Were we saved from nuclear annihilation by a bottle of vodka?

[00:00:03] Welcome to My Nuclear Life. I'm Shelly Lesher. And again, I have Nathan Radke here. Hello, I'm back. And it's amazing that either of us are here at all. It is. It is. And that any of our listeners are here. Yeah. See, this is the thing. We've got a bit of a trend in the last few episodes. It's not an exaggeration to say that when I was a kid and when you were a kid, we were terrified of someday seeing mushroom clouds. Absolutely. Yes.

[00:00:29] Like, that's not a rhetorical flourish. I remember being a kid and being terrified of the thought of a mushroom cloud on the horizon. Now, I was old enough because I was like seven or eight. So I was old enough to know that my hometown of Orangeville, Ontario, was not going to be a target. So in my imagination, the mushroom cloud was always over a more impressive nearby city. So it was a horizon thing.

[00:00:50] Well, I, however, was not far from Chicago. And there was a lot of auto industry and airplane industry in my city. Oh, yeah. So I could have easily been a target or have gotten the effects of a weapon hitting Chicago. I'm sure. I'm pretty close to being sure that there would have been some weapons aimed at Chicago.

[00:01:19] I'm sure there would have been. I mean, it's a major metropolitan city in the Midwest. So probably. Yeah. Orangeville, not so much. I mean, I would have been cooked anyway. And looking back at like at your other childhood fears, a lot of them seem kind of foolish and unjustified. Looking back on this childhood fear, maybe I was underreacting. Wait, what were some of your other childhood fears? Quicksand.

[00:01:41] You know, I was just talking about this with my spouse about how little quicksand has impacted my adulthood and how much fear it was in my childhood. Yeah. Everybody about our age says that it must have been a Gilligan's Island episode or something. Well, and it was Atari. Oh, Pitfall. Pitfall.

[00:02:06] Pitfall. It was Pitfall. Yeah. Some sort of combination of Gilgans Island reruns and Pitfall is the reason that everybody, all the Gen Xers were all convinced that quicksand was going to be a legit problem. Absolutely. That you were going to lose at least one person to quicksand. Yeah. If you had told me that I was going to drown in quicksand, I'd be like, yeah, that checks it. That checks, yeah. But here's the thing. Despite the fact that I've never even come close to drowning in quicksand, I only have one friend who has been caught in quicksand. And I'm a very popular person.

[00:02:36] That's impressive that you have one friend. And that that one friend has also been caught in quicksand as a child. That's impressive. But the thing is, if you look at the amount of times that we've almost died in nuclear war, and we've looked at a few of those examples, it's, again, kind of legit shocking that either of us are here. Yes. I mean, just in our lifetime, as ancient as we are, 1979, there was the NORAD training tape glitch. Oh, yeah. We should cover that one day.

[00:03:07] Yeah. That's its own episode, obviously. Absolutely. A computer operator accidentally puts in the wrong tape and it's like, oh, we're at war now. In 1980, there was a computer chip malfunction at NORAD. And what a malfunction it was. And just lit up the screen with like a bunch of incoming Soviet missiles. In 1983, we've talked about these ones. The Stanislav Petrov incident, the Abel Archer incident. All of these are terrifying.

[00:03:33] All of these are frightening because they took place in the context of the Cold War. Yeah. With two sides facing off with the capacity to destroy the Earth a bunch of times. And the only thing preventing that was diplomacy and mutually assured destruction. Yep. We were finger on the trigger, so to speak. Yeah. Extraordinary that it never actually went off.

[00:03:54] And so much of American foreign policy, both overt policy and covert policy during that time period was engineered to try to wound the Soviet Union. To try to hurt the Soviet Union. Because the Soviets were such a clear and present danger. And if we could only somehow like cause them to collapse, the world would be a much safer place. We've spent years looking at some of the questionable programs and projects that were put in motion for exactly that purpose.

[00:04:24] And they're all just absurd. Fantastic. That's the word I meant. Fantastic. Fantastic. They're all just amazing. But after years and years of this, of us just poised on the precipice, in 1989, I want to talk about something that actually has nothing to do with nuclear war because it has everything to do with what we're talking about today. Okay. Okay. So a little tangent. And that's bureaucratic miscommunication. What? Bureaucrats miscommunicate? Bureaucrats miscommunicate?

[00:04:54] I'm surprised by that too. Okay. Pray tell. Check this. It's 1989. And a thing happened that radically shifted the balance in the Cold War towards the West. And it was a massive blow to the Soviet Union because in 1989, the Berlin Wall comes down. Yep. And the Berlin Wall, it was one of those... I mean, we were all on the front lines because nuclear war puts the world on the front lines. But if there was a front line, the Berlin Wall was it. It was a concrete symbol of the Cold War.

[00:05:24] I saw what you did there. Concrete. Yep. Okay. Acknowledgement. All right. So, now, there had been years and years of, like, protests and economic instability that all contributed to the wall coming down. Of course, there had been some very brave people in East Germany that were working very hard from the inside to try to bring it down. And there had been people who were killed in those attempts.

[00:05:47] But what's fascinating about the collapse of the wall is that ultimately it was a bureaucratic miscommunication that was the catalyst that sent tens of thousands of East Berliners to start tearing down the wall in November of 1989. Have you heard this story before? I have, but please tell it because it's fascinating. I only recently heard it maybe in the last few years. Yeah. And looking back, because we were young, I do remember this sort of coming out of nowhere. Yes, it came out of nowhere.

