Vasili Arkhipov
Yes. One almost started a nuclear war. October 27, 1962, was known as Black Saturday.
Vasili Arkhipov was serving aboard the nuclear-armed Soviet submarine B-59 near Cuba. It was the height of the Cuban Missile Crises, which began earlier in October when a US U-2 spy plane spotted evidence of newly built installations on Cuba. It turned out that Soviet military advisers were helping to build sites capable of launching nuclear missiles.
On October 27, 1962, the Russian sub B-59, had been running submerged for days. It was finally cornered by 11 US destroyers and the aircraft carrier USS Randolph. The US ships began dropping depth charges around the sub.
However, the intention wasn’t to destroy it but to force it to surface. US officials had already informed Moscow of this fact . But unknown to Washington, the officers aboard B-59 were out of contact with their superiors and had every reason to believe that their American counterparts were trying to sink them.
Two of the sub’s senior officers wanted to launch the nuclear torpedo at the US fleet. That included its captain, Valentin Savitsky, who exclaimed: “We’re gonna blast them now! We will die, but we will sink them all — we will not become the shame of the fleet.”
However, the captain didn’t have sole discretion over the launch. All three senior officers had to agree, and Vasili Arkhipov, the 36-year-old second captain and brigade chief of staff, refused to give his consent. He convinced the sub’s top two officers that the depth charges were indeed meant to signal B-59 to surface and that there was no other way for the US ships to communicate with the Soviet sub. He convinced them that launching the nuclear torpedo would be a fatal mistake. The sub returned to the surface, headed away from Cuba, and steamed back toward the Soviet Union.
Arkhipov’s cool-headed heroics didn’t mark the end of the Cuban missile crisis. The same day, US U-2 pilot Major Rudolf Anderson was shot down while on a reconnaissance mission over Cuba. Anderson was the first and only casualty of the crisis, an event that could have led to war. President Kennedy not concluded that the order to fire had not been given by Soviet Premier Nikolai Khrushchev.
The close calls on Black Saturday sobered both leaders, leading them to open back-channel negotiations that eventually led to a withdrawal of Soviet missiles in Cuba, a later pullback of US missiles in Turkey in response, and the end of the closest the world has yet come to total nuclear war.
For his courage, Arkhipov was the first person to be given the Future of Life Award by the Cambridge-based existential risk nonprofit the Future of Life Institute (FLI), in 2017. However, it was posthumous as Arkhipov had died in 1998.
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