The Rest Is History - 92. Nuclear Weapons

Episode Date: September 1, 2021

The year is 1983, and on November the 8th the world is the closest it’s ever been to nuclear destruction, yet nobody at the time realises. Dominic and Tom are joined by author and historian Taylor Downing to discuss how Armageddon was just avoided and why Tom, living near Salisbury, was in more danger than most. A Goalhanger Films & Left Peg Media production Produced by Jack Davenport & Harry Lineker Exec Producer Tony Pastor *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in London, New Zealand, and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. Welcome to The Rest Is History. The horrors of war could not have seemed more remote as my family and I shared our Christmas joy with the growing family of the Commonwealth. Now this madness of war is once more spreading through the world and our brave country must again prepare itself to survive against great odds. Not for a single moment did I imagine that this solemn and awful duty would one day fall

to me, Dominic Sandbrook. But whatever terrors lie in wait for us all, the qualities that have helped us to keep our freedom intact twice already during this sad century will once more be our strength. The words, slightly adapted, of Queen Elizabeth II on Friday 4th March 1983 as Britain entered the Third World War. Well, there was of course no Third World War in 1983. This was actually a British government exercise, a particularly chilling war game.

But Tom Holland, we both grew up during the 70s and 80s in the kind of heyday of the Cold War and these were kind of chilling times weren't they? Oh they were terrifying whenever you thought about them and I so I grew up outside Salisbury and Salisbury plain obviously big kind of army centre and we were close to the town of Wilton which I think was the some NATO headquarters and I remember must have been late 70s a teacher proudly telling us that Salisbury was third on the Soviet nuclear hit list so apparently he said two nuclear bombs would go off over the North Sea to destroy all the kind of telecommunications or something.

And then the third one was going to be detonated over Beech's bookshop, which was a bookshop. Yeah, it was just outside the close around the cathedral. So Ted Heath would have been in trouble. Ted Heath would have been the first to go um and i remember i remember my father coming to pick us up and sitting in the car and looking out at the spire of salisbury cathedral and imagining you know a sudden flash and the whole of it vanishing and i don't think i ever really recovered no it's a strange thing isn't it because people now i mean younger people will find all this very bizarre but i had exactly we had a teacher at school san i now think of him

mr taylor in his socks and sandals he quite clearly was a member of cnd and uh he used to give us sort of little lectures about um the russians had all these missiles aimed at us but we had all these missiles aimed at them and it was really our fault and world war three was you know looming at any moment and um we in the west midlands would be entirely to blame um so but what's it the advantage whenever i get any any kind of millennial grumbling just say that they had easy yeah of course they've got nothing to worry about nothing to worry it's only only global warming or whatever all that stuff yeah that's nothing compared with the threat of mushroom cloud now 1983 um the year we've just been talking about is the subject of a brilliant book about how close the world came to nuclear destruction and we are joined today by the author of said book taylor

downing who also worked what i still think is actually one of the best, one of the absolute best history series ever made. The big sort of, I think, CNN Cold War series in the 1990s, about a thousand parts long, interviews with all the big players. So, Taylor, thank you so much for joining us. And are we right? Is 1983 the moment when the world stood on the brink of destruction, do you think? Well, absolutely it was, yes. I mean, in conventional wisdom, the most dangerous part of the Cold War was the Cuban Missile Crisis, October 1962. That's what most people think of as the most dangerous moment. But certainly I argue in my book, 1983, that in fact it was November 1983, one very specific evening, the evening of the 8th of November 1983, when the

world really came closest to nuclear Armageddon. And the big difference between events in the Cuban Missile Crisis and the events in November 1983 is that everybody knew about the Cuban Missile Crisis. The president was addressing the nation, my fellow Americans. There was live television coverage from the Caribbean as ships, Russian ships were intercepted by American warships. Everything was very public. In America, people looked out of their windows and gauged the fastest route to the nearest nuclear air raid shelter. Not that it would have done them much good, but there was a genuine sort of public sense of anxiety in October 1962, whereas in November 1983, nobody knew what was happening. This was behind closed doors completely. And that's why many people say when they discover what was really going on, that actually events in 1983, we knew it was a dangerous year.

We knew it was a tense time, but actually it was far, far more alarming, far more dangerous than anybody realized at the time. Sorry, Dominic. But I mean, in a way, the implication of this is that, I mean, it's a kind of really frightening one. Because you think that if there is a big global crisis and the eyes of the world are on ships steaming through Caribbean waters or whatever, then we know what we're facing. But actually, at any moment, the world could incinerate. We wouldn't even know about it. Exactly. I mean, that is the terrifying thought from 1983, when the Soviets feared they were coming under attack from the West and prepared a full nuclear strike, a full nuclear retaliation against Western Europe and the United States. And we didn't know about it. And one of

the people I interviewed on the subject was Robert Gates, who was then deputy head of the deputy director of the CIA. And he actually said, he used the phrase, he said, we were on the brink of nuclear war, and we didn't even know it. Now, that's quite something from the deputy head of an intelligence agency. You know, you do want your intelligence operatives to tell you if the other guy's about to biff you on the nose, let alone launch a nuclear strike against you. And this went past almost unnoted in the United States and in Western Europe. So, Taylor, let's talk a bit about the context, because people who haven't studied the Cold War often think of the Cold War as a sort of a great homogenous kind of blob. But obviously, it ebbed and flowed, didn't it, in the early 80s.

