From Russia with Love: The World on the Brink

There was more than baseball being played out in October 1962. The world stood on the brink—and few today remember just how close humanity came to catastrophe.

While on a business trip to Miami that October, my middle-aged sales manager made a remark I still remember with remarkable clarity. Looking toward Cuba, he said, “Ralph, we might get to Miami just in time to get a missile up our ass.”

Well, that was comforting. Cuba lay just ninety miles off the Florida coast. I was twenty-one years old.

The fear reached far beyond Miami. During the crisis, the U.S. government designated Arizona’s Grand Canyon Caverns as a fallout shelter and stocked the underground site with supplies for 2,000 people. Across the country, Americans followed the news and wondered where they would go if the missiles were launched.

I did not know the name Vasili Alexandrovich Arkhipov then, but I certainly do today. His levelheaded decision more than six decades ago may well have changed the fate of the world.

It was the height of the Cold War, the long period of hostility between the United States and the Soviet Union that followed World War II and lasted until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. It was called a cold war because the two superpowers never fought each other directly, despite coming perilously close on several occasions.

The Soviet leader at the time was Nikita Khrushchev. He became First Secretary of the Communist Party in 1953 and Premier in 1958. His leadership was marked by a series of international crises, including the 1960 downing of an American U-2 spy plane and the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961.

Khrushchev was notorious for his fiery temperament and eccentric behavior. During one stormy session of the United Nations, he reportedly removed a shoe and pounded it on his desk in protest.

His daughter later admitted that he was known for “strong language, interrupting speakers, and banging his fists on the table.” Addressing Western diplomats at a reception in Moscow on November 18, 1956, he angrily declared, “We will bury you!”

In 1962, Khrushchev began secretly deploying medium-range nuclear missiles to Cuba, along with Soviet personnel to operate them. Cuban leader Fidel Castro was initially reluctant, but ultimately agreed. Decades later, Castro defended the decision, saying, “We had a sovereign right to accept the missiles. We were not violating international law.”

Khrushchev viewed President John F. Kennedy as inexperienced and weak. The American response to the Berlin Wall and the failed Bay of Pigs invasion reinforced that perception. Soviet advisers described Kennedy as “too young, intellectual, not prepared well for decision making in crisis situations–too intelligent and too weak.”

They badly misjudged him.

In October 1962, American reconnaissance flights confirmed the presence of Soviet ballistic missiles and the construction of launch facilities in Cuba. President Kennedy responded by imposing a naval quarantine around the island.

In a nationally televised address, Kennedy warned that U.S. forces would intercept offensive weapons being shipped to Cuba. Soviet vessels approaching the island altered course, and as the two superpowers hovered near the edge of war, urgent messages passed between Washington and Moscow.

By October 27, tensions had reached their peak.

American naval forces detected the Soviet submarine B-59 in the Caribbean and began dropping practice depth charges intended to force it to surface. Unbeknownst to the Americans, B-59 carried a nuclear-tipped torpedo with destructive power roughly equivalent to the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

Three other Soviet submarines carried similar weapons.

Even more alarming, each submarine commander had authority to use the weapon under certain circumstances without direct orders from Moscow.

After nearly a month at sea, exhausted and largely cut off from communications, the crew of B-59 had little understanding of what was happening above them. The repeated explosions from the American depth charges convinced Captain Valentin Savitsky that war might already have begun.

Believing his country could already be under attack, Savitsky ordered preparation for launching the submarine’s ten-kiloton nuclear torpedo against the USS Randolph, the aircraft carrier leading the American task force.

Under Soviet procedures, however, the launch required the consent of three senior officers.

At that critical moment, Vasili Arkhipov intervened.

Arkhipov strongly disagreed with Savitsky’s assessment. He argued that the submarine was not under direct attack and that the Americans were merely attempting to identify and surface the vessel. More importantly, he pointed out that they had been out of contact with Moscow for an extended period and had no confirmation that war had actually begun.

Launching a nuclear torpedo under those circumstances, he insisted, would be reckless. Arkhipov persuaded the captain to surface first and establish contact.

That decision may have saved the world.

B-59 surfaced. American destroyers neither boarded nor attacked the submarine. Soon afterward, the Soviet vessel turned away from Cuba and began its return voyage home.

The thirteen-day confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union became the closest the Cold War ever came to erupting into a full-scale nuclear conflict.

The crisis eased on October 28 when Kennedy and Khrushchev reached an agreement. The Soviet Union would withdraw its missiles from Cuba. The United States secretly agreed to remove its Jupiter missiles from Turkey and publicly pledged not to invade Cuba without provocation.

On November 20, the naval quarantine was lifted. The Cuban Missile Crisis—the confrontation that had brought the world to the edge of nuclear disaster—was over.

Arkhipov continued serving in the Soviet Navy, eventually rising to the rank of admiral before retiring in the mid-1980s. He died in 1999 from health complications linked to radiation exposure earlier in his naval career.

Three years after his death, Tom Blanton, director of the National Security Archive, summed up Arkhipov’s legacy in a single sentence: “A man called Vasili Arkhipov saved the world.”

In 2017, he was posthumously awarded the Future of Life Award by the Future of Life Institute, recognizing his role in preventing what many historians believe could have become a civilization-ending nuclear war.

Today, many experts believe that had B-59 launched its nuclear torpedo, the resulting chain of events might have triggered a nuclear exchange between the United States and the Soviet Union, with consequences beyond imagination.

Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev once thundered to the West, “We will bury you!”

Yet history has a sense of irony.

His son, Sergei Khrushchev, eventually emigrated to the United States and became a senior fellow at Brown University.
“I like this country,” he once said.

Thankfully, because of the judgment of one Soviet naval officer on a tense October day in 1962, there was still a country to like.