[00:00:05] Welcome to My Nuclear Life. I'm Shelly Lesher and today we are recording part two of 1983. So, of course, I have with me Nathan. Nathan Radke Who survived 1983? Mary Beth Leary And we have brought on Lee. Lee Lee Hiya. I kind of almost sort of remember 1983. Mary Beth Leary Oh, you're just a kid. Mary Beth Leary I'm a little baby.
[00:00:33] Mary Beth Leary Little baby. He's not quite from the late 1900s, is he? Lee Lee Yeah. No, I was alive. And as I say, I even have some memories. I was five years old in 1983. Mary Beth Leary Aw, he's so cute, Nathan. Lee Lee I know. We were the advanced age of eight. Mary Beth Leary Yep. Lee Lee And that's almost where we all stopped. Mary Beth Leary Yeah, exactly. Lee Lee Almost. Almost. Absolutely. Lee Lee There is a timeline where we all stopped in 1983.
[00:01:01] Mary Beth Leary Yes. Let's do a little recap in case people don't remember part one of 1983, which took us all the way, what, Nathan, to October? Lee Lee Just the very beginning of September. Mary Beth Leary Okay. Very beginning of September. So do you want to do a little recap? Lee Lee Yeah, a brief recap of 1983 and why that was one of the most dangerous years in human history. Lee Lee But a context, Cold War had been going on for 35 years. Mary Beth Leary Yep.
[00:01:27] Lee Lee There had been a space race. There had been at least three significant and catastrophic proxy wars with Korea, Angola, and Vietnam. Lee Lee There was the relative optimism and progress of the detente of the 1970s with the end of the Vietnam War, all sorts of things like SALT, the strategic arms limitation talks, the anti-ballistic missile treaty, prevention of nuclear war agreement in 1973. Lee Lee There was new agreements and there was new understandings and there was a thawing.
[00:01:57] Lee Lee And it looked at first in the 1970s like we might be able to work our way out of the situation that we had gotten ourselves into. Mary Beth Leary Looked very promising. Very promising. Lee Lee It was promising. And then we were all born and then things went very, very badly indeed. I mean, that detente was... Lee Lee Wait, wait, wait. Are you saying that there's a correlation here? Lee Lee Well, there is a correlation. I don't necessarily think it's causation. I'm not blaming us. Lee Lee Okay.
[00:02:26] Lee Lee Although we didn't do anything to stop it either. Lee Lee I mean, I was five. Lee Lee And what did you do to stop all of this? Lee Lee You did nothing, Lee. Nothing. Lee Lee He just stood there. He just sat back while the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, which of course replaced all of that optimism with a lot of increased fervor and paranoia and Manichean thinking. In America, you had Ronald, evil empire Reagan. Lee Damn it. Lee Lee In the Soviet Union. Now by 83, you had Yuri KGB Andropov. And all of that progress that had been made.
[00:02:55] Lee Lee Evaporated like a popsicle in an A-bomb test. Lee Lee Not just back to where we were, but kind of further than that. Lee Lee There was a cranking up of the paranoia. And we talked about this in the last episode. In large part, because of something that the Soviets were doing called Operation Ryan or Operation Rion. As we discussed before, that was basically the Soviet intelligence apparatus trying to read tea leaves to decide,
[00:03:24] Lee Lee Are the Americans going to launch a first strike on us. But there are historical reasons why the Soviet Union, especially the leadership at the time, would have been like really sensitive to the idea that they were going to get sneak attacked. Lee This is why we brought in Lee.
[00:03:42] Lee So we had a pretty stable period in the Soviet leadership. We have Khrushchev. He is leader for about 10 years. And after him, we got Brezhnev. And he is leader from 64 to 82.
[00:03:55] Lee Now, here's where some of the problem begins in terms of why are they so convinced and why are they so worried. Part of the issue is that we have these really old leaders. Now, I was actually surprised. I looked up Brezhnev's age and he's around 75 when he dies. But this 75 in the late 70s, early 80s is a different 75. Lee Yeah, he's a Soviet 75. Lee Yeah, he's a Soviet 75.
[00:04:22] Lee Yeah, who had smoked and drank a lot throughout his life. Like this was, they, this leadership is really aged, is really quite decrepit. So after Brezhnev, we get Andropov. And as Nathan alluded to, Andropov had been the head of the KGB during the height of the Cold War, right? Lee So he's coming in with a certain mindset, like if you have an intelligence head in the Cold War coming in as leader, there's a certain idea about what the West NATO America is going to do.
[00:04:52] Lee Well, it's certainly the height of paranoia. Lee Exactly. This is, you know, the height of spying, the height of the missile buildup, the height of the rhetoric. And what's really important in understanding this cadre's paranoia was the fact that they were actually all around during Operation B.
[00:05:11] Lee Well, Operation Barbarossa. Operation Barbarossa is when the Nazis surprise attack the Soviet Union. Of course, if you're going to attack a country the size of the Soviet Union, you're going to need a lot of troop buildup. Now, Hitler had promised Stalin that he was not going to attack. Lee Wait, wait, wait, wait. We got to back up here. Lee Yeah, yeah, yeah. Lee What year is Barbarossa? Lee Oh, my God. And you're going to make me look it up. Lee I am. Lee 1941. Lee Okay, so we're in...
[00:05:41] Lee 1983. And they're going back to 1941. So 40 years earlier, like, for the war. Lee When they were young Soviets. Lee When they were young Soviets. Lee And in their formative years. Lee Okay. Lee And they experienced this sneak attack. Lee It cannot be overstated, the political lesson that this generation of Soviet leaders took from that. The lesson was, the West is going to invade. And they're going to do it sneakily. They are going to pretend that it was just a troop.
