A Blog by Robert Krulwich<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Temperament matters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Especially when nuclear weapons are involved and you don\u2019t\u2014you can\u2019t\u2014know what the enemy is up to, and you\u2019re scared. Then it helps (it helps a lot) to be calm.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The world owes an enormous debt to a quiet, steady Russian naval officer who probably saved my life. And yours. And everyone you know. Even those of you who weren\u2019t yet born. I want to tell his story \u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It\u2019s October 1962, the height of the Cuban missile crisis, and there\u2019s a Soviet submarine in the Caribbean that\u2019s been spotted by the American Navy. President Kennedy has blockaded Cuba. No sea traffic is permitted through.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Photograph by NY Daily News Archive, Getty<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The sub is hiding in the ocean, and the Americans are dropping depth charges left and right of the hull. Inside, the sub is rocking, shaking with each new explosion. What the Americans don\u2019t 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?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This actually happened.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Russian in question, an exhausted, nervous submarine commander named Valentin Savitsky, decided to do it. He ordered the nuclear-tipped missile readied. His second in command approved the order. Moscow hadn\u2019t communicated with its sub for days. Eleven U.S. Navy ships were nearby, all possible targets. The nuke on this missile had roughly the power of the bomb at Hiroshima.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWe\u2019re gonna blast them now!\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Temperatures in the submarine had climbed above 100 degrees. The air-conditioning system was broken, and the ship couldn\u2019t surface without being exposed. The captain felt doomed. Vadim Orlov, an intelligence officer who was there, remembers a particularly loud blast: \u201cThe Americans hit us with something stronger than the grenades\u2014apparently with a practice depth bomb,\u201d he wrote later. \u201cWe thought, That\u2019s it, the end.\u201d And that\u2019s when, he says, the Soviet captain shouted, \u201cMaybe the war has already started up there \u2026 We\u2019re gonna blast them now! We will die, but we will sink them all\u2014we will not become the shame of the fleet.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Had Savitsky launched his torpedo, had he vaporized a U.S. destroyer or aircraft carrier, the U.S. would probably have responded with nuclear-depth charges, \u201cthus,\u201d wrote Russian archivist Svetlana Savranskaya, understating wildly, \u201cstarting a chain of inadvertent developments, which could have led to catastrophic consequences.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n But it didn\u2019t happen, because that\u2019s when Vasili Alexandrovich Arkhipov steps into the story.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Photo courtesy of M. Yarovskaya and A. Labunskaya<\/p>\n\n\n\n He was 34 at the time. Good looking, with a full head of hair and something like a spit curl dangling over his forehead. He was Savitsky\u2019s equal, the flotilla commander responsible for three Russian subs on this secret mission to Cuba\u2014and he is maybe one of the quietest, most unsung heroes of modern times.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What he said to Savitsky we will never know, not exactly. But, says Thomas Blanton, the former director of the nongovernmental National Security Archive, simply put, this \u201cguy called Vasili Arkhipov saved the world.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Arkhipov, described by his wife as a modest, soft-spoken man, simply talked Savitsky down.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The exact details are controversial. The way it\u2019s 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\u2014and only if\u2014he had the consent of all three senior officers on board. On his sub, Savitsky gave the order and got one supporting vote, but Arkhipov balked. He wouldn\u2019t go along.<\/p>\n\n\n\n He argued that this was not an attack<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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. It was being asked to surface. Dropping depth charges left then right, noisy but always off target\u2014those are signals, Arkhipov argued. They say, We know you\u2019re there. Identify yourselves. Come up and talk. We intend no harm.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What\u2019s Happening?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n The Russian crew couldn\u2019t tell what was going on above them: They\u2019d gone silent well before the crisis began. Their original orders were to go directly to Cuba, but then, without explanation, they\u2019d been ordered to stop and wait in the Caribbean. Orlov, who had lived in America, heard from American radio stations that Russia had secretly brought missiles to the island, that Cuba had shot down a U.S. spy plane, that President Kennedy had ordered the U.S. Navy to surround the island and let no one pass through. When Americans had spotted the sub, Savitsky had ordered it to drop deeper into the ocean, to get out of sight\u2014but that had cut them off. They couldn\u2019t hear (and didn\u2019t trust) U.S. media. For all they knew, the war had already begun<\/p>\n\n\n\n We don\u2019t know how long they argued. We do know that the nuclear weapons the Russians carried (each ship had just one, with a special guard who stayed with it, day and night) were to be used only if Russia itself had been attacked. Or if attack was imminent. Savitsky felt he had the right to fire first. Official Russian accounts insist he needed a direct order from Moscow, but Archipov\u2019s wife Olga says there was a confrontation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n She and Ryurik Ketov, the gold-toothed captain of a nearby Russian sub, both heard the story directly from Vasili. Both believe him and say so in this PBS documentary. Some scenes are dramatized, but listen to what they say \u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n