So we've got to put this into the context of the early 80s. Reagan is president. I think he's talking of the Soviet Union as an evil empire. Andropov is the... So Brezhnev is dead. Andropov is the Soviet leader. And can you... Why do you think there was this sort of new sense of tension,

this sort of... Because there was a real sense of momentum, wasn't there, in 1983, of things spiraling out of control very much so the only way to understand the crisis in november 1983 is as you say dominic to see it in its context um so the 70s had been a period of detente had been a period of when it looked as though east and west were going to get on. There'd been the Helsinki Accords. There'd been the Soyuz space capsule linking up with the Apollo mission in space. What could be more symbolic of unity and friendship than two space capsules linking up in space and so on? But that had all come to an end at the end of the 1970s the soviets

had deployed ss20 missiles the americans felt they were being taken for a ride that the soviets were rearming and that led to a shift to the right in the united states which which resulted in the election of ronald reagan whose campaign was very strong on anti-communism was very strong on anti-communism, was very strong that America needed to rearm, needed to face off these guys. We needed to see them down. The bad guys were getting away with it and we mustn't allow them to do this. Now, it's very much part of Reagan's campaign. So when he becomes president in January 1981, he immediately announces and his defence secretary, Caspar Weinberger, in his very first press statement says, we are going to rearm America and a whole new range of stealth bombers and the F-18 and tanks and so on, all of which have been

under development for some years, are all rolled out as quickly as possible. The Navy is increased. Defense expenditure almost doubles in a few years in America to be a huge part of the U.S. gross national product goes into defense spending. And with this, Reagan sort of talks up the anti-communist rhetoric. As you say, he calls theviet union uh an evil empire he announces that they're going to start this fantastic new program strategic defense initiative where they're going to have missiles in space that will intercept incoming missiles star wars isn't it star wars it is instantly named star wars uh and probably won quite a few friends in America by being named after the George Lucas movie. And so the rhetoric is really, really ramping up. And on the other side,

the Soviet Union has stagnated for 20 years under Brezhnev. The economy is hardly advanced. Policies haven't really changed. And when he dies in November 82, the Politburo elect as his successor, not a younger man, not a man with new ideas, not a man with a sort of new vision of the KGB. The KGB is the secret service in the Soviet Union, not only running agents abroad, but also maintaining the surveillance of the entire Soviet society. Every factory has a KGB officer. Every school had KGB officers. Everywhere, the sort of process of watching what people are doing and ensuring nobody steps out of line. The KGB are sort of managing internal security as well as the sort of external stuff that they're probably a bit more famous for now. And this sense of paranoia

is building up in Moscow, this terrible sense that the West are economically more advanced, they've got computers. You know, in the Soviet Union in 1983, you couldn't have a typewriter or a photocopier without having an official license from the government. So computers were completely alien. The idea that there should be a free interchange of information and ideas was just completely alien to the centralized soviet system uh and with this comes as i say a sort of sense of paranoia that the west are doing better than we are that they're scheming away in some way that we don't fully understand so when they're when reagan calls the soviet union the evil empire. This is massively offensive.

They're sort of not being given the respect they feel they deserve as a major power. And then when he talks about his Star Wars initiative, they cannot understand whether the Americans have the technology to do this or not. They just feel that it's suddenly going to completely upset the balance. You know, we've been living since the 50s with this concept of mutual assured destruction. We'll probably come back to that later on, I guess. Whereas if either side presses the nuclear button, they know that they're effectively committing suicide, that the retaliation will be so great

that that'll be the end of the story. And suddenly the Soviets began to think maybe the Americans are getting around this, you know, if they can intercept all our missiles in space, if this Star Wars program can mean we can fire all our missiles, but none of them get through, they have a fantastic advantage over us. The nuclear balance of power or the balance of terror if you like that has prevailed from the 50s onwards is suddenly broken the americans can launch a nuclear war and get away with it because they'll intercept all our missiles and taylor also the the kind of the the close range nuclear missiles that start to be introduced by the americans into britain and

germany that is also a crucial part of this, is it? It is. Cruise missiles are green and common and so on. Cruise missiles are green and common and the Pershing missiles and so on. Yes, that's very, very, very much part of it. What the Soviets had done in the late 70s was introduce a new range of missiles that were short range. They could attack Western Europe from their bases in the Soviet

Union, the SS-19 and so on, the SS-20, sorry the the this sort of fundamentally shifted the balance that if there were short-range nuclear weapons that could take out parts of europe so america began to roll out its cruise missiles and its um and its pershing missiles and so on and uh that was really the beginnings of a new sort of tit-for-tat regime in the 1980s that was starting to get very, very dangerous. You had this man in the White House talking very aggressively. He called the Soviet Union an evil empire. That's very, very offensive to the Soviets. He was spending billions, almost trillions on rearming America. Everywhere, everything in the American side was computer controlled, whereas the Soviets only had a tiny number of computers in their entire state. This sense that they were sort of losing out, not only to the rhetoric from Reagan, but also to this huge arms expenditure that they couldn't keep up with. And to the sense that, you know, America was winning the Cold War.

