Snafu a podcast on Able Archer 83 a NATO war game that nearly caused a nuclear war

Remember war games the 80s movie with Matthew Broderick hacking a computer to run a war game and inadvertently nearly destroying the world in nuclear fire when people think its real

Great fiction classic Hollywood Peak 80s as the kids say demure but as it turns out perhaps not so fictional after all as only a few months after that films release a NATO exercise called Able Archer came terrifyingly close to causing a nuclear war.

Season one of this podcast Snafu tells the story of Able Archer 83 and how a series of events and a lot of cold war posturing and paranoia led to the Russians thinking the US was about to attack them with nukes under the cover of a military exercise and so came perilously close to launching their own nukes in a first strike.

The story includes spies with spy tech calculators, double agents wearing false gotee beard, a passenger jet being shot down after it was mistaken for a spy plane, dodgy malfunctioning Soviet era nuke detection tech that mistook sun reflecting off clouds for icbm launches, unreliable predictive algorithm called Ryan supposed to predict when the US will strike with nukes based on things like the number of lights on in the Pentagon, dodgy Strangelove Esq doomsday weapon dead man switch auto nukes, reviews of films from the period taken from Ronald Reagans diary where he gets mad about things like Dolly Parton pretending to smoke pot

Its a fascinating story that was mostly covered up at the time and only came to light through some people digging into the archives and trying to get access to the classified documents that would tell the whole story.

Its one of those moments that if things had gone slightly differently maybe the world would have ended and even now its difficult to say how close we got to disaster. Its also clear how little we've learned from things like this how we are still just tap dancing on the rim of a volcano and it would only take a small misunderstanding or miscalculation to make the fallout games a reality.

Anyway great podcast on a very interesting bit of not widely known history. Narrated/hosted by Ed Helms who was in the hangover movie. They also have a second season on a raid on an FBI field office where activists stole all the documents and gradually leaked them but I've not listened to that yet.