[00:06:10] Lee This is a troop exercise. This is what Hitler had said. He's like, don't worry about it. We're just, you know, this is just an exercise. We're not planning on an actual invasion. Lee And yeah. So they're like, this is coming, guys. This is totally coming. And the way it's going to come is it's going to be a sneak attack. They're not going to be straightforward about it. Lee And so I think what listeners may not remember is that the Soviets and the Nazis were allies at the beginning of the war.
[00:06:38] Lee Exactly. And Hitler had given assurances, we will never attack the Soviet Union. Stalin believed it. A lot of his second-in-command types were quite skeptical. But, you know, if it's Stalin who says this is the way it is, then you best agree. Lee Exactly. And so Stalin, too, was absolutely shocked and horrified that the attack came.
[00:07:00] Lee So the Nazis started building up troops along the Soviet-German border and eventually attacked the Soviet Union. And then the enemy of my enemy is my friend, which is how we became allies with the Soviets. Lee Yeah, for that period. Exactly. So people like Rezhnev and Andropov, this is the crucible that forms their political identity.
[00:07:27] Lee So basically, your allies are never actually your allies. Lee No, not if you're dealing with the West. This is an alliance to beat the fascists. But in Soviet ideology, too, you have to understand that there is a through line between democratic capitalism and fascism. Lee Fascism is just the natural conclusion of democratic capitalism. Lee To the Soviets.
[00:07:50] Lee Yeah, to the Soviets, to Soviet ideology. These are not two separate things. But fascism, obviously, being worse, you make a pact with the devil and, you know, like combined for World War II. Lee So, of course, in all of this, Nathan also noted, you have to incorporate the logic of the first strike. If you're dealing with now a surprise attack in a nuclear age, and if you're going to use nuclear weapons, you better, you know, you better get it over with pretty quick.
[00:08:17] Lee This is what they're expecting. And Viktor Shebrakov, he's the head of the KGB under Andropov. So during 1983 crisis that we're talking about with the shooting down of the airline and what we're going to get into.
[00:08:30] Lee And while he is not as old as the rest of the leadership, he is just one of these hard liners. Like he says over and over again, the West is coming to attack us. It's not a question of if, but when. I've heard an interview with him after the fall of the Soviet Union where he still maintained that. Lee Wow. Lee He was like, I was not wrong about this. It didn't happen. But that's not because they didn't want to or weren't going to. It was totally going to happen.
[00:08:59] Lee So this is the leadership that we are dealing with. And then, yeah, now, because they already, quote unquote, know that this is happening. And the question is just knowing when they deployed this thing called Operation Grian, which is basically, you can think of it like a checklist of like 100 different items. Lee I think there was 293. Lee Wow.
[00:09:22] Lee Nathan would know such a thing. And what they're looking for is stuff like, well, obviously, is there any kind of military buildup? Like, are we moving missiles around? Are we moving troops around? But also, is there an increase in phone traffic amongst Western leaders? Is there an increase in the defensive stance of US embassies abroad? All these kinds of things and much more besides.
[00:09:46] Lee And so they had agents in West Berlin, in other parts of Europe, and to a lesser extent in America, kind of going through a checklist being like, uh-huh. Yeah, this is happening. This is happening. This is happening. This is happening. So this sets the stage then for the catastrophic, I would claim it an accident of the shooting down of KAL 007. And then the two stories that we're talking about today.
[00:10:12] Lee And there's a technological aspect to this as well, as you would expect being the Cold War. In Operation Barbarossa, to actually launch an invasion of men, like often drawn by horses in Barbarossa. Like that's an invasion that even with early tanks, it's still not happening that quickly. And then by the 50s and 60s, you'd be worried about bomber planes coming over.
[00:10:33] Lee And destroying our cities with nuclear bombs. But by 1983, it's completely different. It would take about 22 hours to lumber an old B-36 from America to Moscow. That gives you some time to react. But now we're talking about a situation where you have submarines offshore with missiles. And rather than 22 hours for the bombs to show up, now it's 10 minutes.
[00:10:56] Lee Yeah. And hadn't the Pershing missiles just been like kind of ostentatiously moved around Germany to be like, yeah, look, we can just send these and they're going to be absolutely catastrophic. And that was, of course, a real saber rattling kind of move. And the kind of thing that would show up on your Project REAN checklist to be like, we should be careful because those sneaky NATO guys are definitely, definitely up to something.
[00:11:23] Lee Yeah. And the other distinctions, the bombers could be called back. The missiles can't be called back. Lee Nope. Lee That means that the time that you have to decide what you are going to do is basically dwindle down to zero amount of time, which is why you see all this prognostication, why you see all of these predictions, why you see, you almost have to see the attack before the attack happens.
[00:11:46] Lee Now, to account for this, to account for the fact that basically you have zero amount of time now, more and more systems and protocols are being put into place to streamline the time between detecting the threat to you and then becoming a threat yourself. And this is where we have to take a step back for a second. And Lee, you're going to be excited. And shall we, you'll be less excited. We have to talk a little social science.
[00:12:09] Lee Okay. I learned about machinism. What did I learn about last week? Manichaeism. Lee Yes, there you go. Lee Manichaeanism. Lee Manichaeanism. Lee Yeah, but Lee and I do this when we're talking to actual scientists as a way to make ourselves feel a little bit better. So there's been a longstanding sociological debate called the structure versus agency debate. And it goes like this. Humans are individuals, but humans are also individuals.