But what's so fascinating about that, Taylor, I think is, I mean, H.A.B. Taylor, I think it was, who said that, you know, wars are generally are generally start not because people are kind of aggressive, but because they're afraid. And one thing that nobody in the West ever seemed to really get, and certainly this came as a great shock to Reagan, and we'll come to this later, I suspect, was that the Russians were scared of them. Because they thought of the Russians as these sort of malevolent Bond villain-type sort of conspirators sitting around their giant... I remember this great scene in Octopussy, a Bond film of 1983, where they're all sitting around this huge table and they've got maps and it's all very high-tech.

And what the people in the West didn't get was that the people in the Kremlin were actually frightened, that they thought the West would strike first. But also, the people in the West are frightened, right? Yeah, of course, because know the soviet union has invaded afghanistan and it's crushing yeah trade unions in poland and everything i get all that i'm not i'm not i'm not sort of saying the soviet union so this is a very anecdote very anecdotal and i'm not sure how much credence to place on it but i was just out having a coffee before that we recorded this podcast and

i mentioned to this guy who was sitting next to me what the theme of the podcast was going to be was he a stranger he was he well he i i can't reveal his identity because um he he said that that's very cool he had he had knowledge of of the workings of the cabinet um in uh in 1983 and said that a leading cabinet officer uh a leading member of the cabinet um in uh in 1983 and said that a leading cabinet officer uh a leading member of the cabinet had um commissioned the building of a nuclear bunker really a private one for himself and i said can i quote you on that and he said uh not by name there was a trade in nuclear bunkers in the i mean there was an ideal bunker exhibition yes and and the advice was that you get your bunker but also you have to invest in a gun.

You already have, because you've got to kill your neighbours. You've got to kill your neighbours. Anyway, sorry, Taylor. Anyway, let's get back. But essentially, there's a climate of fear on both sides, right? Climate of fear on both sides, yes, absolutely. But I think you're right in saying that whilst America was, particularly under Reagan, was sort of aggressive and was

punching out and this constant rhetoric against the Soviet Union, the Soviets were feeling that they were falling behind, that their technology wasn't quite as good as that of the West. They didn't understand how things worked in the West and that they were falling behind in this race. Therefore, they needed to be sort of extra careful, extra watchful, extra vigilant against what the Americans were up to. And suddenly this sort of new figure, this old Hollywood star, you know, appears on the stage and attacks them almost sort of day after day. The rhetoric is building up and it scared them. It absolutely scared them. So they started a process, it was called Operation Rian, which was to look out for indicators that the Americans were preparing to launch a nuclear attack.

And some of these were pretty sort of sensible. You know, are the military mobilising? Well, obviously that would happen if there was going to be a nuclear attack. So their agents were told to go and look for mobilisation of the military. Were blood banks being stored up in case the casualty rate increased? You know, sensible things like that. But eventually it became completely absurd. So agents were told to go and count the lights that were on in the Pentagon in Washington or the Ministry of Defence in London at night.

And if they were more than a certain number, this would clearly conclude that they were sort of plotting away at night. And if they came up with these marks, then they'd get promotion. So there was a kind of incentive. Exactly, yes. The whole process fed on itself. The agents in the field, even if they, know living in london or washington thought well obviously america is not prepared britain's not preparing to go to war but you don't you got no promotion for saying that

you only got promotion for finding the evidence that yes look look that they're planning something so when there's a a perfectly neutral announcement on on the bbc that there's a new call for blood donors um through the national health service that's reported back to moscow look they're preparing for war because they're gathering blood banks you see so one thing after another sort of feeds itself and this rather frenzied paranoid paranoid view in Moscow. And then there's this war game, this NATO war game. Well, yes, the war game comes at the end of a very, very tense year. 1983 had sort of built up stage by stage. You can only really understand the events in November 1983 by sort of seeing it in the context of what I think we now look back

on is probably probably the most dangerous year certainly up with 1962 and the Cuban Missile Crisis anyway certainly one of the most dangerous years um in in the Cold War and there were you know there were a series of events that sort of um jacked up the the the the danger as far as the Soviets were concerned. So there's the rhetoric coming from the White House, coming from the president himself, coming from Reagan, the evil empire speech, and so on. Then there are a series of war games that the Americans play that constantly rattle the Soviet defences.