[00:06:16] But I thought it was just the people had had enough and they had, like, torn it down. Like, so tell the story about how it actually happened. So the East Germans were working on trying to, you know, make some incremental change to make it a little bit easier to travel across the border. They were going to look at getting some exit visas. And this was going to be something that they were going to enact over, like, a period of time. And it was going to be kind of like a gentle, soft opening to the Berlin Wall. And this was during Peristrika, right?

[00:06:44] So the opening of the Soviet Union. Yeah. Under Gorbachev, where things were seemingly calming down a little bit. We had had some agreements. We had had some treaties. Things were looking not quite as intense. And in the middle of that, there was an East German spokesman named Gunter Schabowski. And he was about to go on live TV and just do an interview, as people did. But then he's handed a note. And the note says that there was going to be a shift in the way that exit visas were handled by the East German government.

[00:07:14] And he didn't know anything about the change in policy. He hadn't read the memos or anything like that. So he's a little bit caught off guard. And then during the interview, he's asked, okay, so when is this going to happen? Basically, he shrugs and says, as far as I know, it takes place immediately without delay. And the people of East German, he went, wait, what? And so the checkpoints were immediately flooded with East Germans. Trying to get to the West. Yeah. Yeah. To be like, oh, okay. Like right now, right now. Well, let's go.

[00:07:43] Oh, and here's another one of those moments. And we've come across so many of these moments in the Cold War where there's a person who has to make a choice. And it's way too much weight for a single person to have to make this choice. Yes. And in this case, it was a lieutenant colonel who was in charge of security at the wall. And he has standing orders to open fire on protesters. Oh. To use lethal force against protesters. This is what he's supposed to do.

[00:08:13] And actually, there's going to be a bunch of moments like that in this episode. But instead, he orders his men to stand down. Because there are hundreds of people coming to the checkpoint. Thousands. Tens of thousands. And so that decision by that lieutenant colonel saved countless lives. And also basically was the other thing that allows this wall to come down. And it's an extraordinary moment.

[00:08:41] I would say it was one of those foundational moments in our childhood. Yes. Where for a brief, brief moment, we had this very unusual feeling that maybe things were going to be okay. And, you know, you talking about it and me reminiscing in my head, seeing it come down. Like, I vividly remember watching it on the news. And I still, I'm still getting shivers, right?

[00:09:07] I'm still, it's still one of those defining moments in my childhood. And I think everyone who was alive at that time is just such this moment of hope. Yeah. And there was a few bits like that in that time period. In sort of the late 80s, early 90s, there was the fall of apartheid. There was a bunch of other things, a bunch of other terrible ideas that were collapsing. And this collapse seemed like maybe human beings had realized that some of these terrible ideas were terrible.

[00:09:36] And now we could finally, like, move forward into an actual future. For the first time in my childhood, I considered the possibility a future. And, you know, that could have gone a very different way if that lieutenant colonel obeyed those orders and opened fire, which we've seen since then in other countries. It could have gone very differently. Yeah. That could have been a moment that spiraled things completely out of control.

[00:10:04] But instead, it went about as well as it could have gone, in part because of the bravery of those East Germans, in part because of the decision of that lieutenant colonel, and in part because of the bureaucratic miscommunication on live television where the guy's like, you know what? I guess it's right now. Do you know what happened to any of those people? I'd be very curious to look into it. What I would imagine is that they probably just moved into retirement eventually and just probably spent a bunch of time thinking back on the cold, dusty, gray days of the Cold War.

[00:10:34] I mean, but especially the guy who on live TV just announced that everything was open immediately. I wonder if there was any blowback for him. But, I mean, I guess the East falls, right? So what's going to happen then? Yeah, but the East falls, if anything, that guy becomes a hero in the new world. That's true. And so, yeah, if anything, he would do fine. There was a lot of issues, though, with people in the East because I remember when I first started doing research in 95, so that wasn't that long after.

[00:11:03] There were nuclear physicists that had very important positions in East Germany that were now postdocs in the U.S. because their positions then were gone. And they had to struggle because they were considered lesser than in East Germany as opposed to West Germany. A lot of their positions were given to West Germans. And then they were just stuck being 50-year-old postdocs somewhere else. So it wasn't so happy for them.

[00:11:33] And that's interesting because it does sort of point out that even in the midst of this joy, and it was absolute joy for us, and such a sense of relief. The Berlin Wall, it was so visually ugly. Like, it was so appropriate. Yeah. It was such an appropriate monument to such an ugly time that to see it destroyed, even though the soundtrack was terrible. Oh, my God, it was. Just awful. Like, David Hasselhoff songs and scorpions, like, just atrocious songs.

[00:12:00] But even that didn't blunt my enthusiasm for what seemed to be this incredible human moment. But as you point out, despite that, there was some, like, there was a little, some sour notes in there, too. We should have paid more attention to those sour notes. Because as a teenager, the collapse of the Berlin Wall, it started to make me feel like those mushroom clouds were also starting to dissipate in my imagination. Right. It was really looking like, okay, we, we might have survived this.

[00:12:30] And, of course, at the time, I didn't even know about all these close calls we had had. But then, July 1991, the START Treaty gets signed by President Bush I and Gorbachev. And that starts the process of cutting back on the tens of thousands of nuclear warheads that the powers were all aiming at each other. And it's just, it was this amazing moment of sanity. Yes. Could you tell our listeners what the START Treaty was? Actually, yeah.