[00:12:38] They're also hyper-social and exist in societies and cultures. So the question has always been amongst social scientists, what's stronger structure or agency? If you put an individual human into a specific situation, what breaks first? Can the individual alter the situation? Or is the situation going to break the individual?
[00:12:56] Lee Manichaeism. And all sorts of ink has been spilled on this. All sorts of fascinating and really flawed experiments. Milgram shock experiment, the Ash Line experiment, the Stanford prison incident, which is very famous, but I wouldn't call it an experiment because it just did not follow any kind of protocols at all. And what we're looking at today is two incidents where this structure versus agency kind of played out and played out with the highest stakes imaginable.
[00:13:25] One thing I want to note here is when there's a lot of discussion now about integrating AI into these systems. Right. I just want people to note these stories because when you integrate computer systems into these structures, you're taking out the agency part. Yep. That's entirely the point of it.
[00:13:53] The people who want to integrate AI into these systems say that taking out the agency is a good thing. Yeah. And there has been some debate about this. We'll get to that in a second. Oh, okay. The Air Force was concerned about agency. But this was, of course, back in 1983, we didn't have anything close to AI. And so what the Americans wanted to do is they wanted to try to turn the human aspect as mechanical as possible.
[00:14:20] And the way they dealt with this is through something called Scenarian conditioning of their missile and bomber crews. So repeated drills, trying to take out the thinking from an unthinkable job of ending the world. You want to put Armageddon into the muscle memory of the men being asked to carry it out so they're not thinking about it. Because if you think about it for a second, you're going to be confronted with the horror of it. And maybe you don't do your job. Maybe you don't push the button. Maybe you don't set the alarm. Maybe you don't pull the lever.
[00:14:50] Maybe you don't do the thing that you're supposed to do because your agency gets in the way. And the Soviets were almost certainly doing the exact same thing. Not only because they had the same worries at the Americans, but because even going back to the days of Pavlov, Soviet psychology was obsessed with conditioning. And the hope is that you turn the human into a machine. Because the fear is that the weakest link in the nuclear war chain is going to be someone who loses their nerve.
[00:15:16] And so the whole point of all that conditioning, and also the point of replacing things with AI, is to kind of triumph structure over agency. Trying to eradicate agency. Because there's a fear. It's understandable why you'd have a fear of agency. There were individual commanders or even individual pilots who had direct control over nuclear weapons. And so if they used their agency to say, hey, you know what? I'm going to fire this thing off.
[00:15:42] You could have individual people using their agency to start a nuclear war. But what if your structure is bad? What if you have a failing structure? Well, I mean, all you have to do is just make sure you've got a perfect structure. A structure with no flaws. A structure with no weaknesses. And they were working on this. In 1962, the Kennedy administration ordered the implementation of permissioned action links on all NATO nuclear weapons in Europe.
[00:16:10] Which were basically like combination locks that required an order from the president. Oh, but we do know what those were set to, right? Zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero. That's correct, yes. Yeah. Well, that's hard to remember. And the idea was you wouldn't get like a Strangelove-esque situation where some commander goes rogue and fires off missiles without the president's order. But you could. You 100% could have. Oh, yeah. Of course.
[00:16:39] Because these structures were considerably flawed. And also conceptually flawed. Because what if the president goes rogue? Have you talked about Major Harold Herring before? No. I have not heard of Major Harold Herring. So Major Harold Herring, he was going through missile training class back in the early 1970s. And he was going to be a silo jockey. But also, Lee, what's the American leadership like?
[00:17:07] We've talked about this in our own podcast, The Uncover-Up. What's the American leadership like in the early 1970s? How's the president doing? Yeah, he's not doing great. Tricky Dick Nixon is flirting with a very serious alcohol issue.
[00:17:23] To the extent that actually people in his inner circle give the commanders a kind of like backdoor communication channel that should he call them in the middle of the night to launch some first nuclear strike. They're like, check with us first because he's not trustworthy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, because he was like people around him could see his complete and utter deterioration.
[00:17:50] And I think not apropos anything in particular world events, but like there is seems to be very much no mechanism in the United States to deal with a leader who is clearly not capable of exercising his or her duties at that level. Or any sort of judgment, rational judgment. Yeah, actually, like you're entering senility or whatever. And it's like, well, I guess we just have to hope you don't press any buttons that might make the world go boom.
[00:18:18] And of course, that was the case also in the 70s. And I think that's what the general public doesn't understand is that the president does have full authority. And once the president says to launch, there are no checks. There are no balances. There's nothing. It's launch. And everyone under them says, OK. And you know who was very concerned about that? One major Harold Herring. OK.
[00:18:47] Who was doing his missile training in the 70s under Tricky Dick Nixon. OK. And so during a training, he asks, I think, a very good question. He says, well, how can I tell if a launch order is coming from a sane president? And the answer is every launch order is a good launch order. Yeah. Well, here's the problem. They were very worried about refusal for reasons that we'll get into a little bit later. The Air Force had this sort of measurement to see if the people working were sane and reliable,
[00:19:15] the people who were actually operating the missiles. Oh, I can't wait to hear what this is. Right. So the definition of sane and reliable is measured by your willingness to execute launch orders without hesitation or question. And how do they judge this? Well, if you ask a question like, hey, how can I tell if a launch order is coming from a sane president? You're nuts. Because you are going against the structure. And so what the structure did to Herring's agency is that he was drummed out of the Air Force for not being sane and reliable.