You know, they'll fly jets right up to the edge of the soviet board and then sort of veer away at the last possible second that's top gun that's top gun stuff but you see what they're doing they've got they've got these giant kc-135 uh um listening aircraft up recording all the all the chat and all the dialogue on the Soviet system. This is going on constantly through 1983. Then there's this remarkable event at the end of August 1983, when a civilian airline, a Korean airline, a flight Cal 007, veers hundreds of miles off course over some of the most sensitive territory in the Soviet Union, the Kamchatka Peninsula, and then over Sakhalin Island and towards the mainland. It's still not really very clear quite

how this airliner managed to get so off course, But at one point, it overlaps, it passes an American reconnaissance plane, which is out electronically gathering information. And the Soviet system clearly in some way gets confused as to whether this is a civilian airliner or is an American spy mission. And they shoot it down. 269 completely innocent people on this Korean airliner are killed. And of course, the American rhetoric, the outrage, the sense of how can any system, you know, shoot down a civilian airliner, not be able to distinguish between a military plane and an airliner shoot it down kill all these innocent people you know the outrage absolutely um erupts at that point uh and the

reagan calls the soviet union a terrorist state you know this is this is really sort of severe stuff and there's a couple of other incidents that happen, totally unconnected effectively with the Cold War. To the end of October 1983, the Hezbollah blow up an American Marine base in Beirut with a huge truck bomb. The Americans are there as peacekeepers after the war between Israel and the Palestinians. And America puts all its bases around the world on alert to look out for terrorists.

The Soviets pick this up, but think this is because they're preparing to launch a nuclear attack. Then there's the Americans invade the tiny Caribbean island of Grenada and take over the island. And that's part of the Commonwealth territory. So there's a huge row of bills between Thatcher and Reagan. And there's massive communication between London and Washington. That's another sign that the Soviets are looking out for. If they're about to launch an attack,

London and Washington will be in regular contact. So one by one, these sort of signs are picked up in the Soviet Union, completely separate to anything to do with the Cold War, but they seem to be sort of ticking boxes. You know, in the Lubyanka the head of the the kgb they have a they have a wall they apparently had i've been told they had a sort of perspex wall with sort of matrix down one side and countries across and every time an incident

occurred they sort of put a cross on on this perspex wall and literally people could walk it very high tech isn't it yeah people can walk in bingo card and walk in and look and see these sort of crosses building up and one by one there are more crosses on the big board in the in the lubyanka in the kgb headquarters and then then the incident comes which nearly sparks it off and this is a nato exercise it's an annual exercise called able archer so this is able archer. And in this exercise, the NATO, it's not an exercise where troops go out and move all around. It's called a command post exercise. It's a communications exercise in which they invent a scenario in which there's a conventional

war, which NATO are beginning to lose. A conventional war between the Warsaw Pact, the Soviet and the Eastern Bloc countries attack Western Europe. And it looks as though NATO is losing. So there's a request to the military people put into the civilians, a request to use nuclear weapons to respond. And at this point, the Soviets think, this is no war game. This is no practice. This has now become the real thing. The West, NATO is about to launch nuclear weapons against the Soviet Union. So they prepare their full nuclear arsenal. Giant SS-19 100-ton missiles are put on maximum alert. Submarines are deployed under the Arctic ice, ready to fire their missiles

against the West. The mobile SS-20s are sent out into the forests and the swamps of the Soviet Union, ready to fire their missiles. And on the night of the 8th of November, 1983, Andropov, who's a very ill man at this point he's not even in the Kremlin he's in a clinic outside Moscow the guy with the nuclear trigger called Cheget they were called Cheget in the Soviet Union it's the equivalent to the nuclear football

the guy with the codes sort of comes out and sits up with him waiting to give the go-go to launch this massive nuclear retaliation against the west and the night ticks on ticks through and uh in the morning the war game comes to an end and there is no attack there was a bit of tension there tom i think you did it happen did we all get destroyed but that's the background to um deutschland 83 isn't it yes that kind of wonderful german drama about it is yes that's

a spy in the not specifically abel archer but but the general tension in that very dangerous year of 1983 is the background yes to that Taylor what would it have taken that night for Andropov to have said go? So in other words, a border incident? I mean, those things happened all the time, right? I mean, could it just have taken one small thing for him to say, yeah, go for it? I think it could, Dominic. I think when crises escalate to that level, it's not really rational consideration that takes over. Any slight misunderstanding, any slight misinterpretation of what's going on. You know, an incident in Berlin could just have been the final trigger to say, right, fire those missiles.

OK, so if they did, what would have happened? So how many cities in the West, how many bases, how many would have been taken out? Well, we don't know the exact details of the Soviet nuclear arsenal. All these things were obviously very top secret at the time and are still shrouded in secrecy. But there would have been something like, they had something like 11,000 nuclear warheads, probably a lot more, but we know they certainly had 11. They were targeted on, well, obviously they were targeted on Salisbury, as we heard earlier.

Yeah, Beatty's bookshop would have... Yeah, yeah, that bookshop would have been in the first wave. So there were a multitude of targets, military targets mostly, some civilian targets. Some of the missiles weren't accurate enough to hit a sort of precise target. So some of them wouldn't have been targeted on airfields or missile silos. Some of them would have been targeted on cities. And, of course, as soon as those missiles had been launched, they would have been picked up in the United States.

