Did Vasili Arkhipov Save the World?

When our son was born, my partner Ozy and I named him Viktor Vasili, after Viktor Zhdanov and Vasili Arkhipov. Zhdanov played a key role in pushing for the global eradication of smallpox. But Arkhipov may have done something even more important. The story of his role in the Cuban Missile Crisis deserves to be more widely known, because of what it tells us about nuclear weapons.

Recently, cognitive scientist Steven Pinker has become known for arguing that violence has steadily declined throughout human history. The decline of violence was the central thesis of his book The Better Angels of Our Nature, while Enlightenment Now builds on this for a scathing indictment of the world’s pessimists. Pinker writes that:

Intellectuals hate progress. Intellectuals who call themselves “progressive” really hate progress. It’s not that they hate the fruits of progress, mind you: most pundits, critics, and their bien-pensant readers use computers rather than quills and inkwells, and they prefer to have their surgery with anesthesia rather than without it. It’s the idea of progress that rankles the chattering class — the Enlightenment belief that by understanding the world we can improve the human condition.

Before I’m accused of anything: in some areas — smallpox eradication, say — I agree it’s silly to dismiss the progress we’ve made. But to defend his thesis about war and peace, Pinker has to downplay events like the Cuban Missile Crisis. Both books argue that there was never much risk of nuclear war even during the height of the crisis. With that in mind, let me tell you the story of Vasili Arkhipov and the B-59.

During the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Soviet Union sent four attack submarines to the Caribbean. These subs were supposed to prepare the way for seven ballistic missile submarines, armed with nuclear missiles, that would come later. The best-known part of the crisis involved Soviet land-based missiles, but their plan called for putting bombers and submarines, both with nuclear weapons, in Cuba as well.

Carrying nuclear weapons wasn’t the point of the attack subs. They were just the advance guard for ballistic missile subs that would come later. But each attack sub still had a single torpedo with a nuclear warhead. These were relatively small, short-ranged weapons, intended for use against ships, not cities. They were so short-ranged that there was a worry they’d destroy any sub that fired them.

Before the mission, the submarines’ captains were told they could use the nuclear torpedoes if the Americans attacked their subs. One captain asked for clarification. When exactly were they supposed to use these weapons? Here’s the answer he and his fellow captains got, according to Peter Huchthausen’s book October Fury:

“Comrade Commanders, enter these words in your logs when you return aboard: Use of the special weapons is authorized under the following conditions: first, in the event you are attacked with depth bombs and your pressure hull is ruptured; second, if you surface and are taken under fire and hit; and third, upon orders from Moscow.”

These orders are more specific than “go nuclear if attacked”, but still terrifying given what happened next, something I doubt the officer quoted above expected. You see, putting nukes in Cuba was supposed to happen in secret. The idea the submarines would be fired at may have seemed hypothetical. If so, that was a nearly fatal mistake.

U2 reconnaissance flights tipped off the Americans early, and Kennedy ordered a blockade. For the submarines, a blockade meant forcing them to surface. To surface the subs, American ships would use miniature depth charges too small to really damage them. The Americans warned the Soviets of their plan to surface the subs via radio.

The problem with these warning shots was that, to at least one of the crews of the nuclear-armed subs, they sounded like the real thing.

The most terrifying part of this episode involved a sub called the B-59. The B-59 had three crew members whose names will be important: Valentin Savitsky, the B-59’s captain; Vadim Orlov, head of the radio intercept team; and Vasili Arkhipov, the flotilla’s chief of staff.

Orlov is important because he’s our main source for events on the B-59. Savitsky and Arkhipov were both dead by the time the story came out. (This is not to say there’s no corroboration for Orlov’s version of the events. Arkhipov, it seems, had mentioned the incident to his widow.)

I’ll quote Huchthausen again on how the B-59’s crew reacted to the Americans’ warning shots:

The USS Cony began to drop practice depth charges, in accordance with the U.S. notice to the mariners. Savitsky had received the notice on the submarine broadcast two days earlier. To the Russians, more than a hundred meters below the surface, the grenades sounded like regular depth charges when they exploded. Savitsky was maneuvering at sixty to a hundred meters and had no isothermal layer to hide beneath. The destroyer dropped its grenades in a series of five at a time, which was in accordance with the warning notice. At B-59’s dept the grenades exploded more than sixty meters above them. It scared the submariners, mostly because their first impression, that they were under attack, was hard to dispel, despite the warning they now held.

