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Arkhipov's Refusal: The Torpedo That Would Have Started the War
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
On October 27, 1962, a Soviet submarine commander ordered a nuclear torpedo prepared for launch — and one officer's refusal may have saved the world. This episode goes inside the B-59, the disabled sub running out of air while American destroyers closed in above.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Somewhere in the Atlantic, north of Cuba, on the twenty-seventh of October nineteen sixty-two, a Soviet submarine commander gave an order to prepare a nuclear torpedo for launch. Two of the three officers required to authorize the strike had already agreed.
To understand what was happening below the surface, you need to understand what was happening above it. And the key point here is that the two pictures looked nothing alike.
The Soviets hadn't sent just missiles to Cuba. In the weeks before the quarantine, four Foxtrot-class diesel submarines had departed from the Kola Peninsula, each carrying conventional torpedoes and one weapon that was not conventional at all.
When the American destroyers closed in and began dropping the signaling charges, Savitsky's conclusion was reasonable given what he knew, which wasn't much. He believed his submarine was under attack.
October twenty-seventh was the most dangerous single day of the crisis, and it wasn't just the B-fifty-nine. That same day, a U-2 reconnaissance aircraft piloted by Major Rudolf Anderson Jr. was shot down over Cuba.
On the evening of October twenty-seventh, Robert Kennedy met secretly with Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin. The meeting had no official status.
By October twenty-eighth, Khrushchev announced publicly that the Soviet missiles would be removed from Cuba. The crisis, at least in its acute form, was over.
The crisis did produce changes. The Moscow-Washington hotline, the direct communication channel between the two capitals, was established the following year, specifically because the communication failures during October nineteen sixty-two had been recognized as a structural danger.
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