Yes, I think without any question. Even though, because I guess what I'm wondering is, did they know about nuclear winters at this point? Yes. Yeah, everyone knew about that. Everyone knew about that, Tom. So essentially, you're going to die whatever happens. I mean, it doesn't... Yes, that's why it's called mutual assured destruction

because it's known that if one side attacks the other, the retaliation will destroy the other side. I mean, what would have happened is much of Western Europe, much of North America would have been taken out in the first wave. Then in the retaliation, much of Eastern Europe and much of Asia would have been taken out. But then this nuclear winter, as you say, Tom, would have descended. So that even countries, you know, third world countries,

even, you know, Southern Africa would have eventually been engulfed New Zealand and Australia, the Neville Shute book isn't there? That's right yes, yeah, yeah to go back a little bit so the Soviet Union obviously had a sense that the West would strike first but that wasn't an unreasonable sense

because I've been through the you know, what do they call them, Wintec Symex the British government war games and the one in 1981 for example sense because i've been through the you know they they what they call them wintek cymex the um the british government war games and the one in 1981 for example incredibly detailed that you can see a lot of online declassified files so these war games often envisaged that in the event of war the soviet or warsaw pack conventional forces would be would be too strong for nato and then eventually so the wintec cymex 81 exercise ends with the nato commanders asking um washington and london for permission to use nuclear weapons in the field and the plan is and there's a brilliant you can read it online i think

there's the brilliant minutes of the cabinet discussion where they basically say well we won't take out the soviet union We take out some of the Eastern European satellites to show our limited, you know, because then maybe they won't respond overwhelmingly. So if we just nuke Romania and Poland, then maybe, you know, Salisbury will be safe. The Soviet Union will recognise our limited aims. The Soviet Union will take out Birmingham, isn't that right?

In World War III the general Hackett yeah that is that's exactly what happens it's Minsk and Birmingham I think Minsk and Birmingham but I mean this idea that it would have been the Soviet Union that would have used nuclear weapons first I mean the Soviet in a way they didn't need to because their conventional weapon their conventional forces in Europe were so strong am I right Taylor yeah yes absolutely yes I mean they have 200 army divisions, you know, available in way beyond anything that the Western conventional forces have. But that's what Abel Archer, the NATO exercise, that's what it was about. It was about a defeat in a conventional confrontation, and therefore the request to use to use nuclear weapons and that

was what the soviets you see the soviets had always planned in their attacks upon the west they'd always planned to do it in the guise of a of a military war game so that the west wouldn't wouldn't realize that that was so they assume that the west are going to do exactly the same it's going to be a military war game that isn't in fact a war game. It's the real thing. They assume this is all maskrovka. They called it in Russian deception.

Every signal in the Able Archer war game, and there were signals being sent around sort of pretending all these things were happening, began with the words exercise, exercise, exercise, and then the signals. But of course, in the Soviet mindset, well, that's exactly what they would say, wouldn't they? They're not going to pretend this is the real thing. They're going to pretend it's a war game, and then they're going to attack us. I think we should take a break, Tom. This is so unbelievably fascinating. I think we should take a break. But kind of terrifying. We should talk a

tiny bit about the reaction to the Abel Arch thing, so Reagan completely changing his mindset, which is an extraordinary story and still not, I think, as well-known as it should be. And then we'll talk more generally about nuclear weapons. So we'll see you after the nuclear winter of the break. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews,

splash of showbiz gossip, and on our Q&A, we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes, and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com.

Hello, welcome back. We are on the cheery topic of how close the world came to total nuclear destruction. And on that theme, if you're interested in it and i i i don't really see how you couldn't be um i do recommend another podcast series um atomic hobo presented by julie mcdowell which whenever i want to make my flesh creep i listen to it and it's it's terrifying and brilliant and i can't recommend it highly enough anyway but enough about Julie's podcast let's get back to ours um we have uh Taylor Downing with us who has been talking about 1983 um Able Archer the world at the brink um but Taylor this is this is exists in the context obviously of the entire post-war period and I guess it the story begins with Hiroshima and Nagasaki when the eyes of the world and I guess particularly the Soviet Union is open to the fact that the United States have a

devastating weapon that gives them an overwhelming military advantage for as long as the Soviet Union doesn't have these weapons? Yes, absolutely. 70,000 killed within a few months in Hiroshima and probably well over 100,000 from the nuclear fallout that followed. And then another bomb, a different type of bomb in Nagasaki a few days later, finishes the Second World War and really is the dawn of the next conflict, the Cold War that follows. It's quite soon that the Soviets catch up. They have their spies at Los Alamos, where the Americans had produced the atomic bomb. And in 1949, I think it was August 1949, the Soviets detonate their first atomic bomb. And so the sort of balance of power

then effectively becomes a balance of terror. The two superpowers in the world, the United States leading the Western democratic world, the Soviet Union leading the communist bloc, both have atomic weapons, and can sort of stare at each other, you know, across the divide. And there are several, several incidents, as we know, that sort of... But before that, before that, while the Americans have the monopoly, is there any talk about, you know, let's launch a preemptive strike, let's take them

