Vasili Arkhipov

Preposterously Awesome Historical Figure of the Week

Yeah, I was going to do these on Mondays, but then Labor Day got a little, well, labored. What Dylan Moran said about vodka is totally true. It's sneaky. One minute you're wondering why you're bothering drinking it, and then the next minute you're wondering where you are and how you got there. Wrestled with an adorable big puppy chocolate lab named Teddy, had some veggie burgers, and was in a very very good mood.

On to the Preposterously Awesome Historical Figure of the Week: Vasili Arkhipov.

There’s a guy whose name you probably don’t even know whose actions are the reason you exist, and why the last 45 years of history were able to happen in anything other than a smoking gray rubble pit where philosophical debate consisted of whether or not the sun was ever going to come out again. The director of the National Service Archive said it best, "a guy called Vasili Arkhipov saved the world".

Head on back to the Cuban Missile Crisis. You probably already know it as the time the world almost ended, and you’re right. In a way far more concrete than that the two world leaders sitting on enough nukes to end life as we know it were powerful pissed at each other. Even throw on the fact that they were receiving daily memos from their peons saying “think if we nuke first we can still save the breadbasket” and ludicrous shit like that. Plus a tinpot dictator was about to be sitting on some of these nukes himself, and anarchist college students, listen up because your beloved Che was firmly of the “nuke the shit out of the imperialists” camp and if he’d gotten his way none of you would probably exist.

But none of this is quite as scary as the explicit fact the world came to within one key turn on a nuclear sub away from a Soviet first strike.

In a nutshell, the Cuban Missile Crisis happened because the United States had put nuclear missiles in Italy and Turkey. The Russians did not like this, Fidel offered to help them out with a bit of tit for tat and let them put missiles in his country. The United States did not like this. And so started mutual threats, hostility, and the military equivalent of much forehead flicking.

But the argument was almost entirely about saving face rather than changing the game back to one that benefited either nation’s survival in case of nuclear war. Both countries had subs with nuclear missiles just sitting out there in the ocean within striking distance of the other’s major cities. They weren’t about to get in a tizzy telling each other to move those, because there was no way they would trust that the other side had, plus they weren’t about to move the ones they had placed.

It very nearly got proved to everyone that nukes on subs could be every bit as dangerous as the ones that Fidel was having the Soviets drill silos for.

There was a Soviet Foxtrot submarine class B-59 encircled by American destroyers and an aircraft carrier off the coast of Cuba. These ships started dropping practice depth charges, more like hand grenades than actual bombs, down at the sub. The practice depth charges being dropped were meant to be a signal for the sub to take an easterly course, surface, and identify itself. At least that is the message sent to Moscow by the Pentagon as a firm suggestion as to how everyone should conduct themselves in this period of heavily armed terror and paranoia. Though Moscow sent back no message saying they agreed to this, American crews were relayed this tactic as if it was a mutually agreed upon rule. The crew of the Soviet B-59 were not relayed these instructions, and so saw the fact that they were having explosive devices dropped on them not as a demand to surface, but as an attempt, to you know, hurl explosive devices down at them.

Another thing that the American did not know is that the Soviet submarine had nukes, and that the crew was authorized to use them if the three top officers: the captain, the political officer and the second in command, unanimously agreed upon it.

Once the charges started dropping, the captain, Valentin Grigorievitch Savitsky thought that this meant that the war had started. He wanted to retaliate with nukes. One report has him screaming “We’re going to blast them now! We will perish ourselves, but we will sink them all! We will not disgrace our Navy!”

The political officer agreed with the captain. 2/3 of the people necessary to start the use of nuclear weapons in the Soviet-US conflict were in agreement that starting a nuclear war without any sort of confirmation from their commanders was a fine idea.

But Vasili Arkhipov, was the voice of reason. Maybe brought up the point that causing armageddon was generally not a good military strategy, who knows what he said, but thankfully it was convincing and he got the Political Officer to agree with him. So the captain didn’t have the unanimity necessary to launch the nuke.

The sub surfaced 15 minutes after JFK sent the message to Khrushchev agreeing to take the missiles out of Turkey (secretly) if Khrushchev took the missiles out of Cuba (publicly.) The message that was the beginning of the end of the Cuban Missile Crisis was being hammered out in Kennedy's office, while unbeknownst to anyone in DC or in the Kremlin, a more important debate was being held in a submarine somewhere on the quarantine line off Florida.

Seriously, what if Vasili’s wife had left him? What if he was having a bad day? What if one of the depth charges had gotten a little close and incited a little more panic in him or knocked him out? Would we all be a fried glowing crisp right now?

Funnily, this was a pretty unknown incident until after the Cold War had ended and Soviet documents were declassified. Then we learned the world came so much closer to coming to an end than we'd ever heard before. It's terrifying to think that there are people out there able to start this whole nuclear train wreck going with the turn of a key because they’re scared, desperate or just plain nuts.

Oh, and on the jukebox? Fugazi, because for whatever reason they seem like they'd be a good soundtrack to nuclear fallout.