http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasiliy_Arkhipov
Quote:
Vasili Alexandrovich Arkhipov (Russian: Василий Александрович Архипов) (1926–1999) was a Soviet naval officer. During the Cuban Missile Crisis he prevented the launch of a nuclear torpedo and therefore a possible nuclear war. His story is to this day unknown to the wider public, although some, as the director of the National Security Archive Thomas Blanton expressed it in 2002, hold that "a guy called Vasili Arkhipov saved the world".
There are a couple "Russian guy who saved the world"s iirc.
Quote:
On October 27, 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, a group of eleven United States Navy destroyers and the aircraft carrier USS Randolph trapped a nuclear-armed Soviet Foxtrot class submarine B-59 near Cuba and started dropping practice depth charges, explosives intended to force the submarine to come to the surface for identification. Allegedly, the captain of the submarine, Valentin Grigorievitch Savitsky, believing that a war might already have started, prepared to launch a retaliatory nuclear-tipped torpedo.
Three officers on board the submarine — Savitsky, the Political Officer Ivan Semonovich Maslennikov, and the Second in command Arkhipov — were authorized to launch the torpedo if they agreed unanimously in favor of doing so. An argument broke out among the three, in which only Arkhipov was against the launch, eventually persuading Savitsky to surface the submarine and await orders from Moscow. The nuclear warfare which presumably would have ensued was thus averted.
This doesn't nearly tell the whole story (I saw a documentary on this). These Russian subs were underwater in way warmer water than they were designed to handle for months. It was literally 140-150 degrees in some parts of the subs. The men were all sick from diesel fumes and horrible sweat-rashes. They had no idea what their orders were and hadn't heard from Moscow for months. All this during the insanely tense final standoff of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Basically it was the perfect scenario for someone to make a rash decision and start WW-III.
When the sub finally surfaced the captain of the Russian sub and the captain of US Destroyer looked at each other through binoculars. There's a great quote from the Destroyer captain, who's still alive - "I knew I didn't want to be the one to start WW-III. I just looked at him and prayed he felt the same." The destroyer captain ordered his guns turned away as a sign of non-combativeness. But as he looked up they had misread the order and started turning the guns
toward the sub. He started screaming and got them to go the other way. Imagine if that gaffe started WW-III?
Lol though, the US boats had no idea the Russian subs were armed with tactical nuclear missiles until much later. That knowledge in itself might have prompted the US ships to try to launch a pre-emptive attack. And how knows what happens then.
When the Russian sub crews finally got back home, they said the military brass didn't know whether to treat them as heros or goats. So they sent them all to the gulag for 10 years for surfacing when their orders said not to - even though they were about to suffocate.
Last edited by suzzer99; 03-04-2010 at 02:26 AM.