[00:19:46] Wait. So he actually got dismissed on like section whatever that you're insane? Yeah. He was dismissed because of that question. That gives us a little taste of that structure versus agency. Herring tried to use his agency and say, well, wait a second. What if my human brain tells me this president is nuts? But the structure says, no, you have no role here then. And he is removed.
[00:20:11] And so then that takes us to the Soviet side of the equation in the second half of an already dicey 1983. And what happens in September of that year when someone else gets put into an extremely dicey and dangerous situation? So in September, we are at the point where the I guess I'm just recapping from last time that the Soviets have been up for months.
[00:20:39] What is it like nine, 10 months because the U.S. planes are tapping their airspace. Right. Yeah. For the purpose. And going back to what Lee was saying about paranoia, the purpose of the American military testing those Soviet air defenses, in part, according to a declassified NSA document, was to, quote, calculated to induce paranoia. So they knew what they were doing. Yes.
[00:21:07] They knew it would cause paranoia within the Soviets. Everyone's on high alert. They just shot down the Korean airliner. Yep. Everyone's still on high alert. The U.S. is still poking the airspace. Yep. And then on September 26th, Lee, what happens? On September 26th, a Soviet air defense man who works in missile defense.
[00:21:34] Basically, what his job is, is he oversees radar systems for incoming missiles. Right. He's part of this early warning structure that also the Soviets have. In case that there is some kind of sneaky attack that the Americans have not announced ahead of time, the Soviets would know at the latest possible moment when the missiles, you know, cross the North Pole and are heading over to the Soviet Union. Okay, we're under attack.
[00:22:02] So they have satellites in space and they are feeding this information to these radar silos across the Soviet Union. And there's one guy in particular, Stanislav Petrov on September 26th, the night of September 26th, 1983. He's on duty. He wasn't even supposed to be on duty that day. He was taking over the shift for another guy who, whatever, got sick or something. So he shows up to work.
[00:22:30] And I think this has got to be one of the most boring jobs that are out there. Right. Like, what do you do all day or in his case, all night? You just sit around like nothing's ever going to happen. You're sitting around in this bunker. You're watching these radar systems and you're, what, drinking some tea and occasionally going for a smoke break. That's your job. And it's probably a pretty nice gig if that's the kind of thing you're into. Like Nathan and I, you're not that super jazzed about working like crazy, you know, 15-hour days.
[00:23:00] This might be not a bad place. Right. It's clean. It's warm, probably. It's clean. It's warm. You're not on the front lines of anything in particular. I mean, in some metaphorical sense you are, but you're not, you know, okay. So it's a kind of a cushy job is how I imagine it, cushy and boring. Except this night does not run the way any other previous night had run.
[00:23:22] And to pick up on Nathan's point about the social sciences, one of the things that I think is particularly interesting is how history actually provides us with a lot of kind of sort of experiments. Like Shelley, as a physicist, we are envious of you guys because you can generate, in a lot of cases, actual experiments and, you know, test a theory. Yes. And in the social sciences, on the whole, we can't do that because we're dealing with populations.
[00:23:51] The question is, well, what happens if we radically lower the interest rate? Well, we can't really do that to a country, but we can see historically what happens when those things happen. And so here, we can also look historically at moments in which people were asked, what are you going to do if you're faced with potentially triggering the end of the world? And Shelley, I blame you for this mostly. Okay, thank you.
[00:24:16] I was wonderfully naive about nuclear safety until we started working together. And I was introduced to how few safety standards are really there to protect us from something just going wrong, something just accidentally happening. So here we are. Petrov is on duty the night of September 26th.
[00:24:40] And suddenly, the alarms go off that there has been a launch of an intercontinental ballistic missile from the United States. And when I say the alarms go off, this is not like a ding, ding, ding. This is like the entire complex goes red and everything starts blaring. There is a big screen that starts saying, warning, warning, warning.
[00:25:06] Of course, this would be everybody's nightmare. Absolutely. He's the guy in charge of those people who are overseeing it. He's sort of the commanding officer on duty that evening. And exactly the thing that the leadership has been worried about, that they have been sort of counting down the days to, here it is, it's happening. And of course, the United States didn't give them advance warning, because that would defeat the whole purpose of a first nuclear strike.
[00:25:35] As you well know, I know I'm not telling you anything new, Shelley, but they call it the decapitation strike, because the point is, you just send all your bombs out there. Your enemy can't do anything about it. So here it comes. So it's happening. And he's on duty. But he doesn't do anything. This is his own reporting after the fact. He's given a number of interviews. He's deceased. But, you know, after the fall of the Soviet Union, and when this story became publicized, he did give interviews about what happened.
[00:26:04] And at first, he just freezes. Then he shuts off the warning system, because he's like, this has got to be a false alarm. And also, he's like, look, if we're being attacked, somebody else is also going to hear about it. So maybe that, you know, kind of takes the decision making out of my hands. But then the alarms go off again. Oh. And now there's four more missiles that have just been launched, and they are on their way. Right.
[00:26:34] Now, I know that these numbers are going back a bit. I'm using data from the 60s. But nonetheless, it gives you some sense. A launch from the United States until impact in the Soviet Union is around 25 minutes. Slightly more, like 26 and a half minutes. So already the fact that this is, like, happening now, time is already lost. And so if these missiles, and you can't tell exactly, and he's, of course, sitting just outside of Moscow.