[00:12:59] This seems more like your wheelhouse. Yeah. So it was signed in December of 91. It wasn't put into force until December of 94. And it was the first time that the Soviet Union and the U.S. decided to start reducing their number of nuclear weapons. And it was considered a major victory.

[00:13:19] What is really, really sad is that in 2023, Russia suspended its participation in New START. Mm-hmm. And in 2026, START treaties officially ended. So we now have no bilateral nuclear agreement with the Russians. Yeah.

[00:13:44] So after all of that hope of the 80s, we're back to the 60s and 70s where we have no agreements with the Russians. We have no agreements with anyone about how many weapons we can have, about what the tonnage is, about where they can be. It's the Wild West again.

[00:14:07] And to me, that's really scary because these treaties, it's not so much that we're talking about reducing. The really, really important part about these treaties is that we agree to look at each other's stockpiles. Mm-hmm. Transparency. Transparency. That's the transparency part.

[00:14:26] And that's the really, really important part is that we have an international body that goes to, well, the Russians now and looks at their warheads and makes sure that they're following the rules. And they come to the U.S. and make sure we're following the rules. Or they go to Iran and make sure they're following the rules. Mm-hmm. And it's that transparency that now we don't have. So we have no idea what they're doing except for the spycraft that we have. Right.

[00:14:56] And, of course, we have a shared interest in this. We as in governments or we as in people and humanity? We as in humanity. We as in humanity have a shared interest in this. This is in all of our interest to reduce those weapons. So in the long term, that excitement that we had back when these treaties were signed, you said that's faded and now the treaties themselves have been obliterated.

[00:15:19] Even in the short term, it's interesting because if you go back to that time period, that initial sense of like, wow, things are going well. We had like a month after that treaty is signed. We have a terrifying scare. When in the Soviet Union, military hardliners attempted a coup. So the signing was July 31st, 1991. Yeah. And then just a month after that, we have this terrifying scare where military hardliners attempted a coup. They kidnapped Gorbachev. What?

[00:15:49] And take over the Soviet Union briefly. And this probably deserves its own episode as well. This moment. Yes. Particularly about the question of in that time when the military hardliners had kidnapped Gorbachev and taken over the Soviet Union, who had command and control over the nukes? Well, that's interesting because this would have been 91. One, the Soviet Union would have split up. In December of 91. Yes. So the nuclear weapons would not have been in Russia.

[00:16:19] They didn't keep any weapons in their own territory. They were in Georgia. They were in Ukraine. Kazakhstan, I think. Kazakhstan. Yeah. So there were no weapons. And as far as I know, the majority of the weapons were kept out of Russia proper. So this was such a dicey moment where, again, we're like, oh, everybody's rational. Everybody's reasonable. And then the military leaders are like, we are not. And then there's this sort of extraordinary moment.

[00:16:47] People who have power are going to do everything they can to keep it. Yeah. It's that great sunk cost fallacy. Instead, somehow we got through that one as well for reasons that actually we'll get into when we talk about a character named Boris Yeltsin. Who? I've never heard of him. No, I have. Oh, Boris. Boris is going to figure prominently in this story. I have. I don't want any comment at this point to go, what an idiot. She doesn't know who Boris Yeltsin is. No, of course you know. We're all Gen X. We remember Boris Yeltsin. Yes.

[00:17:16] He was drunk a lot of the time, which may or may not have played a role in this. Wait, so is he bald or does he have hair? Well, we know if he had hair or not because Gorbachev came before him and Gorbachev was bald. So Yeltsin has hair. So Yeltsin has hair. See, I get it. Yeltsin, of course. Yep. And then after Yeltsin, we had? Bald. Yeah, we had bald again. All right. So then in December 1991, the Soviet Union just collapses. It's just like, it's done. It's over.

[00:17:42] And we're all thinking, hooray, we're no longer in the final stages of the Cold War. Hooray. We're in the initial stages of the Age of Collapse. Wait, that's not better. No. So if people want to hear more about what it was like at the end of the Cold War, you can go back and listen to the episodes I have about Georgia, where I talk to people who were in Georgia securing nuclear material in this time period. It's very interesting. I highly recommend that. Yeah. It's a fascinating story. Yeah.

[00:18:11] And so now we're dealing with like a whole new situation. People were dancing in the streets. I let out a sigh of relief. You probably let out a sigh of relief. Yeah. But there's still an awful lot of missiles aimed at my horizon and all of our horizons. Yes. And what may have appeared at first to have been a victory over the Soviet Union that was going to make the world safer, it was way more complicated than that for reasons that you've talked about in some of your other episodes.

[00:18:37] Because as terrifying as the Cold War had been, and also as destructive as it had been when you can consider all the proxy wars and everything, there was at least a kind of horrifying stability to it. And in that stability, there were back channels between the Soviets and the West to keep misunderstandings from leading to disaster. And the Soviet Union kept a tight leash over its nuclear scientists and technicians and engineers. And after the collapse, those were not true anymore.

[00:19:07] And all we have to do is look at what happens in 1992. A Japanese political figure named Shoko Asahara visits Russia to recruit former Soviet nuclear techs. Now, you might not have heard of Shoko Asahara, but his plan was to acquire nuclear warheads either by buying some that had already been made from the collapsed Soviet Union, or maybe they build their own. And then Asahara was going to end the world. Because Asahara was the leader of a doomsday cult called Aum Shinrikyo.