According to Orlov, Savitsky ordered the torpedo prepared for firing, saying, “we’re gonna blast them now! We will die, but we will sink them all.” But Savitsky changed his mind, and the B-59 surfaced. Now here’s the most contentious part of the story: what was Arkhipov’s role?

Orlov has given many interviews about the incident. I’ve read numerous accounts based on his testimony, and not every detail is in every version. However, in one interview Orlov gave Arkhipov a great deal of credit for talking Savitsky down. This inspired Thomas Blanton, director of the National Security Archive, to declare “the lesson from this is that a guy called Vasili Arkhipov saved the world.’’ Blanton’s statement has been quoted widely, and seems to have made Arkhipov’s reputation as a hero.

I need to add a caveat, however: It’s one thing to give Arkhipov credit for helping talk Savitsky down, it’s another thing to say, as some have claimed, that he exercised explicit veto power over the launch. I haven’t been able to find any corroboration of the latter claim.

I emailed Blanton about this. He said he regretted the quote and complained of inaccurate portrayals of the incident. According to Blanton’s email, Orlov credited both Savitsky and Arkhipov for “calming down the situation”.

This doesn’t mean the incident wasn’t a close call. Nor does it mean (as Steven Pinker claims) that Savitsky “spontaneously” backed down. This is a strange argument for Pinker to use — having whether or not a nuclear war happens come down to a single spontaneous decision by one naval captain would seem plenty terrifying — but set that aside. Pinker cites Aleksandr Mozgovoi’s book on the Cuban Missile Crisis to support this claim, but it’s not what the book says. Here’s what Mozgovoi actually quotes Orlov as saying:

“Savitsky was able to rein in his wrath. After consulting with Second Captain Vasili Alexandrovich Arkhipov and his deputy political officer Ivan Semenovich Maslennikov, he made the decision to come to the surface.”

This version of the story doesn’t say exactly what happened when Savitsky consulted Arkhipov, but that hardly implies Arkhipov didn’t matter! In my view, it’s always hard to prove what would have happened if not for some particular person. Maybe Savitsky would have backed off without Arkhipov. Similarly, maybe if Stanislav Petrov hadn’t correctly identified the 1983 Soviet false alarm, a higher-up would have, avoiding war regardless. But when Pinker claims there was little risk of the Cuban Missile Crisis escalating into all-out war, the facts are not on his side.

Even though the nuclear torpedo was a short-range weapon, it’s hard to imagine it incinerating a US warship without provoking massive retaliation. The USS Randolf, one of the ships tracking the B-59, carried over 3,000 sailors. Their deaths would have been a worse disaster than Pearl Harbor. The pressure to respond would be strong. Besides, how would Kennedy have seen the attack? As a single Soviet officer’s rash action?

He could easily have assumed the attack had been ordered by Moscow. And while Kennedy and his advisors might have tried to come up with a relatively limited military response, one that could be spun as “proportionate”, any such plan would have faced the risk of further nuclear attacks by Soviet forces. A massive counter-attack, launched in hopes of wiping out as much of the Soviet nuclear arsenal as possible, might have looked like the best option.

This is especially true because US intelligence suggested the Soviet’s nuclear arsenal was significantly inferior to the US arsenal. This intelligence was correct — it was the entire motivation for putting missiles in Cuba in the first place. However, while this would have made trying to wipe out the Soviet arsenal in a first strike look more realistic, it would not have guaranteed success. And what no one at the time knew was that even a one-sided nuclear war could have touched off a nuclear winter, killing billions through famine.

Another thing Blanton told me is that he wanted to call attention to “both sides… deploying nuclear warheads as if they were just big bullets”. The Soviet decision to arm attack submarines with nuclear weapons is hardly the only case of this. At one point in the crisis, for example, American nuclear-armed fighters were sent to rescue a U2 that had strayed into Soviet airspace.

Another example was revealed in Max Frankel’s book High Noon in the Cold War, which I strongly recommend. Frankel reveals that before nuclear missiles capable of striking the US were operational, the Soviets had working nuclear artillery in Cuba. The officer in charge was, at one point, told he could use these weapons if Cuba was invaded and contact with Moscow was lost. Kennedy resisted calls for invasion from his advisors, but had Nixon won the 1960 election, perhaps that’s what would have led to nuclear war.

Bottom line: the fact that we got through the Cold War without escalating to World War III was luck — not a sign humans have become more peaceful. And this matters. Downplaying events like the Cuban Missile Crisis encourages hawkish policy makers to be reckless with nuclear weapons and with other nuclear powers. Especially given who’s in the White House right now, complacency about nuclear war is not something we can afford.