is. But how is that not starting a war?
[00:47:48] Well, it's really close to starting a war. You could easily see how doing that could get innocent people killed. But we kept doing it. Yeah. And guess what happens on September 1st, 1983? What? A Korean Airlines flight, 747, which is supposed to fly through the Pacific Ocean. Oh, wait. Before we get to this, because this is big. Okay. Yeah. What are the other things that were happening? Because we didn't just, I mean, this is one of the things that we're doing.
[00:48:18] So for like months, we were taking our jets, flying into the Soviet airspace. Military jets. We were taking our military jets. We were flying them into Soviet space just right inside to scramble their planes to see what radar. And then we were coming back, right? So we were just kind of like poking the bear. And we were doing that routinely for months. Yep.
[00:48:38] So the Soviets then, in response, had to be on alert continuously for nine months because they didn't know if we were going to pierce and come in or we were just tickling their space. Yeah. Was this a tickle or was this an intrusion? Right. And so they were constantly on alert. And if you're on alert for nine months, you're going to be a little tired, aren't you? You're going to be a bit punchy. And a bit punchy because you think at any time they're going to come in.
[00:49:08] Didn't they lodge a complaint with someone that we had come into the airspace already? Well, I mean, back in the 1960s, the Americans have been flying U-2 spy planes over the Soviet Union. And the Soviets were saying, we know you're flying over us. And the American government was all gaslighting. No, no, no, no, no. That says more about you than it says about us. How could you say that about us after all we've been through? Until, of course, Gary Powers gets shot down in his U-2. And the Soviets were like, we've got your guy.
[00:49:36] And the American government's all, Gary, you were supposed to kill yourself. Damn you, Gary. It's all your fault. So that had been happening for decades. So now we have these military planes punching the airspace for like nine months. The Soviet military have been on high alert for nine months. And then September comes along. Yeah, September comes along and a Korean airliner full of innocent people strays into Soviet airspace.
[00:50:05] And Lee and I have an entire episode of this on our podcast, Ian Cover Up. Great podcast, by the way. You should listen. Oh, thank you. You're on it a bunch of times. I am, yeah. And there's a bunch of hypotheses as to why that Korean airliner, that 747, ended up in Soviet airspace. It could have been an issue with the way that the navigation was programmed. It could have been a deliberate choice by the Soviets to try to interfere with the navigation.
[00:50:33] And the third option is that the CIA had asked them to. Oh. Which tragically isn't as far-fetched. It isn't necessarily what I think happened, but there is evidence that it could have been why it happened. I mean, because we had been piercing their airspace. Yeah.
[00:50:52] There were, I believe, rumors or some intelligence that the U.S. had thought about using commercial planes to go into Soviet airspace for spying. There were very close ties between Korean Airlines and the CIA. Extreme close. There were particularly close ties between this particular pilot. Oh. And American intelligence and the American military.
[00:51:18] So when the plane strays into Soviet airspace, I'm guessing they tried to contact the pilot. They did. They sent up some fighter planes to intercept it. The first airplanes, they were unable to intercept it, but then Sukhoi 15 does intercept the plane. And then there's a lot of debate about what happened next. The Soviet pilot maintained that the Korean airliner took evasive action. How much evasive action can a 747 take? Well, it was nighttime.
[00:51:48] It was very dark. And so there was discussion about how, you know, they changed altitudes. They changed headings. They didn't respond. Obviously, the Korean government, the American government says, no, that's not what happened. What they say what happened was that basically that Soviet interceptor murdered hundreds of innocent people on that plane because it fired a missile, knocked it out of the sky, sent it into the ocean. And killed, what, 200 and something? A little less than 300 people.
[00:52:16] Innocent people who had, were just trying to get to Japan. They had nothing to do with any of this. Mm-mm. Regardless of why it was there, the people that were on that flight... Were completely innocent. Were completely innocent and were all murdered by the Cold War. Jeez. So was the black box recovered? Well, I mean, this is a very long and complicated story. So I encourage anybody who's curious, go to the Uncover Up and look for the episode on KAL 007. Okay.
[00:52:45] KAL 007. Mm-hmm. So this might be a good place to end because this sets the stage of what we're going to talk about next. Yeah, there's two awful things that are about to happen. One, September 26, we're all about to come very close to all dying. Yes. And then in November, we're going to come very close to all dying. Yes.
[00:53:06] And the tension kind of starts here because the Soviets are tired because we've been basically harassing them all year. Yep. Which leads them to think that we are spying on them using a civilian plane. Their paranoid leadership is convinced that they can read the tea leaves and the chicken entrails and say, oh, my goodness, look at this parking lot. An attack is imminent. And they've convinced themselves it is.
[00:53:36] And so this plane gets shot down. Obviously, everyone around the world is just aghast that this has happened. I believe the pilot is hailed as a hero in Russia. Yeah, the pilot of the Interceptor, yeah. And they stand by that they did nothing wrong. Yep. So things are bad. Innocent people have been killed. Things are very bad. And the way that 1983 ends is absolutely chilling. All right. Thank you.