[00:27:04] If these missiles are on their way to Moscow, that's it. Like, Moscow's already gone. Like, it's already over. Right. Okay. So the question is, you know, what do you do? I have to pull back a little bit, because a little bit of the mythology around Stanislav Petrov, who I do think saved the world, is nonetheless, he was not personally in charge of retaliating. So he did not have a trigger where he could just be like, I'm going to push the button now,
[00:27:32] and I, on sole authority, am sending the missiles over. Oh. He was not in a position to do that. I thought he did. I thought he did have the ability to retaliate. Well, he was a very key link in the chain. And because of the way he downplayed it and dealt with it, I think he kind of reined in the Soviet leadership's potential for overreacting at this moment.
[00:27:59] And again, we've set up, this is why I wanted to spend just a little bit of time just setting up, like, who these guys were, because if the head of the KGB at that moment had heard the missiles are on their way, he is not doing any due diligence anymore. No, no. He's not checking. The action plan is, let's send all our missiles over there so at least we can get them back. Annie Jacobson does a great job of recounting what would happen in a situation like this.
[00:28:27] England is going to see things on their radar. All the other nuclear powers are going to see things on their radar. Does England know, by the way, that the missiles are going to the United States, not to England? Because England's, of course, much closer. So then they send out their missiles. France sends it, you know, and there we are. It's the end of the world. But, of course, it wasn't because we're here. So I'll just solve this mystery about what actually happened and also maybe make us even more afraid about,
[00:28:56] you know, giving this decision power over to something like AI was that there were high-altitude clouds, I think somewhere around North Dakota. And these clouds just so happened, just on that day, just by accident, to refract sunlight into the satellite, thereby triggering a false alarm, or a false positive, I guess, suggesting that it's actually a missile. So for whatever reason,
[00:29:24] the light frequency was similar enough to a missile attack that on Stanislav Petrov's radar, it was incontrovertibly a missile attack. But five times? Yeah, right. Five times. Five times. But, interestingly, you say that as in, you know, five times this happened, but it was precisely the fact that it wasn't 400 that made Petrov a bit skeptical. Because he's like, I've also heard about, you know, these first strike approaches,
[00:29:53] and you're not going to do it with five missiles. That's just inviting doom on your end. So because it wasn't a bigger number, if it had been 60 or 100 or 500, then he might have really gotten on the phone and yelled down to his leadership, we are under attack. Please do everything you can. But that's Petrov using his own analysis. That's not Petrov following protocols. No, it's precisely that he did not follow the rules.
[00:30:21] He shut it down the first time. He shut it down the second time. And he certainly wasn't blaring down the phone saying we are under attack. So what was protocol? Like, the alarm goes off the first time. I understand he turns it off because it's loud. You can't think. Like, okay, let's turn it off. Let's figure out what's going on. But still, you have 20 minutes, right? You have 20 minutes. That is not a lot of time to figure out what the hell is going on. No, and actually probably less
[00:30:48] because it's 25 or 26 and a half from launch in the U.S. But by the time it's being detected, although these are satellites, so maybe you actually do have 20 minutes. But still, say five minutes. Five minutes. I don't know what you're going to do with the extra 45 seconds in this situation. Right. Like that margin of error. Thank goodness we had that extra 45 seconds. Yeah, we're going to be generous. Say you do have the full 25 minutes. I think this is, again, this is like this decision-making is part of the problem here and leads to very bad decisions
[00:31:16] because if you have 25 minutes decision-making time and you're trying to decide in that time, even just getting the information to the people who need to know. Look, sorry, I know this is a bit of a tangent, but we saw how slow communications are during crisis, during 9-11, when it took forever to alert, relatively, right, to alert the U.S. leadership, like the president, secretary of state, those people, about what was actually happening
[00:31:46] and then trying to get them to do something about it, even just to get them to shelter or whatever, took like hours. Literally. And that was a continuity of government plan that was devised during the Cold War. They hadn't changed it. Yeah. And then you have stuff like January 6th, the storming of the Capitol, where, you know, sometimes the leadership is just like, no, I'm not going to, whatever, quote unquote, abandon my post or whatever. On the other hand, this is what they trained for.
[00:32:15] The police are trained to react very quickly. In the military, you're trained to act quickly. So the reason that people in these situations are not supposed to freeze is because they're trained so frequently and so well that they train that instinct out of you and they give you a new instinct. So wasn't Petrov trained for this situation, trained for this alarm going off, trained for him to think under this high stress situation? He certainly was. The question is, did Petrov freeze
[00:32:42] or did Petrov use his agency and make a decision? Yeah, because he would have been trained for this. They would have, I mean, especially the Soviets, especially would have done this over and over and over and over again to try to kick that agency out. Okay, look, two things. One is, I think he was actually, whatever training he got, it worked perfectly. Yes. Because we are here and we did not all die. But it was not the intent of the training that he got.
[00:33:12] It was probably not the intent. But I think the other thing is, I think at some level, and look, I'm talking out of my field here, but at some level, I think there is a difference between training and real life. And I think you know the difference. You know, when you're in a training exercise, the very fact that it's training that is something that is in your brain and you're going to behave in a certain way. Right. There is a difference between those two things, which is why we have something that is this weird combination of the two,
[00:33:41] something that isn't quite reality and isn't quite training, something that we call simulation. And the second story that we have, because you'd think, okay, we dodged a bullet there or dodged hundreds of nuclear bullets. With the Petrov situation, Petrov used his agency despite being within that structure and he was able to use his human brain to analyze and make the correct decision. But we're not through 1983 yet and we haven't survived yet. And I think it's about to get even more dangerous, amazingly.