[00:19:37] Oh. They were the ones with the sarin gas in Tokyo subways. Yes. So they worked very hard in Australia to try to build nukes. That probably also deserves its own episode. I think so. I need to start a list. But again, it shows you that it's like, oh, I'm no longer worried about the Soviet Union, but I should maybe be worried about Japanese doomsday cults. I should be worried about the fact that there's all of these scientists now that basically are not getting paid. They're not getting paid at all. Yep.

[00:20:04] And so what seemed to be at first to be a safer situation was actually a much dicier and more dangerous situation in a lot of ways. But, you know, we're in college. We don't care. Yeah, that's true. We were listening to pavement and smoking weed and kicking back. No, we're not smoking weed. Oh, no, that's true. We weren't because it was totally illegal. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. It was still legal to listen to pavement back then, fortunately. It was. It was.

[00:20:31] And like all of those weapons stockpiles, they still existed. Yeah. They were still there. And they were in a lot of, as you said, they were in a lot of former Soviet republics, like Ukraine and Belarus and Kazakhstan, which had now become technically like some of the most powerful nations on earth all of a sudden, which is wild. Although I know it's more complicated than that. They possessed the weapons like physically, but that doesn't necessarily give them launch authority, like all things. It was complicated.

[00:20:59] And then you had like the 94 Budapest memorandum, which I think we look back now. That was when all of these countries are like, oh, it's fine. We will surrender our nuclear weapons back to Russia. This is when Ukraine did that, which of course we look at differently now because of recent events. So just a wild time where everything's basically been thrown up into the air and everything's coming crashing down. And times of collapse are extremely dangerous for a bunch of different reasons.

[00:21:28] It takes a trained and staffed and functioning and funded bureaucracy to keep nukes safely functioning. Oh, yeah. And it's, I mean, millions and billions of dollars. It's not easy. I mean, but some of these republics became nuclear states overnight, but they were extremely poor, right? They didn't have any money, but they had nukes. And a lot of them came to the U.S. It's a terrible combination. Yeah, exactly.

[00:21:57] And the other thing that, of course, you need funding and training and all these other things for is to keep your early warning systems operational and effective. Yes. And this is 1970s technology. This isn't even 1980s technology. Yep. And so 1995, let's skip ahead a bit to 1995. The president of Russia. Enough reminiscing. That's right. Enough reminiscing. Let's move to the more recent past. So now we've got Boris Yeltsin. Okay.

[00:22:24] And of course, what's the one thing that everybody knows about Boris Yeltsin? He has hair. Yes. What's the other thing that everybody knows about Boris Yeltsin? He drinks a lot. He drinks a lot. He has a lot of hair and he drinks a lot. And he's a complicated character. I mean, during that 1991 coup, where again, the world is tipping into balance, so many balance tipping moments, Yeltsin was crucial and had this sort of moment where he could have been

[00:22:52] a hero and he 100% took that moment. I mean, we've seen the photographs of Yeltsin like standing on a tank in Red Square. Yeah. With machine guns aimed at him, giving that speech against the coup plotters, like protecting the Russian people with his own drunken body. Maybe he didn't realize what he was doing. Entirely possible. But you know what? Even if he was fueled with the courage of vodka, he was still up there.

[00:23:20] He was, that was like a moment that required someone to do that. And Boris Yeltsin did it. Just an absolutely extraordinary moment. And then he became president and that was probably his best moment. And all the other moments were not as good as that one. He was trying to move Russia away from the central planning of Soviet communism towards a free market system. He had really aggressive economic policies and it caused just chaos, just massive chaos and economic instability.

[00:23:45] Basically, Russia starts turning into a kleptocracy where whoever can steal the most is ultimately going to end up with a power. And that's kind of where we are now. Yeah. And these are the origins of it. And so then by 1993, the Russian parliament rebels against Yeltsin and calls for his impeachment. And then he dissolves parliament. And then parliament refuses to recognize the dissolution. And they barricade themselves in the parliament buildings. And then protesters take the street on both sides.

[00:24:13] And this time Yeltsin's basically on the other side of the tank. Instead of standing in front of the machine guns, now Yeltsin's behind the tanks and the tanks are firing on the Russian parliament buildings. Against the parliament, you realize, okay, what we thought was going to be a nice smooth transition into peace and harmony is looking pretty rough. I don't know why anyone thought that it would be a smooth transition into peace and harmony. It rarely is.

[00:24:42] Because it was the end of history. Or is it the beginning of history? Dude. I mean, so many people thought that there was all these sort of neocon philosophers who were like, capitalism won. It's over. Everybody go to Disneyland. We're done here. And so after all of that chaos, all of the checks and, or not all of them, but a lot of the checks and balances that had sort of separated powers in Russia between parliament and the president.

[00:25:08] After your president starts shooting at parliament with tanks, obviously that ship has sailed. And so like Russia fundamentally shifts and so much more power is consolidated in the figure of the president now. What could possibly go wrong? Nothing at all. And so then by the end of 1994, the Russians had gotten into the first Chechen war. At this point, it's just like any dreams of a post-Cold War order are shot.

