Vasily Arkhipov

Vasily Aleksandrovich Arkhipov (Василий Александрович Архипов, 30 January 1926 – 19 August 1998) was a senior Soviet Naval officer who prevented a Russian submarine from launching nuclear torpedoes against ships of the United States Navy at a crucial moment in the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962. The course of events that would have followed such an action cannot be known, but speculations have been advanced, up to and including global thermonuclear war.

Off the coast of Cuba, US ships had dropped depth charges. The captain of the diesel powered submarine SOVIET SUBMARINE B-59 and the political officer believed that war had started and that they were under attack. Arkhipov, as flotilla chief of staff and executive officer on board the submarine, refused to consent to the use of nuclear weapons in retaliation, a decision which would have required the agreement of all three officers. In 2002, Thomas S. Blanton, then director of the US National Security Archive, credited Arkhipov as "the man who saved the world".

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

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

K-19 accident
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 from acute radiation syndrome. Over the course of two years, 15 more sailors on the crew died from the after-effects.

Involvement in the Cuban Missile Crisis


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 would probably 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 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."

Aftermath
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. Researcher Alexander Mozgovoi has written that when Grechko learned about this discrepancy, he "removed his glasses and hit them against the table in fury, breaking them into small pieces and abruptly leaving the room after that".

In 2002, retired Commander Vadim Pavlovich Orlov, a participant in the events, held an interview revealing that the submarines were armed with nuclear torpedoes and that Arkhipov was the reason those weapons had not been fired. Orlov presented the events less dramatically, saying that Captain Savitsky lost his temper, but eventually calmed down.

Robert McNamara, U.S. Secretary of Defense at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, stated in 2002 that "We came very, very close [to nuclear war], closer than we knew at the time." Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., an advisor for the John F. Kennedy administration and a historian, continued this thought by stating "This was not only the most dangerous moment of the Cold War. It was the most dangerous moment in human history."

Later life and death
Arkhipov continued in Soviet Navy service, commanding submarines and later submarine squadrons. He was promoted to rear admiral in 1975, and became head of the Kirov Naval Academy. Arkhipov was promoted to vice admiral in 1981 and retired in 1988.

He settled in Kupavna (which was incorporated into Zheleznodorozhny, Moscow Oblast, in 2004), where he died on 19 August 1998. The radiation to which Arkhipov had been exposed in 1961 may have contributed to his kidney cancer, as it did for the illnesses of many others who served with him in the K-19 accident.

Nikolai Zateyev, the commander of the submarine K-19 at the time of its onboard nuclear accident, died on 28 August 1998. Both Arkhipov and Zateyev were 72 at the time of their deaths.

Personal life
Arkhipov was known to be a shy and humble man. In a 2012, PBS documentary entitled The Man Who Saved the World, his wife, Olga, described him as intelligent, polite, and very calm. Much of what is known about his personality comes from her. According to her, he enjoyed searching for newspapers during their vacations and tried to stay up-to-date with the modern world as much as possible. In this same interview, Olga alluded to her husband's possible superstitious beliefs as well. She recalls walking in on Vasily burning a bundle of their love letters inside their house and that he claimed that keeping the letters would mean "bad luck".

In popular culture
Leon Ockenden portrayed Arkhipov in Season 12 Episode 1 of Secrets of the Dead, entitled "The Man Who Saved the World". It was aired 23 October 2012 on the 50th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

The 2021 novel Red Traitor by Owen Matthews includes Arkhipov as a major viewpoint character, and is dedicated to him.

The character of Captain Mikhail Polenin, portrayed by Liam Neeson, in the 2002 film K-19: The Widowmaker was closely based on Arkhipov's tenure on Soviet submarine K-19.

The musical group Converge dedicated a composition called "Arkhipov Calm" to Arkhipov in 2017.

Denzel Washington's character in Crimson Tide (1995) is an officer who refused to affirm the launch orders of a submarine captain.

Awards and honors
In recognition of his actions onboard B-59, Arkhipov received the first "Future of Life Award", which was presented posthumously to his family in 2017. Offered by the Future of Life Institute, this award recognizes exceptional measures, often performed despite personal risk and without obvious reward, to safeguard the collective future of humanity.

In 2002, Thomas S. Blanton, the director of the U.S. National Security Archive, said that Arkhipov "saved the world".

Books

 * Martin J. Sherwin: Gambling with Armageddon: Nuclear Roulette from Hiroshima to the Cuban Missile Crisis, New York, Knopf, 2020