[00:34:11] Before we move on, every, you do this with your students and we should do it with all podcast listeners because this episode comes out on September 26th. Yes. That's true. Okay. So, happy Stanislav Petrov Day. Happy Stanislav Petrov Day. Please take a moment to just thank Stanislav Petrov that he did not follow orders and that we are here today. Go look at some trees, go look at some
[00:34:41] non-nuclear irradiated birds, go look at all the grass that we still have and the farmland and all of that kind of stuff. I think basically anything you do on Stanislav Petrov Day is appropriate to celebrate with the potential exception of fireworks. Agreed. And you should put it in your calendar and remind yourself every year. Yeah, let's force this holiday into existence. We really want to because Petrov
[00:35:10] kind of disappeared also in the Soviet Union. He was neither really reprimanded. He certainly was not promoted for his disobedience. And only after the Soviet Union's collapse did this story become known. But I still don't think it's known enough. Like, I really think that we should celebrate Stanislav Petrov Day at least as fervently as your favorite other holiday. 100% agree. Can we get presents like on Christmas or dress up as our favorite Soviet? presence on Earth
[00:35:39] is present enough. Ah. Oh. That's okay. Okay. So this podcast will definitely be celebrating September 26 from now on. Oh, yeah. Absolutely. And all of our students do because I force them to put in their phones. And now we're forcing, well, we are trying to force all of my 20 podcast listeners to do so as well. All 20 of them. Yeah. Right. Yeah. But the world does not know that they just survived September 26. They won't know
[00:36:08] for a decade or more. Yeah. But we're still not done. Yeah, no, because thanks to Cold War secrecy and lack of communications, the Americans didn't know how close we had just gotten to nuclear annihilation. And thanks to Cold War secrecy and lack of communication, the Americans didn't realize how close they were about to be to push the world towards nuclear annihilation. because this is something we've already been talking about. Part of the way you condition your forces is to react instantly in those situations
[00:36:37] through constant drills. But military leaders had been concerned after the two world wars about something called the non-firers. And these were soldiers. They'd been trained to be expert shots. But you'd put them in the field against actual people and they would deliberately fire over the heads of enemies to avoid killing them. Because it turns out humans don't like killing humans. Huh. I know I'm surprised too because we've done it very well for thousands of years, but I haven't
[00:37:06] and you guys haven't. Human beings don't tend to want to kill other human beings. Even if they're trained? There were reports. Even if they're trained to do it? You can turn them into a good shot, but that's different than turning somebody into a killer. And there were reports. These reports, of course, have been, you know, questioned over the years, but certainly the U.S. military believed these reports when they came out, that the non-firing rate in World War II was 80%. What? And this was a problem. So to reduce this, the way that soldiers
[00:37:36] were trained was shifted. Instead of firing at static targets shaped like bullseyes, which makes great marksmen, but not necessarily killers, now they're firing at moving targets shaped like the human form. And unlike the bullseyes, which you'd shoot out for a bit and then you'd walk down the range to see what you did, these targets that are shaped like humans, when you hit them, they go down immediately, giving you that instant sense of reward. And in a similar fashion, you can run all the drills and practices you want, but that doesn't necessarily
[00:38:05] reduce the non-firing rate at the nuclear level. And so, what they were doing is they were going to run a simulation. Not a practice, not a drill, but a simulation. Something that kind of blurs the distinctions between the false and the real. And it was called Able Archer. And Able Archer was a war game simulation. You're going to actually behave as though this is really happening, that this war is real. Even NATO leaders were part of the simulation
[00:38:35] and were asked to behave and act as though the exercise was a real thing. This doesn't sound good. It's not going to go well. It's going to get worse in a second because the purpose was to simulate a nuclear attack, a sneak nuclear attack on the Soviet Union. Oh, no. The exact thing that the Soviet leadership is petrified about, the exact thing that the Soviet intelligence agencies are reading tea leaves to try to discover and predict, the Americans say, hey,
[00:39:05] let's simulate that exact thing. Ugh. Quote, to practice command and staff procedures with particular emphasis on the transition from conventional to non-conventional operations, including the use of nuclear weapons. So they had a whole backstory to the simulation. There was going to be a series of proxy wars in the Middle East that spiraled out of control. What? Like? I know, unthinkable. How could that have happened? I mean, but Afghanistan was happening.
[00:39:34] It sure was. And so that gave them a nice little bit of background to make the simulation feel more real and to be more accurate to reality. Okay. I'm scared to ask what was next in the simulation. So the next thing that they said was, and then they were going to assume that Yugoslavia would align with NATO and then that would cause a rise in tensions which would have then result in the Soviets invading Finland with conventional forces and then West Germany. And so then the question is,
[00:40:04] how would NATO respond to that situation? And the simulation starts on November 7th. On November 8th, the idea is the NATO conventional forces are unable to contain the Warsaw Pact and so permission is requested by NATO commanders to use limited nuclear powers to destroy a Soviet city. On November 10th, the Soviets are still attacking despite the loss of one of their cities and so permission is requested for a full-on nuclear strike against all Soviet targets.
