On October 27, 1962, the world came closer to nuclear war than at any other moment in history, and the decisive confrontation did not take place in the White House or the Kremlin. It took place hundreds of feet below the Atlantic Ocean, inside a Soviet submarine that had lost contact with Moscow, run low on air and power, and was being shaken by American depth charges. The men on board believed, with good reason, that war might already have begun. One of them carried a nuclear torpedo, and the decision whether to use it rested with three exhausted officers in a sweltering control room. That this submarine, B-59, did not fire is one of the great pieces of good fortune in modern history, and the man most often credited with preventing the launch, Vasili Arkhipov, remained almost unknown outside Russia for forty years.
A Crisis Built on Secrecy and Miscalculation
The Cuban Missile Crisis began when American reconnaissance aircraft discovered Soviet nuclear missiles being installed in Cuba, only ninety miles from Florida. To Kennedy, the missiles were an unacceptable shift in the balance of power and a direct threat to the United States. To Khrushchev, they were a way to defend Cuba from another American-backed invasion after the failed Bay of Pigs landing in 1961, and to balance the American missiles already stationed in Turkey and Italy near Soviet territory. Both men had reasons for their positions, and both underestimated how the other would react. Khrushchev appears to have believed the missiles could be installed secretly and then presented as an accomplished fact. Kennedy, once the missiles were discovered, believed he had to respond forcefully or lose credibility with his allies and his own public.
Four Submarines Sailing Into the Unknown
Four Soviet diesel-electric submarines, B-4, B-36, B-59, and B-130, had been sent toward Cuba to protect Soviet shipping and to threaten American vessels if war broke out. Diesel submarines of that era could not stay submerged indefinitely. They had to surface regularly to recharge their batteries, and when they did, they were visible to American patrol aircraft. Conditions inside were brutal. Tropical heat, poor ventilation, and failing air conditioning turned the boats into ovens, with temperatures climbing far above what the crews could endure comfortably. Food spoiled, fresh water ran short, and the men grew exhausted.
Black Saturday Beneath the Atlantic
Inside B-59, the situation was desperate. The boat’s batteries were nearly exhausted, its air was foul, and its crew was suffering from heat and carbon dioxide. Captain Valentin Savitsky, convinced that war may have already begun and that his boat was under attack, argued that the submarine should fire its nuclear torpedo. It was a decision that, in his position, could have seemed rational. If the Soviet Union was already at war with the United States, and if his boat was about to be destroyed, why not use the most powerful weapon he had? The difficulty was that he could not know whether the premise was true. He had no reliable way to confirm that war had started, and no way to ask Moscow. He was being asked to make the most consequential decision of his life on the basis of explosions he could hear through the hull.
The Three Officers and Arkhipov’s Refusal
Soviet procedure required the agreement of three senior officers before a nuclear torpedo could be launched: the captain, the political officer, and the flotilla commander aboard the boat. On B-59, the political officer agreed with Savitsky. The third man, Vasili Arkhipov, did not. Arkhipov was the commander of the submarine flotilla, a senior officer with long experience at sea. He argued that the depth charges were signals, not an attack, that surfacing the boat was the right course, and that launching a nuclear weapon on the basis of an assumption would be a catastrophic mistake. His refusal broke the required unanimity, and without it, the torpedo could not be fired.
What the Video Contributes
The video at the center of this chapter reconstructs the ordeal of B-59 from the point of view of the sailors who lived it, and that perspective is what makes it valuable. It does not stay in the conference rooms of Washington and Moscow. It takes the viewer into the boat, into the heat, the noise, and the confusion, and it shows how little the crew actually knew. That is the point. The men on B-59 were not villains and they were not cowards. They were professional sailors caught between their duty, their fear, and their incomplete information. The film also makes clear how close the American side came to a disaster it did not intend. The depth charges were meant as signals, but signals only work when both sides understand the code. The Soviet crew did not, or could not be sure that they did, and the result was a moment of genuine terror.
The Lesson of the Submariner’s Tale
The story of B-59 stayed secret for decades. Arkhipov died in 1998, largely unrecognized for what he had done, and the full details of the incident only became widely known after a conference in Havana in 2002, when participants in the crisis revealed what had happened underwater. That delay is itself part of the lesson. For forty years, the world celebrated the peaceful resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis without knowing how close it had come to a very different ending. Historians now treat the incident as one of the most important near-misses of the nuclear age, and as a warning about the dangers of placing nuclear weapons in the hands of forces that cannot be reliably communicated with in a crisis.