Who was Vasili Arkhipov?

The survivor of K-19

Arkhipov was born in 1926 and made his career in the Soviet navy’s young submarine fleet. In July 1961 he was the executive officer of K-19, one of the first Soviet nuclear-powered missile submarines. On July 4, during exercises in the North Atlantic, the cooling system of its reactor failed. Crew members rigged an emergency cooling line by hand, and several of the men who did the work died of radiation sickness within weeks. Arkhipov came through. Fifteen months later he was at sea again, in a far more dangerous place.

Four submarines, four nuclear torpedoes

Operation Anadyr, Moscow’s secret move of missiles to Cuba (its reasons are in why the Soviets sent them), also sent four diesel submarines of the Northern Fleet: B-4, B-36, B-59 and B-130. Each carried one torpedo with a nuclear warhead. Arkhipov sailed in B-59 as chief of staff of their brigade. The boat’s captain was Valentin Savitsky.

By late October the U.S. Navy was hunting all four. On October 27 a group led by the carrier USS Randolph cornered B-59 near the quarantine line, and destroyers dropped small practice depth charges as a signal to surface. Washington had explained the signal to Moscow. No one had passed the explanation on to the men below. Inside, the batteries were almost dead, the temperature passed 45°C (113°F), and the boat had heard nothing from Moscow for days.

The order and the refusal

Savitsky concluded that the war might already have begun, and ordered the nuclear torpedo readied. Vadim Orlov, a signals intelligence officer aboard, later remembered him shouting, “We will die, but we will sink them all.” In the version most often told, firing the weapon needed the agreement of the three senior officers on board: Savitsky, the political officer Ivan Maslennikov and Arkhipov.

Arkhipov said no. He calmed the captain and persuaded him to take the boat up. Around nine that night B-59 surfaced among the American ships, under their searchlights. The destroyers circled it, and in the end let it sail home.

What historians still argue

The scene rests on the memories of the men who were there, above all Orlov’s, which became widely known only around a conference in Havana in October 2002, held for the crisis’s fortieth anniversary. Some veterans of the operation doubted that any captain would have fired without orders from Moscow. Historians still argue over the details: how far the order went, how close the torpedo came to launch and what each officer actually said. No account disputes the outcome. B-59 came up, and the torpedo stayed in its tube.

“Saved the world”?

Arkhipov stayed in the navy, rose to vice admiral and died in 1998, before most of the world had heard his name. At the Havana conference, Thomas Blanton of the National Security Archive told the Boston Globe that “a guy called Vasili Arkhipov saved the world.” In 2017, after his death, he became the first person honored with the Future of Life Award.

Whether one man’s refusal saved the world can’t be proved. What the record does show is that on Black Saturday, often called the most dangerous day of the crisis, a weapon that could have started a nuclear war was in the hands of exhausted officers far from Moscow, and one of them said no.