[00:40:34] On November 11th, Remembrance Day, permission is given and the full-on nuclear attack is simulated. So this happened? This is what they did. This is how they were acting. This is how they were behaving as if this was a real thing. And were the leaders of both the U.S. and U.K. involved? A lot of the NATO leaders, like the actual leaders themselves, were involved in this, in their movements, in the places they went, in the meetings they had. This was all simulated
[00:41:04] as if it was a real thing. Ronald Reagan was actually supposed to go to Europe to participate, but at the last minute, and I'm not exactly sure why, pulled out of it, but it was at that level. And I know that Nathan was recounting that this is NATO, but we have to understand what the simulation was trying to kind of give everybody a sense of how to coordinate their troops, how to coordinate the approaches, because this is now not just
[00:41:33] the United States versus the Soviet Union. This is a NATO versus Warsaw. This is a multi-nation alliance. I guess one of the things, I'm sure Nathan will get to it, but what does the Abel Archer simulation look like to Soviet spies in Europe? Yeah, because remember, the Soviet spies under Operation Ryan have been asking questions like, hey, are there lines at the blood bank? Whereas now what they're seeing in these three days, in real life, in this simulation,
[00:42:04] is NATO forces have been put on full alert. They remain there for the entire simulation. American Air Force bases are simulating loading aircraft with nuclear ordnance. I believe I read they were actually at DEFCON 1. Yeah. And there are also some reports from people who were there that real warheads were used in these simulations. What? And there was also a large, again, this is, a lot of this is going to go through the signals, so it might not actually match necessarily
[00:42:34] troops' movements on the ground, but there will be, again, if you're just looking at the signals intelligence, it looks like half a million American troops are being made ready to go to Europe. And, you know, this is starting to look extremely alarming. The Soviet leadership had access to some of the signals communication and they were hearing this constant ramp up of the NATO leaders, you know, like getting more and more ready
[00:43:04] to do this, to implement that, to go to DEFCON 1. So it was looking really serious from the Soviet perspective. Part of the simulation were sending nuclear orders over teletype. And the Soviets were picking that up. Well, here's the thing. In 1990, the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, or the PFAIB, they reviewed the Soviet response to Abel Archer. And they concluded that, oh boy, like the Soviets had ramped up their own military intelligence activities
[00:43:33] considerably, like to an unparalleled scale. The Soviets had started transporting their own nuclear weapons in preparation for war. All non-essential military aircraft operations were paused to ensure that the Soviet Air Force was absolutely ready for what they assumed was about to happen. The situation was wildly out of hand. In East Germany, they were actually deploying these kind of like trucks that had short-range nuclear missiles in them. They were deploying nuclear weapons for real. Yep.
[00:44:03] They were like, okay, we got to get ready now. It's coming. Yeah, because of the, that's how realistic that simulation was and also the danger of simulation. Like if you were going to fake a bank robbery, you could do it with actors and you could do it with sets. If you're going to simulate a bank robbery, you do it in a bank. There is not much distinction between simulation and reality. And of course, they were expecting it. Like again, this is where I had to have that moment with myself. It was like, hold on,
[00:44:33] and Andropov just get on the telephone and call Reagan and see if something's up. No, Andropov, first of all, is in hospital. He has been for like the last year or two. He is not healthy. He is not, sorry, this is a bit of a tangent, but Gorbachev, by contrast, was this sprightly young chicken who was like out meeting Reagan and Thatcher and going around the world. Like Andropov's in a hospital bed. All his communications are coming from the newspaper and the KGB and mostly the KGB is the one
[00:45:03] who he's hearing about. And of course, we know that the KGB, it's Cheberkov, who is a hardliner who is still up until his deathbed was expecting the Americans were going to come and invade. So they already were expecting it. Yeah. So just to reiterate that. Things are really spiraling out of control. And here's how this could spiral even further out of control. The Americans realize that the Soviets are ramping up, so then the Americans ramp up. In reality, and they're already prepared to because they're already simulating a ramp up.
[00:45:33] And then things get ramped up and then we go off the ramp and then we go through the burning ring of nuclear annihilation. At this exact moment, we have an intelligence officer with the American Air Force in Europe, Leonard Perutz. And Leonard Perutz receives the information that the Soviets are ramping things up, that they're preparing their nuclear weapons, that they're preparing their air force, that they are moving missiles, that they are doing all of these things.
[00:46:03] And he is placed into a similar situation that Petrov had just been in, like a couple of weeks earlier. And what he is supposed to do is he's supposed to report that immediately to the higher-ups who will then overreact to it and then we've got ourselves an even worse situation somehow. And what Perutz does is nothing. What Perutz chooses to do is again go against the structure and use his agency and make what was I'm sure
[00:46:32] an extremely difficult decision to be like, no, I can't report this. Because if I report this, then this will inevitably spiral off into madness. And later on, he said that he did this on instinct, that it was already a tense situation and he thought this will tip it over, this will be the catalyst. to just add something extra to what Nathan was just noting is that Operation Ryan, like what are the incentive structures for the agents on the ground, right?
[00:47:02] So if you say nothing's happening, your leadership who is convinced that something is going to happen any moment, it's like you're a bad agent. You're not paranoid enough. Yeah, you're just like hanging out enjoying the West German lifestyle and you're not actually getting us the real info. So a lot of times very innocuous things were packaged to look more dangerous than they were because the spies themselves knew that that's what their leaders were looking for. So if you want to keep your boss
[00:47:31] off your back, you tell them, oh yeah, you know, there are slightly longer lines at the blood bank today. The lights at the embassy have stayed on suspiciously long time this evening. The Pentagon pizza joint is just like packed today. So beyond just beyond the actual signals intelligence that were coming in that suggested something very real was happening, you're also getting this other intelligence that was coming in that was sort of supporting it as well. This sounds like I'm going to contradict my point. Not everybody went along with it as Nathan notes.
