The Greatest Hero You’ve Never Heard Of

Many of us, even those who lived through the Cuban Missile Crisis, don’t know how serious those times were, and certainly don’t know how close the United States and the Soviet Union came to destroying each other, and many millions of people at the same time.

Even less know what a tremendous debt of gratitude we owe to one particular man.

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His arrival on this planet was not aboard a spaceship from the planet Krypton, like Superman.  In fact, there was probably little fanfare of any kind, even in his small village of Staraya Kupavna, outside Moscow, when Vasili Arkhipov was born to a poor, peasant family, on January 30, 1926.

Arkhipov grew to show an innate intelligence and, at the age of 16, he began his military career by working on his education at the Soviets’ Pacific Higher Naval School.  That was probably in 1942 and, by 1947 he had already seen his first military action aboard a minesweeper in the Pacific Theater late in World War II.  He graduated from the Caspian Higher Naval School that year and served aboard submarines in the Soviet Black Sea, Northern, and Baltic fleets. 

The world got its first glimpse of Vasili’s ability to function under high stress situations in 1961.

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At that time, Kupavna was serving as a Soviet military officer aboard the new K-19 sub.  He was appointed deputy commander of the sub, which you may have heard of in the movie “K-19: the Widowmaker,” starring Harrison Ford and Liam Neeson.  While the movie has been criticized by Soviets for overplaying dissent aboard the sub, it remains, for the most part, historically accurate.  If you watch the movie, it is widely agreed that the part played by Peter Sarsgaard is probably based on Vasili Arkhipov.

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K-19 (never called the Widowmaker by the Soviets) was one of the first Soviet nuclear subs, and was also armed with a nuclear ballistic missile.  On July 4, 1961 K-19’s radiant cooling system developed a major leak.  The sub wasn’t equipped with a backup cooling system, leaving the vessel in serious danger of a reactor meltdown…a nuclear accident like the world had never seen.

Yeah, that bad.

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To prevent the loss of everyone aboard, the sub’s captain sent crewmen into the area of dangerous levels of radiation.  Vasili used his engineering expertise to help keep the overheating down as much as possible.

The courageous crewmen were successful in saving the submarine, but all 22 of the men who went into the most radioactive area were dead within the next two years.  Despite what some Soviets have said about accuracy since the movie came out, reports indicate a near-mutiny aboard the vessel.  Kupavna backed his captain and a mutiny was averted.  Vasili would later receive a medal for his bravery in a time of crisis, and his loyalty to the Soviet Union.

But it was nothing like what he was going to do in slightly more than a year.

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Vasili was transferred off K-19 and made second-in-command of the B-59, one of four attack subs ordered to travel to Cuba in early October, 1962.  Among its 22 torpedoes was one with nuclear capability.  We think of torpedoes as powerful arms, capable of sinking a ship, but that particular one had similar strength to the bomb the United States had dropped on Hiroshima to end World War II.

The captains of all four attack subs had permission from the Soviet command to fire their nuclear torpedoes at their own discretion, as long as they were in agreement with the ship’s political officer.

The subs travelled deep underwater to prevent detection by the U.S. and were thus incommunicado for about four weeks during the trip.  Thus, they didn’t know that the Americans began their naval blockade on Cuba on October 24 and alerted the Soviet command that they would be dropping practice depth charges to force subs to surface, where they could be identified.

Like I said, the subs had been travelling too deep to receive communication from the Soviet command and were unaware of the warnings issued by the U.S.

When the aircraft carrier USS Randolph located the B-59, cornered it, and began dropping depth charges, the sub’s captain, Valentin Savitsky, thought the vessel was under attack.  He believed that nuclear war had broken out between the two countries.  He discussed it with the ship’s political officer and the two agreed on a course of action.  They would fire their nuclear torpedo.

The firing of a nuclear weapon in anger would almost certainly have been met with retaliation by the Americans…NUCLEAR retaliation.

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Think about it for a minute.  The U.S. had enough nuclear missiles to destroy every major Soviet installation, and any city they were near, including the installations within the Soviet Union’s allied countries. 

The Soviets had plenty of nuclear missiles of their own but lacked the ability to hit many nuclear sites on U.S. soil, which was what the movement of Soviet missiles into Cuba was intended to rectify.

For this reason, many American officials thought a nuclear war at that point would ensure the total destruction of the Soviet Union.  The absolute destruction of many of America’s allies on other continents was thought of as an unfortunate peripheral loss…unfortunate, but acceptable given that the Soviet Union would be gone, hopefully forever.

The loss of millions of human lives was thought of as acceptable.

One man stood between the world and the button that would have knocked over that first nuclear domino.

Vasili Arkhipov.

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Because of the heightened tension between the U.S. and its allies, and the Soviet Union and its allies, someone had had the wisdom and foresight to install Vasili as the leader of the fleet of the four Soviet subs on the mission.  Yes, the second-in-command on the B-59 had been given veto power over the firing of the nuclear torpedo.

The captain and political officer on the B-59 wanted to fire the nuclear torpedo, but Vasili strongly disagreed, arguing that, in the four weeks they had been deep underwater, they were unable to receive any orders from Moscow.  He demanded that the sub surface long enough to contact the Soviet command.  The argument was fierce; some say the men even came to blows.  Luckily, perhaps partly due to his reputation in stopping the mutiny of the K-19, Vasili won the disagreement and the sub surfaced. 

Vasili Arkhipov, had single handedly saved the world.

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Arkhipov continued serving in the Soviet Navy, receiving promotion to rear admiral in 1975.  He eventually became head of the Kirov Naval Academy, retiring in the mid-1980s.

In 1999, at the age of 73, Vasily finally succumbed to complications of the radiation poisoning from the incident aboard the K-19.

Vasily Arkhipov, the man who saved the world, was dead, and almost no one knows what he did…but I do, and now you do too.

Thanks, Mr. Arkhipov.  May you rest in peace.  You have certainly earned it.

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