out while we can? No, no. The Soviet Union had been America's ally. They were very irritated by Soviet behaviour towards Berlin and responded with a Berlin airlift. They responded with a Marshall Plan to sort of shore up the European economies after the devastation of the Second World War. But no, I don't think there was any talk that, ah, we'll sneak away. I mean, there might have been one or two very bombastic, very combative military figures who said, now's the time, you know, let's blow these guys back into the Stone Age. We know that was said a few times in the 1950s by the Kurt LeMay's and the Thomas Powers and these sort of people who ran strategic air command. But I don't think there was any

serious thinking at the top level about using this advantage against the Soviet Union. They simply hoped, America hoped that it would maintain its monopoly of nuclear weapons. And I think the CIA had estimated that it would probably be the end of the 50s before the Soviets catch up. So it's a great surprise when in 1949, they detonate their first atomic bomb. But then the whole thing goes into a new era, into hydrogen, into thermonuclear weapons. So the bomb that had been dropped on Hiroshima, in technical terms, was a bomb of 14,000 kilotons. That's roughly equivalent to 14,000 tons of TNT. Huge, absolutely massive. But through the 50s, as both sides start testing the use of hydrogen bombs, this escalates off the scale. We're now talking about megatons, millions of tons of TNT equivalent,

the explosive power equivalent to millions of tons of TNT. So the Americans launch a detonated missile of 10 megatons, 10 million tons. The Soviets respond with one of 20 megatons. And finally, in 1961, the largest bomb ever detonated by the Soviet Union is of 50 megatons, 50 million tons of TNT. Remember, Hiroshima was 14,000, and we know how massively destructive that was. So one can only begin to imagine what an explosion of a 50 megaton and americans respond the same way and certain american thinkers who are working on all this talk about mega deaths they measure the deaths by millions of deaths it all just becomes utterly terrifying the scale

of the weaponry and the ability you know these wouldn't just destroy mankind it would destroy probably every living thing on earth would be destroyed by these weapons but taylor i mean let's get into the the sort of the weeds of the issue um these things are incredibly expensive and incredibly terrifying um but that you could if you wanted to maybe i mean i actually probably would make this case that ultimately they saved a lot of lives that a lot of people who are alive now who would be dead um had these weapons not been developed because had they relied on conventional armaments the chances are given that we know what we know of human nature and of the history of the 20th century that the two sides probably would have fought a third world war.

But I would argue, now a lot of people will probably say this is a horrific argument, but I would argue that the possession of such unbelievably terrifying weapons stayed their hand and that actually deterrence, well, to me, the story of the Cold War is one of deterrence working. Now, am I just being completely mad and over-sanguine about that, or do you think there's some truth in it? No, no, I think there is. I mean, that was the justification for deterrence. That was the justification that neither side, despite the vast cost of these weapons, the huge drain on the economies, particularly of the Soviet bloc,

less so in the West, but the huge drain on the economy to produce these weapons, despite all of that, that they wouldn't be used. And this, of course, comes to the central crux, in a sense, of Cold War ideology. Robert McNamara, who was Kennedy's defence secretary in the early 60s, comes up with this thing, destruction and somebody rather cleverly adds the word mutual to the beginning of that so this is the most famous acronym of the cold war mad it's a mad philosophy mutual assured destruction but you're absolutely right dominic it it did work you know and there's a there is a case to to be made for the fact that it was effective. Because even on that night in November 1983, that we've just been talking about, the Soviet leaders didn't press the button,

didn't launch their missiles, because they knew they would be committing national suicide by doing so. So on the theme of this this episode which is basically nuclear war near misses we've we've talked about 1983 you've cited 1962 the cuban missile crisis as the other time that we came close to destruction were there other particular moments where the world came perilously close aside from those two examples yes tom absolutely they were and they're usually revolving around accidents technical failures computer mishaps misunderstandings of one sort or another so just to give you an idea of a few i mean in july 1957 the rf lakenheath which is near Cambridge, a B-47 bomber crashed and skidded into a bunker containing nuclear weapons. The whole thing was engulfed in flames.

And it was only down to the very rapid action of not only the Air Force Fire Brigade, but the local fire brigade that put the fires out just before they ignited the nuclear weapons in this bunker. In January 1961, a B-52 bomber, one of these huge giant eight-engine jet bombers, split apart over North Carolina, probably some sort of metal fatigue or something. And two 24 megaton thermonuclear bombs fell to earth in North Carolina. One was recovered quite quickly. The other landed somewhere in swampy ground and has never been recovered. Oh, my God. It's still there. So an alligator might eat it.