[00:25:35] And then that takes us finally to what we're talking about today. Okay. January of 1995. Okay. What happens January of 1995? Okay. So it's worth noting something about nuclear war that we've talked about before. Okay. It's an awful lot easier to attack than defend. Yes. In fact, you want to be the attacker. Yeah, exactly. What are some of the reasons why you want to be the attacker in a nuclear war?

[00:26:00] Because you want to make sure that you shoot off all your nukes because the person who responds is going to attack all of your missile silos. You have to use them or lose them. Exactly. And the weapons are so destructive and the missiles are so quick. Like any possible defense against a nuclear strike is complicated and uncertain at best. If anything is even possible. Yeah. I mean, there's no defense. Yeah.

[00:26:28] So after the collapse of the Soviet Union, as far as I can tell, the numbers aren't like maybe you have better numbers than I've been able to find, but Russia's nuclear triad was in possession of somewhere between 5,000 and 9,000 tactical and strategic warheads. Yeah. I mean, it's hard to say exactly. It's hard to say because it was collapse and chaos, but that's a ballpark. It's a big range, but yeah. Yeah. It's a big range. And it's also kind of an irrelevant range because you're never going to say, thank goodness it was only 5,000.

[00:26:57] Well, the other thing is, how are you counting? Are you counting delivery systems or are you counting warheads? Because MIRVs can have more than one warhead. It's one delivery system, but it's 8 to 12 weapons. So like, how are you counting? And if it's at the lower end of that scale, we're never going to look back and say, thank goodness it was only 5,000. We could have really been in trouble there. Yeah. 5,000 or 9,000, it doesn't matter. You can destroy the world with 5,000 just as easily as 9,000. Yeah.

[00:27:26] Like, I can't even imagine if we were trying to figure out a way to describe how much destructive power that is. Could you just like knock Australia off the globe with that amount of like firepower? Like what, what could 5,000 nukes do? You could destroy the whole planet with 5,000 nukes. Like, I can't even imagine how much destruction you could do. And that's what Russia still possessed. Well, in all fairness, we possess the same amount. Oh yeah, true.

[00:27:56] But we weren't yet in a state of collapse back then. Yes. And to make it sound a little better, those aren't deployed nukes either. Some of them are in storage. Some of them are being dismantled. Some of them are on sub. Some of them are land-based. Some of them are waiting to be put on an airplane.

[00:28:22] So they're not like all ready to be launched immediately. Yeah, there's maintenance rotations. There's all sorts of things. Yeah. I mean, but still, I mean, even if you're talking like a quarter of them being able to be launched immediately, that's still a lot. Yeah, that's still a lot. So even though Russia was in a state of collapse and the people were hungry, they still had this extraordinary destructive power. But while their offensive armaments were in reasonably destructive shape, destructive

[00:28:52] enough, their defensive network is suffering the strains of the fall of the Soviet Union.

[00:29:25] Hmm. It probably didn't stay operational for long. I would hope not. The other Chernobyl reactors were still going and providing energy. It was just the reactor that had the accident that was taken offline.

[00:30:08] Mm-hmm. So just FYI, Soviet Union doesn't exist anymore and Russia has no money. So I guess just sort of fend for yourself. He ended up being up there for like 300 days. Who brought him down? So the reason that he stayed up there was the Russians didn't have the funding to send a replacement crew. And in order to maintain the space station, he felt a responsibility to maintain it. So he just stayed up there.

[00:30:33] I mean, he probably came back like about an inch taller and with much weaker bones. Oh, yeah. What I always find amazing, but not so surprising, is how scientists are so dedicated to their work. He stayed up there because he didn't want the space station to be destroyed, right? Yeah. And there's other stories about how scientists were protecting the nuclear weapons, even though they didn't have food or their families didn't have heat,

[00:31:03] but they knew it was important. Or there's stories about in Armenia, there were scientists that stayed and protected an instrument because there was silver in it. And they knew that people were going to come to take the silver out. So they stayed there and just guarded the instrument because it was so important to them. So there's like all these stories about scientists taking on these physical hardship because they believed in their science so much. And I always find them very fascinating. Yeah.

[00:31:32] And weirdly inspiring. You have these terrible moments. You have individual humans behaving in these extraordinary human ways. Yes. In these inhuman moments that the humans are responsible for. Yes. Yes. I don't know what to do with any of that. I don't either. But I think maybe I want to start telling those stories. I don't know. Yeah. Well, I mean, we sort of have been telling some of those stories. It's true. Yeah. And there's been some of those stories already in this episode. And so getting back to collapse. Yeah.

[00:32:00] Because there's lots of meandering in this episode. So if people if people don't like meandering, then this episode probably isn't for them. This is what happens when old codgers are reminiscing about the Cold War. Oh, it's true. Yeah. Our younger listeners are going to be like, what are you talking about? They'll be codgers soon enough if they're lucky. It's true. If they're lucky. They survive long enough to become codgers. And so ultimately we see the situation where the complex systems that are allowing the

[00:32:28] Soviet Union and then Russia to have some kind of early warning system. Those are fraying quite badly. The satellite network, it was aging. It hadn't aged to the point where it had completely become irrelevant yet, but it was on the horizon. And between all of this and the complicated transition between old Soviet bureaucracy and Russian bureaucracy, there's just so many there's so many opportunities for breakdowns in communication.

