Friday 16 August 2013

The Man who saved the world...

Vasili Arkhipov is not a name that people are familiar with. Arkhipov was a naval officer in the Russian submarine fleet and had a fairly illustrious career and in one particular incident which he became famous for.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasili_Alexandrovich_Arkhipov

On October 27, 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, a group of eleven United States Navy destroyers and the aircraft carrier USS Randolph located the diesel-powered nuclear-armed Soviet Foxtrot-class submarine B-59 near Cuba. Despite being in international waters the Americans started dropping practice depth charges, explosives intended to force the submarine to come to the surface for identification. There had been no contact from Moscow for a number of days and, although the submarine's crew had earlier been picking up U.S. civilian radio broadcasts, once B-59 began attempting to hide from its U.S. Navy pursuers, it was too deep to monitor any radio traffic, so those on board did not know whether war had broken out.[5] The captain of the submarine, Valentin Grigorievitch Savitsky, believing that a war might already have started, wanted to launch a nuclear torpedo.[6]
Three officers on board the submarine – Savitsky, the political officer Ivan Semonovich Maslennikov, and the second-in-command Arkhipov – were authorized to launch the torpedo if agreeing unanimously in favor of doing so. An argument broke out among the three, in which only Arkhipov was against the launch.[7] Although Arkhipov was only second-in-command of submarine B-59, he was actually commander of the flotilla of submarines including B-4, B-36, and B-130, and of equal rank to Captain Savitsky. According to author Edward Wilson, the reputation Arkhipov gained from his courageous conduct in the previous year's K-19 incident also helped him prevail in the debate.[3] Arkhipov eventually persuaded Savitsky to surface the submarine and await orders from Moscow. This presumably averted the nuclear warfare which could possibly have ensued had the torpedo been fired.[8] The submarine's batteries had run very low and the air-conditioning had failed, so it was forced to surface amidst its U.S. pursuers and head home.[9] Washington's message that practice depth charges were being used to signal the submarines to surface never reached B-59, and Moscow claims it has no record of receiving it either.


 
Sitting in a tuna can a mile or two underwater and not having communication with the outside world can make a man go mad. Arkhipov had some power when it came to descisions having backed a previous captain in a mutiny that was happening on board a submarine a few years before that became the fim 'K-19 - The Widowmaker' with Liam Neeson a few years later. That must have been a feat of judgement to know that if the missile had been fired he would have been responsible for possibly triggering World War 3.

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