But as long as the alligator doesn't know how to set off the trigger. On the one they discovered, five out of six safety devices had failed. In January 1966, probably the most famous incident was over palomares in Spain. That's right. So the Americans had this, their basic deterrence worked through what they called Operation Chromedome. At any one moment, 12 B-52 bombers were airborne, circling around Soviet, just on the edge of Soviet airspace. They all had pre-assigned targets. And had there been war, the go codes would have been sent out to these aircraft and they would have immediately entered Soviet airspace to attack their pre-assigned targets. This was the operation that was wonderfully satirized in Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove, where it all goes wrong and the commander orders his planes to attack and so on. But anyway, on this day in 1996,

there's a B-52 flying out of Seymour Johnson Air Force Base in North Carolina. It's on a 24-hour mission. It's crossed the Atlantic, it's gone down the Mediterranean, and it's patrolling the Western Soviet border outside airspace, but as I say, waiting for the go codes should they come this was a 24 7 operation 12 b-52s on this particular day it's returning to the states after this long mission they have to have two refueling um uh operations in the course of the 24-hour flight and it's the second of the two coming back about to cross the atlantic but over the Mediterranean, where the aircraft collides with the fuel tanker that is sent up to refuel it. A huge fireball in the sky. Most of the people involved are killed immediately. But four thermonuclear weapons fall to the ground, three of them landing on a beach near Palomares, they recovered

quite quickly, although they'd leaked a small amount of nuclear waste. But it took months that the fourth had fallen into the Mediterranean and it had actually remarkably fallen down a sort of canyon in the Mediterranean. So it was, I think, 2000 feet deep, something deep something like that and it takes months to to find this this this fourth weapon um uh and retrieve it and the arguments between the spanish and the u.s governments over compensation you know go on for for for about 50 years in fact they were resolved in the early part of this century and there's another accident over fuel in Greenland. And eventually governments object to the idea that the Americans are flying B-52 bombers with nuclear weapons overhead. Fair enough. With a habit of dropping them. the Cuban Missile Crisis itself, which we've already referred to, you know, a very, very tense moment in the Cold War, the Americans are very fearful that the Soviets will try and get agents into their bases and to sabotage aircraft or missiles. So on this one particular night at

Duluth Air Force Base in Minnesota, a guard spots an intruder climbing over the fence and sets off an alarm. This immediately triggers alarms at other air bases in the Midwest. But at one of them, the wrong alarm goes off. It's not we have an intruder, it's we are coming under nuclear attack. So all the aircraft rally to the end of the runways, they're just about fully armed with nuclear weapons, they're just about to sort of take off to launch a reprisal. When the commander realises that the wrong alarm has gone off and they're all reculed. Phew, thank goodness for that.

Back at Duluth in Minnesota, they find that the intruder was a grizzly bear. A hungry grizzly bear nearly sets off World War III. But, Taylor, I suppose in complete contrast to my earlier sort of sanguine, oh, they save lots of lives, some listeners will say, well, the lesson of all this is that one day, you know, we've been lucky and lucky and lucky and lucky, and one day we won't be lucky and the planet will be destroyed.

Do you buy that? Looking back on the Cold War period, I think we were miraculously lucky. I think the number of incidents, and I could relate more, the number of incidents where we came so close to a nuclear accident, coming out of some misunderstanding or some technical failure. There are lots of cases as well where computers malfunction. Remember remember computers that were running the nuclear systems in the 1960s certainly uh you know had far less computing power than your iphone today has these are very unsophisticated controls uh and they go wrong on several occasions and there there's another one in the Cuban Missile Crisis where the early warning system is going through a test and it gets confused as to a conventional satellite coming over and it's test run. And again, it goes right up to the Strategic Air Command to prepare to launch a retaliation against the Soviet Union. You know, I think overall, to answer your question, yes,

I think it was a miracle that we got through the Cold War without there being some sort of nuclear configuration. Whenever, you know, my laptop malfunctions or something, it always makes me think, how on earth did we survive the Cold War? But we did. And I suppose going into the the post-cold war period generally people have been able to breathe more easily and yet perhaps in a way it's become more dangerous because there are certain flashpoints where there could be nuclear war but it wouldn't destroy the entire planet and so therefore

perhaps there are governments that think well we, we might give it a go. And I guess the two notorious flashpoints are India and Pakistan and North Korea. Is that fair? Yes, I think, I mean, picking up on both the points you're making, you know, Dominic, your point about it was a sort of balanced world and therefore a safer world the sort of bipolar nature of the cold war where they were just basically you know two two sets of powers did have a level of balance what we're now into is a multipolar nuclear world where several countries in israel and iran i forgot them as well yeah absolutely yeah yeah so so so both india and pakistan as you say tom have nuclear weapons there could well be a dispute that would

again this sort of what we were talking about earlier with abel archer with the nato exercise you know if one side feels it's losing then it's more likely to launch a nuclear attack upon upon the other so we've got we've got um pakistan and ind. Iran doesn't yet, as far as we know, have a nuclear capability, but Israel does. And if there is some sort of terrible shooting war in the Middle East that escalates, then it's impossible to imagine a nuclear configuration there. North Korea, we're pretty sure, has some sort of nuclear capability, although it's quite unclear what it is. And, you know, that's a very unstable, very strange political entity in North Korea. So in a sense, the world is a more dangerous place now in this