[00:32:54] And then in the middle of all of that, there's a missile. OK. And the Russian early warning system detects it. An early warning radar station in Murmansk Oblast detects this missile. Its speed and trajectory closely match what would have been expected of a submarine launched Trident missile. OK. And when we're talking about submarine launched missiles, I don't know about you, but I've always found the submarine missiles to be the most terrifying. Yes, because you don't know where they are.

[00:33:22] I mean, at least with missile silos, they have an exact location. You can see them from space. Right. But submarines can be anywhere. Yeah. The bombers, I always find the most comforting. One, because they're airplanes and airplanes are cool and people who like airplanes are cool, but also because the airplanes can be called back. Yes, they can. To me, that flexibility has always seemed really important. The submarine launched missiles. Also, there is almost zero amount of time to respond. Exactly.

[00:33:53] They're just offshore. They're hidden somewhere offshore. If a missile comes out of the middle of America, you've got, what, 30 minutes? Sure. Yeah. Which isn't very much. But it's something. But it's something. With the submarine missiles, you have 10. Maybe. Yeah. 10 minutes if you're lucky. I mean, 30 minutes is already terrifying. 10 is three times more terrifying than that. Yeah. But in England, you had four. That's true. Well, yeah. Well, England was going to be cooked regardless.

[00:34:22] And still might be. And still might be. We'll see. What time are we recording this? So, we talked about the Petrov incident, where there had been like a malfunction in the equipment that gave a false positive. Yeah. And he knew it was a false positive because there were too few missiles coming. Yeah, exactly. But unlike that incident, in 1995, nope, this is a real missile. Because one was coming. Yeah. And one was coming. It was just one.

[00:34:52] It was real. And also, unlike the 1983 Petrov incident, the radar base commander passed the alarm up the chain of command. Okay. So, Petrov said, this isn't real. I'm going to sit on it and not pass it up. But this guy is like, nope. Missile. Move it up. Yeah. And because it's a Trident, it's equipped with MIRVs. And we've talked about MIRVs briefly, but maybe it's worth discussing what a MIRV is. Yeah. So, MIRV stands for Multiple Independently Targeted Reentry Vehicles. Yeah.

[00:35:22] Which should be MITREV if I know my acronyms, but it is. Yeah. Yeah. I know. Yeah. Sometimes you got to fudge the acronyms a little bit. It's true. So, basically, this was started in the 70s. The Soviets integrated them in late 75. But basically, you have one missile, but then you can have 8 to 12 warheads included in it so that you can have 8 to 12 targets with one missile.

[00:35:50] And this is really important because, as you said, it was only one missile. And that seems strange. It seems strange that if the Americans were going to attack Russia, they would do that with one missile. Right. And this is one of the things that, with Petrov, he was like, that's the thing. But with the MIRV, this was after, you said it was 95? Yep. So, it could have only been 8 missiles on it instead of 12. I mean, small comfort. Right. That's still a problem. Yeah.

[00:36:19] Because of the START treaty, all the MIRVs went from 12. You could only have 8. Mm-hmm. And what's another possibility, in addition to the fact that your one missile might have a bunch of warheads on it, what's another reason why the Russians might have been terrified at the thought of just one missile? Like, to start a war with one missile rather than starting a war with, like, hundreds of them.

[00:36:42] What's sort of a less orthodox way that that missile maybe could have been used that could have entirely disabled the Russian command system? Oh, are you talking about EMPs? Exactly. Yeah. Ah, yeah. So, the larger your warhead, so the more megatons you have, the larger your EMP. What acronyms today? Yeah. Do you want me to tell you what EMPs are? Because they're like... Okay. Because they're wild. They are.

[00:37:11] And they're not as bad as movies make them out to be. So, EMP stands for electromagnetic pulse. And it's part of all nuclear weapons. Because it was first noted in 1945 during the Trinity test when the scientists from Los Alamos, I mean, they knew something might happen to their electronics, so they shielded everything. But, in fact, it didn't work for all of them.

[00:37:37] And some of their recording instruments lost data from the EMP. But it really became noticeable during 1962 with Starfish Prime. And it was a high-altitude blast, which detonated in the Pacific Ocean, but it took out the streetlights in Oha, Hawaii, which was 700 miles away. So, people in Hawaii knew something was going on because all their streetlights had been turned off.

[00:38:03] And if you want to learn more about that test, I spoke to someone who was at Starfish Prime in Episode 73. This is the advantage of having a big library of interesting episodes. Well, and they're all coming together on this one, right? It is. It's all coming together in this one disaster. So, why would an EMP be actually maybe an effective way of opening a nuclear attack? Yeah. And there are weapons that are just EMPs.

[00:38:31] But what happens is when you have a nuclear explosion, it generates gamma rays. And those gamma rays can interact with air molecules, which causes a wave of electromagnetic energy, which are basically electric and magnetic fields that travel at the speed of light. When you detonate a bomb at high altitude, then it also interacts with the Earth's atmosphere. And produces an aurora borealis. Yeah. Amongst other effects. Yeah.

[00:39:01] That's the prettiest thing that happens. Yeah. So, if it hits the atmosphere and it interacts with the Earth's magnetic field, because the Earth has its own magnetic field, then there is potential for far-reaching effects on electrical and electronic systems. And this is where Hollywood always makes it like, oh, everything's going to go to shit because a nuclear weapon is going to take out the power grid. And it is possible. So, there's like three different stages of the EMP pulses.

