War/Conflict: Cold War, Cuban Missile Crisis
Date: 27 October 1962
Event: During an international reunion 40 years after the event, a 34-year-old Soviet naval officer, Commodore Vasili Alexandrovich Arkhipov, was credited with being the central and defining figure in a potentially apocalyptic drama played out hundreds of feet below the surface of the Atlantic Ocean, approximately 500 miles off the coast of Cuba. As the flotilla commander of four diesel-powered submarines, Arkhipov was also the second-in-command of one of the four boats, B-59. Detected by the US Navy on 27 October 1962 attempting to pass covertly through President John F Kennedy’s line of quarantine around Cuba, the submerged B-59 was subject to small explosive charges dropped by American warships in an attempt to force it to surface. Unbeknown to the Americans, the infiltrating subs each carried a single nuclear-armed torpedo that the boat’s captain was authorised to employ should he believe he was under attack. Fortunately for the world, while the other three boats required the approval of only the two most senior officers on board to employ their weapons, B-59 had three senior officers who needed to agree. The conditions in the sub were exceptionally harsh. Temperatures climbed past 122ºF (50ºC), air scrubbers were not working, crewmen were falling unconscious, and the boat’s batteries were nearly depleted. Believing war had broken out and that they were already under attack, two of B-59’s three senior officers were in agreement that they should fire their nuclear torpedo. The third officer, Arkhipov, calmly refused to authorise the weapon’s use, and eventually convinced the captain to surface instead.
Impact: For any survivors, 27 October would have been the anniversary of World War III had it not been for one man: Commodore Arkhipov. While Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev would receive all the accolades for their resolution of the crisis, in reality (though this was unknown for decades) it was Arkhipov’s calm disposition and sound rationale that prevented the fall of the first domino, the initial mushroom cloud that most likely would have expanded to global thermonuclear war. Of all the stars that shine within the Pantheon of world heroes, Arkhipov’s shines the brightest as the man who literally saved the world from itself.
Smelling the past