Vasili Arkhipov

person · earth

Soviet naval officer who on 27 October 1962 was aboard the Foxtrot-class submarine B-59 in the Atlantic near the American quarantine line when US destroyers dropped practice depth charges to force it to surface. The submarine had been submerged for a long period in heat and rising carbon dioxide, had lost radio contact with Moscow, and did not know whether war had begun. It carried a nuclear-armed torpedo, and accounts assembled decades later — principally from participants at conferences held in the 1990s and 2000s — hold that the boat's captain moved to arm it and that Arkhipov, who as chief of staff of the submarine flotilla was aboard and whose concurrence was required, refused. Two features of the record deserve care. The episode was unknown in the West for about forty years, so it played no part in what anyone thought the crisis had been. And it rests substantially on participant recollection rather than on documents, which is why historians differ over how close the authorisation actually came.

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