[00:39:29] You probably don't want to know all of them, but there's E1, E2, E3. E2 doesn't do anything. It's E1 and E3. So, E1 are just these extremely fast and intense pulses. And basically what happens is anything that is metal acts as kind of like an antenna. And it collects the voltage and basically fries your electronics, even if you have a surge protector.

[00:39:58] So, if you had this nuclear weapon and you had this EMP, especially if you had eight of them, it would start frying out your systems. And a power grid maybe could handle a couple fries, but it can't handle lots and lots of them. And why this is important is because to the Russians, to see one missile on its way, especially a missile that contained MIRVs, there are reasons why maybe America would lead with one missile.

[00:40:25] Yeah. So, if you did this, the E1 pulse, I mean, because also the E3 does something, but it's really that E1 pulse. Because as you knock out transformers and relays in a power grid, you push more of the load on the other transformers and relays, which then overwork them and then they start going. So, it's a cascading effect. It's a cascade effect. And I'm guessing the Russian system was not high tech or very good at the time. So, it wouldn't have been hard to take out their systems.

[00:40:55] Well, first of all, do you want to know what would happen to cell phones? Yeah, of course. Okay. So, basically, it probably wouldn't affect your cell phone. What a relief. Yeah. However, it would affect the network. Oh. Because remember how I said that the E1s basically make metal act like antennas and collect all the charge and the voltage kind of fries things. So, basically, all the cell antennas would be fried.

[00:41:25] Okay. So, I could still use my phone. I could still use the flashlight on my phone. I could still use the calculator on my phone. Yes. But I couldn't doom scroll. Correct. If your phone was plugged in, then it might be fried. But, basically, you can use it offline. But you can't use anything online because there won't be any cell towers. Okay. So, I could still use my alarm clock. You can still use your alarm clock. You can get up to fight the zombies. Okay. I'll be fine then. Yeah.

[00:41:51] So, someone did a modeling saying like, okay, if there's an EMP from a one megaton bomb, then what would happen? And the estimate was that 5% of transmission lines would be disrupted. And the E3 could damage some really expensive equipment that couldn't be replaced very easily. And, basically, it would probably impact one state and maybe a couple surrounding states.

[00:42:18] But it's not going to take out the whole country like it would in movies. Yeah. So, that's one. But in Russia at the time, if the bomb was detonated at the right spot, at the right height, then it could have taken out some of the power grid. Then again, if you're that close, I'd be worried about way more things than an EMP. Yeah. Well, no, of course. But what makes all of this important is that now we have a situation where there is something that looks like an American Trident missile.

[00:42:48] And it's following the profile of a potential American attack. You lead with a series of EMPs from the Mervs that are contained within the Trident. Then once you've knocked out basically like all of their defenses, then you follow up with waves and waves of bombers and missiles and things. Right. Because if you take out their retaliation, then you can hit them and not be hit back. Yeah.

[00:43:15] And so, this alert goes all the way up to the top, all the way up to Boris Yeltsin and to his advisors. And we don't know for sure what happened. A lot of this is speculation. Like all of the stuff about EMPs, the American government has speculated that the Russians might have been worried about that. But we don't know for sure if that was something that occurred to them. I don't see why it wouldn't have because, of course, those advisors would have known about this. They probably had similar plans to lead an attack with the EMPs. And if it occurred to us, it occurred to them. Yeah. No, of course.

[00:43:45] And even if it hadn't occurred to them, their spies would have picked up on it and they would have told them about it. Exactly. And so, this is bad. This is bad. This looks really, really bad. And the full alert goes up to Boris Yeltsin, who is presented with the nuclear briefcase. The only time in history so far that the Russian or Soviet nuclear briefcase is activated. This moment. It's activated. It's activated. So, it is put into play.

[00:44:14] And as far as we know, that's the only... Never during the Cuban Missile Crisis, never during Able Archer, never during any of those times did this occur, but now it's like, okay, let us begin the process. And the reason is, at this point, you're looking at literally, like, what, six minutes left? Four minutes left? Two minutes left? To make this decision. Now, the Russians have a protocol, as do the Americans, I'm sure, that potentially could have killed us all that day.

[00:44:43] The Russian plans allowed for a launch of retaliatory missiles before the incoming missiles land. For reasons that we've already talked about. Yep, yep, yep. You don't have to wait until they make contact. You don't have to wait until you see the explosion. If you're like, it's coming, let's get our stuff up there too. Makes terrible but understandable sense. Because if you wait for the other missiles to land, you're going to lose your capacity and capability.

[00:45:08] But it also meant that the Russians could have easily, in those eight minutes, eight minutes between the alarm sounding and then the Russians realizing what this missile actually was, because, spoiler alert, it was not a Trident. In those eight minutes, they could have fired off their own retaliatory missiles. And so we know they didn't. What happened? How did they, like, what happened? We don't entirely know, but I've heard a bunch of different stories.

[00:45:38] Okay. But we don't know. This is a pretty closely guarded thing. The Russians kept this very close to their chest, as they did in other similar close calls, as the Americans have as well. So, spoiler alert, because people are on the edges of their seat thinking, oh no, we're all about to die in 1995. It wasn't a Trident missile. It was a Canadian-designed... Congratulations. Thank you. Black Brandt rocket. Okay. And why was it there? It was being sent up by the Norwegians to gather data on the Aurora Borealis.