[00:48:00] There was another agent, an agent that had gotten himself ensconced in NATO but was working for the Soviets. His cover name was Topaz, he's a German. He also has been interviewed subsequently and he is totally unrepentant. Like, he was like, yeah, yeah, yeah, the West and capitalism absolutely awful. My job was to destroy it. But he was one of the voices that was saying, I'm sorry guys, I'm not seeing it. Like, I'm not seeing it on the ground here. There would be
[00:48:30] other things that are happening. So there were some voices that were coming in that were trying to de-escalate. But this is within a cacophony of other signals coming in to suggest, well, it's probably happening. And oh, don't forget, they did it to us before in Operation Barbarossa. This is the thing about structure versus agency. One of the nice things about structure is that it kind of removes our responsibility. If Petrov had said, oh, this isn't my responsibility, I'm not going to be firing the missiles. I'm just going to
[00:48:59] follow my protocols and I'm going to report this up. I'm going to follow orders. That still results in the missiles getting fired eventually or makes it more likely. With Perutz, he wasn't in charge of firing missiles back, but he was part of a structure which would have then the internal logic of which would have made it more likely that missiles are firing. And so within those structures, these two individual human beings, while they don't have the capacity to launch attacks, they're part of a greater system that is going to
[00:49:28] result in that happening. But even within those structures, you see the decisions made by these people do have like an outsized impact. In 1989, Perutz is the head of the DIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and writes an official memo detailing his concern that, you know what, I don't think American intelligence realized how close to total destruction we were in 1983. That memo is what encourages the PFIAB to
[00:49:58] review the events of 1983. And looking back, we can say, holy cow, that was so close. It wasn't until 89 that we realized how close we were. That's when there was an official government report on it, which then stayed classified for like another 20 years or so. But there's something I want to end off with because something else happens in November. Oh wait, we're not done yet. We're not done yet. Because my question is, does, so the exercise, Able Archer
[00:50:27] just ends. No big deal. Well it ends, it was supposed to end. It was going to be this sort of like slightly less than a week long affair. So Reagan, bastard, doesn't know that this happens. Like, he's completely unaware how close. And at this point, at this point in 1983, Reagan is a fanatical pro-nuclear war advocate. Yes. Like, he has made a decision, and this sounds bizarre, he's made a decision earlier
[00:50:57] in 1983 that he wants enough nuclear weapons that the Americans could be in a nuclear war for six months, and then after that war, still be prepared for a second nuclear war. But there wouldn't be a second nuclear war. Well, that's the thing. That's the thing that's ridiculous and bizarre and absurd about all of this, but that's the level to which Reagan, at that point to 1983, is committed to this idea of nuclear war. Are we going to talk about the same thing that happened on November 20th, 1983? I think we
[00:51:27] are, so why don't you take it? So, one of our favorite films debuts on November 20th, 1983, and that is The Day After, on ABC to 100 Million Viewers. And we've talked about this before, we have a whole episode on it, where I talk about how little eight-year-old Shelly got to stay up late and watch it for God knows why, and it impacted me, but it also impacted someone else, and that was
[00:51:56] Ronald Reagan. Yeah, it scared the pants off him, and I think it scared the pants off a lot of people, you know, because there's a very big gulf between the bluster and ravato of first nuclear strike and where we can survive this and all of that, and then actually seeing the reality of what something like that would look like, even if you survived it. Right? And so, seeing what it would actually look like, and it's interesting because the film has a disclaimer, I think at the end,
[00:52:26] which says something to the effect of a real strike would be a lot worse than this. it was extremely understated. Yeah. It's extremely understated, and nonetheless, even in its understatement, you're like, I don't want any part of this, because it does bring out some of the tertiary problems as well, like the farmers who have survived are now told that they need to scrape off the topsoil, and then the question is, well, how are we supposed to grow any food in what's left? Because, of course, the topsoil is where all the nutrients are.
[00:52:56] So, you're like, yeah, you can't eat the meat, you can't farm anything, the cities are destroyed, and it's just, and that really scared Reagan, and I think it was instrumental in a shift that then leads to what would have been an actual elimination of nuclear bombs had they gone through with it under Reagan and Gorbachev. Yeah, so I have that historians credit the movie with shaking his confidence in peace through strength, which is what it was,
[00:53:26] and his diary said it was very effective and left me greatly depressed. What an extraordinary way to end 1983. Yeah, a year where we came close to destruction so many times, the thing that pulled us back, in some cases, were people using their individual agency, and in some cases, rather than the actual events that were transpiring, the thing that was convincing was a TV movie. I want to just remind us of something, a quote that I came across,
[00:53:55] and this is by General Lee Butler, and he was the last strategic air commander, and he said, we escaped the Cold War without a nuclear holocaust with some combination of skill, luck, and divine intervention. And I think that's true, but I also think that is not good enough. It is not good enough that we have to risk the entire world's survival on Stanislav Petrov not following orders, or Abel Archer
[00:54:25] not being taken quite as seriously by the Soviets, or not seriously enough in time that they were able to launch their first strike. We got away with it so many times by luck, and this is just, what, four months in 1983. There are a lot of other examples like this. I mean, if this was the only thing you could point to, I'd still say, not good enough, we're in a really dangerous situation. But unfortunately, this is happening a lot. There are so many times, I know I'm looking at Shelley,
[00:54:55] but Shelley knows all this. There are so many times where dumb accidents or misunderstandings have brought us to the edge of absolute destruction. That is actually a perfect setup because what Lee, you might not know is that Nathan and I have talked about we're going to talk about more of these things on My Nuclear Life in the future.
[00:55:25] This podcast was edited by Resonate Recordings.