Vice-Admiral Vasili Alexandrovich Arkhipov 1926-1998
The new book, The Littlest RaceHorse -- begins during the week of what was known as The Cuban Missile Crisis -- October 1962. A week that almost brought down a genuine apocalyptic curtain on the future dreams of humanity. One man, never recognized...perhaps forgotten...kept our play on life's perilous stage. I figure I might owe him my life. I certainly owe him this page. We all do.
Author’s Note
Many of the issues surrounding the Cuban
Missile Crisis will never be fully known.
Time passes, along with the participants, though the sensitivity about
the internal machinations of diplomacy…or its failure, remain. As such, the truth may never be fully known.
However, in the years following the
collapse of the Soviet Union, certain matters concerning those perilous days
and hours were finally de-classified by the new Russian government and
acknowledged by US counterparts. Among
them, the story of Admiral Vasili Alexandrovich Arkhipov (pictured), Executive
Officer (2nd in command), aboard the Foxtrot-class, nuclear-armed
submarine, B-59 – parked off Cuba’s
coast along with three other Soviet submarines.
At the height of the crisis, the US aircraft carrier, Randolph, with its escort of eleven
destroyers had located the B-59 and began to drop test, or sounding depth-charges
on the Soviet submarine in an effort to force it to the surface.
Unbeknownst to the US ships on the
surface, the B-59 had been out of
contact with Moscow since entering the area around Cuba (though still within
international waters), and was operating on ‘standing orders’ – ‘if fired upon,
they were to return fire’ – with nuclear-tipped torpedoes. The submarine had also lost its air-conditioning
and was running low on air and battery power; the crew operating under
incredible strain, not knowing if a state of war already existed above them.
Seemingly under attack, an argument broke
out on the B-59 between the
submarine’s Captain, Valentin Savitsky, the political officer Ivan Maslennikov
and Arkhipov, who was actually second-in-command on the B-59, but overall
commander of the submarine fleet.
Arkhipov was the lone dissenter on returning fire and finally prevailed
in the argument, primarily due to the wide respect he had garnered during the K-19 incident ( the so-called Widowmaker) debacle. As such, he ordered the submarine to
surface. The end of this story is about
what didn’t happen that day. Just
possibly the end of humanity on this planet.
Arkhipov remained in the Soviet Navy, as a commander until his death in 1998, attributed in part to the radiation poisoning he incurred during the K-19 affair. And of course, in the years to come, the great powers adopted the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction…or MAD as the acronym so poignantly states. For in the nuclear age, the great antagonists could no longer square off over ideology, doctrine or the mantra of brute force. For the real enemy was now…war itself.
Vasili Arkhipov’s birthday is January 30th. Perhaps we should all pause a moment on that day, take a deep breath and thank this man for his sense of humility and conscience. Think about the man for a moment, because somehow in the escalating tumult of that dangerous week, he managed to think about us.
A.
Allan Juell
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| Soviet-era Foxtrot Class -- Nuclear Armed Submarine [image: comtourist.com] |
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