Dropping depth charges left then right, noisy but always off target-those are signals, Arkhipov argued. The official Soviet debriefs are still secret, but a Russian reporter, Alexander Mozgovoi, an American writer, and eyewitness testimony from intelligence officer Orlov suggest that Arkhipov told the captain that the ship was not in danger. On his sub, Savitsky gave the order and got one supporting vote, but Arkhipov balked. The way it’s usually told is that each of the three Soviet submarine captains in the ocean around Cuba had the power to launch a nuclear torpedo if-and only if-he had the consent of all three senior officers on board. But, says Thomas Blanton, the former director of the nongovernmental National Security Archive, simply put, this “guy called Vasili Arkhipov saved the world.”Īrkhipov, described by his wife as a modest, soft-spoken man, simply talked Savitsky down. What he said to Savitsky we will never know, not exactly. He was Savitsky’s equal, the flotilla commander responsible for three Russian subs on this secret mission to Cuba-and he is maybe one of the quietest, most unsung heroes of modern times.
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Good looking, with a full head of hair and something like a spit curl dangling over his forehead. would probably have responded with nuclear-depth charges, “thus,” wrote Russian archivist Svetlana Savranskaya, understating wildly, “starting a chain of inadvertent developments, which could have led to catastrophic consequences.”īut it didn’t happen, because that’s when Vasili Alexandrovich Arkhipov steps into the story. Had Savitsky launched his torpedo, had he vaporized a U.S. “We thought, That’s it, the end.” And that’s when, he says, the Soviet captain shouted, “Maybe the war has already started up there … We’re gonna blast them now! We will die, but we will sink them all-we will not become the shame of the fleet.” Vadim Orlov, an intelligence officer who was there, remembers a particularly loud blast: “The Americans hit us with something stronger than the grenades-apparently with a practice depth bomb,” he wrote later. The air-conditioning system was broken, and the ship couldn’t surface without being exposed.
Temperatures in the submarine had climbed above 100 degrees. The nuke on this missile had roughly the power of the bomb at Hiroshima. Navy ships were nearby, all possible targets. Moscow hadn’t communicated with its sub for days. His second in command approved the order. He ordered the nuclear-tipped missile readied. The Russian in question, an exhausted, nervous submarine commander named Valentin Savitsky, decided to do it. What the Americans don’t know is that this sub has a tactical nuclear torpedo on board, available to launch, and that the Russian captain is asking himself, Shall I fire? Inside, the sub is rocking, shaking with each new explosion. The sub is hiding in the ocean, and the Americans are dropping depth charges left and right of the hull.
It’s October 1962, the height of the Cuban missile crisis, and there’s a Soviet submarine in the Caribbean that’s been spotted by the American Navy.
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