sort of multi-polar game. And it is easier, I think, to imagine that somebody will start what they see as a limited nuclear exchange, hoping to get benefit out of it. But the trouble with any form of nuclear exchange is that it will escalate. And what about the United States and China? So people talk about Taiwan as an incredibly dangerous flashpoint. Do you think there's a prospect that that might escalate to a degree that, you know, we're staring down the barrel of nuclear confrontation again? Just to cheer the listeners up as we come to the end of the podcast. Yeah, this is very cheery, isn't it? Yes, yes. I mean, I think it's unlikely, to be honest. I think both China and the United States have enough restraints built into their systems. But it's entirely impossible to predict. And the trouble,

as I say, is how these things would escalate very rapidly. And the trouble with crises and periods of crises is that they bring misunderstandings. They bring a misinterpretation of what's going on. They bring a sense of panic. That's exactly what happened in 1983. The Soviets panicked that they were about to come under attack, having completely misread the signs. And it is very possible that that could happen again today in the multi-polar nuclear world that we're living in. But let's just end on a slightly more cheery note. So the 1983, arguably the closest the world has ever come to nuclear war.

That did kind of end happily, didn't it? Because Ronald Reagan, who had previously been all about the the sort of evil empire rhetoric when he learned through oleg gordievsky the soviet defector when he learned how frightened the russians had been he completely changed his view of the soviet union and of the you know he became much more he he writes in his memoirs about what a revelation it was he said i'd never it never occurred to him before that they would be frightened of us so that is a kind of cheery thought in a way it is it is and in its way the his reaction to that begins the end of the cold war he says we must never be in a position again where the soviets

can misunderstand us, where they will think we might launch a preemptive attack. You know, the American view is we don't do Pearl Harbors. You know, we don't launch our planes on our, you know, out of a blue sky. You know, we don't do these things. And we must make sure that the Soviets understand we would never launch a preemptive attack. That's what Reagan says in 1984, 1985, when the news comes through about how panicked they were. So he says, I must get to know these guys. And then eventually in 1985, after another Cheneyenko, Andropov dies, Cheneienko, an even older Soviet leader takes over. When he finally dies, the Politburo decide we've got to get a new generation in charge.

And of course, this man, Gorbachev, Mikhail Gorbachev comes along. Reagan reaches out to him. They meet. And guess what? They get on. They get on well together. They disagree fundamentally over ideological issues and strategic issues, but they get on as individuals. And from that moment onwards, the sort of likelihood of a misunderstanding escalating to a full nuclear Armageddon gets less and less and less.

And there are a series of conferences and treaties and summits that we all know about Geneva Geneva, Reykjavik, Washington, and so on. And that begins the process, not only of nuclear disarmament, certain intermediate range weapons are abolished altogether, but it sort of basically begins the process that ends the Cold War. So yes, yes, Dominic, it does have a happy ending.

Well, Taylor, thanks so much. That was brilliant, if incredibly depressing and harrowing um and uh i i can't recommend uh your book 1983 the world at the brink enough it's a completely chilling uh read and actually gave me sleepless nights for quite a long time after i'd read it it is chilling though tom but i mean it didn't happen you know it could be quite but it might have happened yeah but it didn't so i I retrospectively cast a shadow over my memories of. Of 1983.

Growing up in 1980s Wiltshire. Yeah. Realising that myself, the Brooks Bookshop. And actually, Dominic, I'll tell you something actually also very sinister that happened was that I was going through my father's papers. Yeah. So he had a whole stash of papers which he kept and he was clerk to the parish council of broad chalk in the picturesque chalk valley and there was a whole load of papers that he'd been given as clerk of the parish council on how to cope with a nuclear strike oh yes and it was all about how to kind of bury dead cattle

absolutely and where where bodies should be disposed of and as you know i'm a big fan of all this sort of protect and survive um stuff you know and there was these public information films that told you how to bury the bodies of your loved ones outside your fallout room um and all this sort of stuff i mean the key thing i always think i mean we haven't got onto threads and stuff which i know taylor is interested in as am i all the sort of fantasies of of nuclear apocalypse. But the key thing, I think, would be to die straight away. You want to be incinerated right at the beginning.

You don't want to be wandering around some sort of Dark Ages frozen wasteland. So one film that I did see was a series called QED, and it was about a nuclear missile being dropped over St. Paul's, and it kind of worked out exactly what would happen. And I remember they put, I think, a kind of melon or something, watermelon on a stick, and then they blew shattered glass at it to simulate what the effect would be of being in a room with glass. And that would make me definitely want to be killed.

Yeah. Because what happens to your head in the event of glass hitting it? You don't want to be one of these people who's living in this sort of post-apocalyptic kingdom of Mercia fighting the mutants. Well, no, the end of Threads, which I think we should do an episode on. We will do. We should do that on how people envisaged what the effects

of nuclear war would be, but maybe not immediately because, to be honest, it's a bit depressing. All right. On that note. I think we'll be back soon with hopefully some kind of more cheery stuff. Thank you again, Taylor. And we'll see you next time. Bye bye.

Bye bye. Thanks for listening to The Rest Is History. For bonus episodes, early access, ad-free listening, and access to our chat community, please sign up at restishistorypod.com. That's restishistorypod.com.