I NEVER LEARNED TO LOVE THE BOMB (Part 2)

This is Vasili Alexandrovich Arkhipov. Fifty years ago he may have saved the world. (Thanks to Jim Buck on Facebook for the story.)

“On October 27, 1962, during the Cuban Millile Crisis, a group of eleven US Navy Detsroyers and the aircraft carrier USS Randolph trapped the diesel-powered nuclear-armed Soviet Foxtrot class B-59 submarine near Cuba and started dropping practice depth charges, explosives intended to force the submarine to come to the surface for identification. There had been no contact from Moscow for a number of days and, although the submarine's crew had earlier been picking up US civilian radio broadcasts, once B-59 began attempting to hide from its US navy pursuers, it was too deep to monitor any radio traffic, so those on board did not know if war had broken out.. The captain of the submarine, Valentin Grigonevitch Savitsky, believing that a war might already have started, wanted to launch a nuclear-tipped torpedo. Three officers on board the submarine – Savitsky, the political officer Ivan Semonovitch Maslennikov, and the scond-in-command Arkhipov – were authorized to launch the torpedo if agreeing unanimously in favor of doing so. An argument broke out among the three, in which only Arkhipov was against the launch. Although Arkhipov was only second-in-command of submarine B-59, he was actually Commander of the flotilla of submarines including B-4, B-36, and B-130 and of equal rank to Captain Savitsky. Arkhipov eventually persuaded Savitsky to surface the submarine and await orders from Moscow. This presumably averted the nuclear war that would have ensued had the torpedo been fired.“ (Click here for more)

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The secret word is October