How a Soviet Naval Officer Single-Handedly Prevented Nuclear Armageddon
The B-59 Soviet submarine, equipped with a T-5 nuclear torpedo, cutting through Cuban waters. October 1962.
It was October 27th, 1962, the apotheosis of the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the B-59’s battery was quickly depleting. The foxtrot-class Soviet submarine had been submerged for days. The air-conditioning had given out, oxygen was running low, and a noxious cocktail of carbon dioxide and methane gas was filling the steel cylinder. Crewmates fainted from the 120 degree heat and succumbed to delirium. The emergency lights bathed the sub’s interior in a malevolent red glow. The sub was too deep to contact Moscow or receive U.S. radio broadcasts.
When matters couldn’t seem to get any worse, multiple blasts rocked the hull of the submarine, sending the crew, already suffering from acute distress, into a nonsensical panic. A fleet of American warships had surrounded the B-59 and were bombing them in international waters. To Captain Valentin Grigoryevich Savitsky, that could only mean one thing: World War III had broken out on the surface. He told his crew, “We’re going to blast them now. We’ll die, but we will sink them all. We won’t disgrace our navy or shame the fleet.”
Captain Savitsky instructed his men to prepare the “special weapon,” a 10-kiloton nuclear torpedo equivalent to 10,000 tons of TNT, with two-thirds the explosive power of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
The Brink of War
The Cuban Missile Crisis spanned only 13 days, from October 16th–28th, 1962, but every day, it appeared the scales of diplomacy would inevitably tilt toward thermonuclear war with the Soviet Union.
President John F. Kennedy gave a televised address from the Oval Office, informing a distraught nation, “Unmistakable evidence has established the fact that a series of offensive missile sites is now in preparation on that imprisoned island (of Cuba). The purpose of these bases can be none other than to provide a nuclear strike capability against the Western Hemisphere.”
A week prior, on October 14th, a U-2 spy plane piloted by Richard Stephen Heyser captured surveillance images clearly showing the construction of Soviet-supplied medium-range and intermediate-range ballistic missiles in Los Palacios, San Cristobal and San Diego de Los Banos, Cuba.
It appeared the Soviets were preparing for an attack, or at the very least, establishing a military presence 90 miles south of Florida’s coast and arming the Castro regime. Some of Kennedy’s advisors urged him to conduct an aerial strike and destroy the missile stockpile, while others called for a complete invasion of Cuba. After the botched Bay of Pigs Invasion, Kennedy had grown weary of his intelligence officers and opted to try diplomacy with Nikita Khrushchev, the premier of the Soviet Union.
For several days, the two world leaders communicated in a series of letters, but their statesmanlike rhetoric contained hostile undertones, and tensions continued to percolate. A glimmer of hope arrived on Friday, October 26th in the form of a letter from Khrushchev. He refuted Kennedy’s interpretation of weapons in Cuba as “offensive” but raised a proposal for peace: the Soviet Union would disband its weapons and cease the supply of further armaments to Cuba in exchange for an end to JFK’s “quarantine” of the island — a term the President favored over “blockade,” which was considered an act of war — and a guarantee that Cuba would not be invaded.
Kennedy received another letter from Khrushchev the following day. It was evening in Washington, but the early morning hours of the 28th in Moscow. Khrushchev added the stipulation that armaments be removed from Cuba if the U.S. removed Jupiter missiles from Turkey.
Noting the peculiar time in which the letter was sent, Kennedy deduced that Khrushchev was more anxious to strike an agreement than he was letting on, likely because a U.S. U-2 plane piloted by Major Rudolph Anderson was shot down by a Soviet missile over Cuba earlier that day, giving Kennedy cause to invade the neighboring country. Kennedy decided to ignore the second letter about Turkey and respond to the first. The two world leaders agreed upon the original terms, and the subsequent removal of nuclear weapons from Cuba was carried out under the supervision of the United Nations.
However, at the same time President Kennedy was crafting his letter to Chairman Khrushchev on October 27th, the B-59 was readying their 10-kiloton warhead to obliterate a clueless U.S. naval fleet.
Vasili Arkhipov Saves the World
Other Soviet foxtrot submarines only required the authorization of a captain and a political officer to fire the “special weapon,” but because Arkhipov was an executive officer and chief of staff, his permission was needed as well. Captain Savitsky and Political Officer Ivan Semyonovich Maslennikov voted to fire the torpedo, but Arkhipov refused to give his consent.
He correctly assumed the American ships were not firing upon them, but dropping depth charges intended to provoke the B-59 to surface.
The 36-year-old Arkhipov was familiar with the destructive power of nuclear radiation. The previous year, he was the executive officer aboard another famous Soviet submarine, the K-19, the first submarine equipped with nuclear ballistic missiles. The sub was assembled haphazardly and the nuclear reactor’s cooling system suffered a large leak, dropping the level of coolant to zero. Engineers sacrificed themselves to create a makeshift cooling system, but the entire crew had been irradiated, including Arkhipov. Twenty-two crew members, including all engineers, died within two years.
Arkhipov had witnessed the long-term effects of radiation exposure firsthand and therefore understood how imperative it was that the B-59 not launch their warhead unless unequivocally certain war had broken out. If they were mistaken, and ended up starting World War III, they would doom the human population to the same experience the men on the K-19 endured.
Reports vary on how close the B-59 actually came to launching the torpedo. Some claim Savitsky had given the orders and the missile was being prepared, while the account of Ryurik Ketov, a commander of a submarine in the same brigade, claimed Savitsky was panic-stricken for a moment, but Arkhipov calmed him down before he could even descend the steps of the conning tower.
After hours of depth charges exploding around them and the battery life of the B-59 dwindling, Arkhipov eventually convinced Captain Savitsky to surface and incur whatever consequences awaited them. Upon exiting the sub, they were surrounded by the USS Randolph Task Group Alpha, which included USS destroyers Murray and Cony. Instead of being met with gunfire, the crew of the B-59 was greeted with a blinding searchlight and the Murray’s jazz band playing on deck. Many crew members likely thought they were still hallucinating.
Despite his heroic actions, Arkhipov encountered a general disdain from his superiors upon returning to Russia. Many Soviet officers felt the B-59 crew should’ve gone down with their ship before submitting to the Americans’ requests. October 27th, 1962, or “Black Saturday,” as the day came to be known, became a point of shame for Arkhipov, but he continued to serve in the Soviet navy for another sixteen years, eventually rising to the rank of vice admiral.
It wasn’t until 1997 that the general public gleaned a sense of just how close the world came to vast destruction. Arkhipov gave a presentation in Moscow on the 35th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis. In his presentation, he responded to a 1995 publication by Alexander Mozgovoy about the near-use of the torpedo. He disproved certain claims, downplayed his role in the prevention of war, and shied away from the word “nuclear,” but did confirm the salient details of Mozgovoy’s report to a shocked audience.
Had the T-5 torpedo been launched, the Randolph Task Group would’ve been incinerated, and President Kennedy likely would’ve been forced to exhaust all retaliatory measures, which included over 27,000 nuclear weapons with approximately 3,500 prepared to launch, and the world would’ve been engulfed in nuclear war.
In 2017, Vasili Arkhipov was posthumously honored as the first “Future of Life” award recipient by the Future of Life Institute, a nonprofit organization that promotes the proper management of volatile technologies such as AI and nuclear weapons.