S10 Ep41: Able Archer: The Nuclear War Game That Almost Ended the World with Brian J. Morra

In the fall of 1983, NATO's annual nuclear war exercise, Able Archer 83, brought the United States and the Soviet Union closer to catastrophe than almost anyone in Washington understood at the time. Brian J. Morra—decorated former Air Force intelligence officer, aerospace executive, and author of the historical thriller The Able Archers —was inside those events: stationed in Tokyo during the KAL 007 shootdown, transferred to Washington just as the crisis peaked, and present in Germany as Soviet nuclear alerts reached levels never seen before or since. He walks Chris through the paranoia that drove Operation RYAN, the Kremlin's vast intelligence collection effort premised on the certainty of a NATO first strike; why mirror imaging at CIA left Reagan largely uninformed; and how three individuals—General Charles Donnelly, Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov, and General Leonard Perutz—each exercised the kind of cool judgment that kept the crisis from tipping into war. Morra draws the line from 1983 to the present: when leadership on opposing sides stops talking directly, the system fails—and that failure, he argues, looks familiar today.

You can listen to S10 Ep41: Able Archer: The Nuclear War Game That Almost Ended the World with Brian J. Morra online on Radio and Podcast. Open the player on this page to stream the available audio.

S10 Ep41: Able Archer: The Nuclear War Game That Almost Ended the World with Brian J. Morra is an episode from Secrets & Spies.

This episode is 61:05 long.

This episode was published on Apr 26, 2026.

Yes. Use the heart button on the episode page to add it to your favorite episodes list.

Yes. This page shows related episodes from Secrets & Spies when more episodes are available from the podcast feed.