The Cuban Missile Crisis was a 13-day confrontation between the US and the Soviet Union initiated after the discovery of Soviet ballistic missile deployment in Cuba. Most people consider this tense incident to be the closest the world has ever been to full-scale nuclear war. However, historians would argue another event that happened in international waters at the same time prevented a certain catastrophe.
On October 27, 1962, a group of 11 US Navy destroyers and the aircraft carrier USS Randolph located a nuclear-armed Soviet B-59 submarine near Cuba.
The US dropped explosive depth charges on the vessel, hoping it would force it to the surface for positive identification.
There had been no contact from Moscow for a number of days and although the submarine's crew had earlier been picking up radio signals, it was now too deep to monitor any traffic.
The batteries on board had run very low and the air-conditioning had also failed, as the crew suffered from extreme exhaustion while fearing certain death.
Vasily Arkhipov apposed the launch (Image: GETTY)
The Cuban Missile crisis is known as a flashpoint of WW3 (Image: GETTY)
He saved the world
Thomas Blanton
As a result, they did not know if a war had already broken out and so the captain – Valentin Grigorievich Savitsky – called for their nuclear torpedo to be readied.
Unlike other Soviet submarines in its group, the B-59 required the agreement of all three senior officers on board – Mr Savitsky, Ivan Semonovich Maslennikov, and commander of the deployed submarine detachment Vasily Arkhipov.
However, while the first two unanimously voted in favour of using their “special weapon”, Mr
