Vasily Arkhipov

Vasily Aleksandrovich Arkhipov (Василий Александрович Архипов, 30 January 1926 – 19 August 1998) was a Soviet Naval officer who is known for preventing a Soviet nuclear torpedo launch during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

The course of events that would have followed such a launch cannot be known, but various speculations have been advanced, up to and including global thermonuclear war.

As flotilla chief of staff as well as executive officer of the diesel powered submarine SOVIET SUBMARINE B-59, Arkhipov refused to authorize the captain and the political officer to use nuclear torpedoes against the United States Navy, a decision that required the agreement of all three officers.

He was educated in the Pacific Higher Naval School and participated in the Soviet–Japanese War in August 1945, serving aboard a minesweeper.

He transferred to the Azerbaijan Higher Naval School and graduated in 1947.

After graduation in 1947, Arkhipov served in the submarine service aboard boats in the Black Sea, Northern, and Baltic Fleets.

In July 1961, Arkhipov was appointed deputy commander and therefore executive officer of the new Hotel-class submarine ballistic missile submarine K-19.

After a few days of conducting exercises off the south-east coast of Greenland, the submarine developed an extreme leak in its reactor coolant system.

This leak led to a failure of the cooling system.

Radio communications were also affected, and the crew was unable to make contact with Moscow.

With no backup systems, Captain Nikolai Zateyev ordered the seven members of the engineer crew to come up with a solution to avoid nuclear meltdown.

This required the men to work in high radiation levels for extended periods.

They eventually came up with a secondary coolant system and were able to prevent a reactor meltdown.

Although they were able to save themselves from a nuclear meltdown, the entire crew, including Arkhipov, were irradiated.

All members of the engineer crew and their divisional officer died within a month of the incident due to the high levels of radiation they were exposed to.

Over the course of two years, 15 more sailors on the crew died from the after-effects.

On 27 October 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, a group of 11 United States Navy destroyers and the aircraft carrier USS Randolph (CV-15) located the diesel-powered, nuclear-armed Foxtrot-class submarine SOVIET SUBMARINE B-59 near Cuba.

(The B-59 was one of four Foxtrot submarines sent by the USSR to the area around Cuba.) Despite being in international waters, the United States Navy started dropping signaling depth charges, which were intended to force the submarine to come to the surface for identification.

By then, there had been no contact from Moscow for a number of days, and although the B-59's crew had been picking up U.S. civilian radio broadcasts earlier on, the submarine was too deep to monitor any radio traffic, as it was busy trying to hide from its American pursuers.

Those on board did not know whether war had broken out or not.

The captain of the submarine, Valentin Grigoryevich Savitsky, decided that a war might already have started and wanted to launch a T-5 nuclear torpedo.

Unlike other Soviet submarines armed with the "special weapon", where only the captain and the political officer were required to authorize a nuclear launch, three officers on board the B-59 were required to authorize the launch because Arkhipov was also the chief of staff of the brigade (not the commander as is often incorrectly reported, who was in fact Captain First Rank Vasili Naumovich Agafonov).

The three men were Captain Savitsky, Political Officer Ivan Semyonovich Maslennikov, and Executive Officer Arkhipov.

An argument broke out among the three of them, with only Arkhipov against the launch.

Although Arkhipov was only second-in-command of the B-59, he was also the chief of staff of the flotilla.

According to author Edward Wilson, the reputation Arkhipov had gained from his courageous conduct in the previous year's K-19 incident played a large role in the debate to launch the torpedo.

Arkhipov eventually persuaded Savitsky to surface and await orders from Moscow.

His persuasion effectively averted a nuclear war that likely would have ensued if the nuclear weapon had been fired.

The batteries of the B-59 ran very low and its air conditioning failed, which caused extreme heat and generated high levels of carbon dioxide inside the submarine.

It surfaced amid the U.S. warships pursuing it and made contact with a U.S. destroyer.

After discussions with the ship, B-59 was then ordered by the Russian fleet to set course back to the Soviet Union.

In 1997, Arkhipov wrote that after surfacing, his submarine was fired on with warning shots by American aircraft: "the plane, flying over the conning tower, 1 to 3 seconds before the start of fire turned on powerful searchlights and blinded the people on the bridge... when [the commander] blinked and blinked his eyes and could see again, it became clear that the plane was firing past and along the boat. And the subsequent similar actions (there were 12 overflights altogether) were not as worrisome any longer."

Immediately upon return to Russia, many crew members were faced with disgrace from their superiors.

One admiral told them "It would have been better if you'd gone down with your ship".

Olga, Arkhipov's wife, said that "he didn't like talking about it, he felt they hadn't appreciated what they had gone through".

Each captain was required to present a report of events during the mission to Marshal Andrei Grechko, who substituted for the ill Soviet defense minister.

Soviet military officials were infuriated with the crew's failure to follow their strict orders of secrecy, but this anger was mitigated when the Collegium learned that diesel-electric submarines had been involved—not, as originally planned, nuclear submarines.

The diesel-electric submarines were not so well-suited for long-range voyages in Caribbean waters as the nuclear ones.

In 2002, Thomas S. Blanton, then director of the U.S. National Security Archive, credited Arkhipov as "the man who saved the world".

Arkhipov was born into a Russian peasant family in the town of Staraya Kupavna, near Moscow.