[00:46:08] Oh! It was a weather rocket. Didn't they tell the Russians they were sending it up? They absolutely did. But the problem is, because the Black Brandt, Canadian-designed, is a multi-stage rocket, so, you know, you've got different boosters, and then the booster runs out of fuel, you eject that, and then it keeps going, and then you eject another one. Which is just like the Trident. Exactly. And you know what that really, really looks like when you're looking at it from a radar? Really looks like MIRVs. Yeah. Yep.

[00:46:36] And because of the location in Norway, it appeared to the radar controllers that the rocket was coming from a part of the ocean where American subs would be lurking. So this is all very bad. But didn't anyone read the brief that said the Norwegians were launching an atmospheric rocket? This returns us to the Berlin Wall. The Berlin Wall collapsed because of a little bit of bureaucratic miscommunication. Yeah. And so this incredible moment in human freedom in history was caused by miscommunication. That's an amazing thing.

[00:47:06] And then we almost all got snuffed out for the exact same reason. Oh my God. Because of a bureaucratic miscommunication. So I've looked into this. This is a hard thing to look into because they really are not letting much information get out about this. So I've looked at interviews from retired generals in Russia in the, like the rocketry forces. There was one, Vladimir Dvorkin, Russian strategic rocket force, was interviewed years later. He argued, this was never a problem.

[00:47:35] He said that no Russian president would ever launch a counterattack based on ambiguous data but a single incoming missile. I don't think that's true. Yeah, I'm skeptical. For one thing, we do know that it was the first and only time in Soviet or Russian history where that briefcase was in play. So already that's closer than we had ever been to that. We're also talking about literal minutes being the difference between launching a retaliation and determining that the missile wasn't a threat.

[00:48:01] And at the very least, at the very best, it's depending on the judgment of a single person in an extremely high pressure situation with like literally minutes to decide. Who's drunk? Who's almost certainly drunk. I mean, we don't know if he was drunk. And here's an interesting little side possibility. If he was super drunk, maybe that delay that allowed us to survive was them trying to wake him up.

[00:48:29] Oh, or someone else opening the briefcase. Yeah, in which case our lives were all saved by a bottle of vodka, heroically throwing itself down the throat of Boris Yeltsin. But again, there's been lots of times in which the leader of a country was not mentally fit to make that kind of decision. And yet our lives still depend on one person. I'm so irritated by that.

[00:48:55] And look at some of the one persons that have been in that position, like the Soviets before Gorbachev, who Gorbachev, he's kind of fine. Gorbachev I got some time for. But before then, they had Brezhnev, Andropov, and Chernenko, who were all just washed, busted old geezers. Older than us? Even older than us. And like Brezhnev was an old busted geezer at the end of his term. But the other two guys were busted old geezers at the start of their terms.

[00:49:25] Boris Yeltsin, as we've been saying, infamous drunk. The Americans had Nixon, who was dangerously unstable and often drunk at the end of his presidency. So that's not a good situation. And some others that we haven't mentioned. Sure. I mean, we'll look back if we have history. If we can move into the future, we'll look back in history and be like, wow, can you believe we survived that guy? Whoever that guy may be. Whoever it may be. But yeah, the Norwegians absolutely told the Russians about the rocket ahead of time. I believe it was nine days ahead of time. They was like, hey, we're going to shoot up a rocket.

[00:49:55] You're curious about the Aurora Borealis. Because the defense ministry had been informed. But because of the bureaucratic misunderstanding and miscommunication, the information never made it to the radar crews. Oh my God. How many more of these can we have? Well, I'm surprised, like even surviving one of these seems far-fetched. The amount that we have survived is absurd. And that's just the ones we know about. And this one's interesting because we don't entirely know why we survived.

[00:50:25] It could have been Boris Yeltsin had a second great heroic moment. Can we believe that? I would love to believe that. I mean, it's entirely possible. We know that he had one heroic moment on the tanks. He had a bunch of worse moments afterwards. But maybe he was a person who was presented with two times in his life where he was basically the difference between chaos and disaster and some kind of safety and relief.

[00:50:52] And maybe in that moment, with literally minutes to go, two or three minutes to go, maybe Boris Yeltsin made the right choice. Maybe. Or he was too drunk to wake up. That's probably the story. And that's why it hasn't been released. It's entirely possible. But regardless of what the story is, again, we're in this situation where that shouldn't have happened. We shouldn't have got that close ever. No. We should never have been in that position. And that was 95.

[00:51:21] That was 1995. So now there's going to be more of our audience who was alive at that time. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, for a lot of these stories, for the audience, it's like their parents would have been eliminated and they never would have existed. But yeah, a lot of people can probably think back to January 1995. I was in first year university. I was not smoking weed because it was illegal. I was listening to records. I was playing backgammon. I'd let my guard down. I wasn't imagining mushroom clouds. I had let my guard down too.

[00:51:51] I was study abroad in England in 95. Having a fantastic time. England would have been so leveled. You would have lived through threads. I would have. However, it was also mad cow disease. So it's the reason why I still cannot give blood to this day. Oh, yeah, that's right. Wow. We've survived a lot of weird things. Yes. Yes, we have.

[00:52:19] Thank you for listening to another episode of My Nuclear Life. You can find us at www.mynuclearlife.com. Until next time, I'm Shelley Lesher, and this has been My Nuclear Life. This podcast was edited by Resonate Recordings.