Vasili Arkhipov Quotes

Today, while the world hangs on every utterance of Justin Bieber and the Kardashian family, relatively few of us even know the names of Vasili Arkhipov and Stanislav Petrov, two men who quite literally saved the world.

Tiny hardware malfunctions can produce outsized risks. In 1980 a single faulty computer chip costing forty-six cents almost triggered a major nuclear incident over the Pacific. And in perhaps the most well-known case, nuclear catastrophe was only avoided during the Cuban missile crisis when one man, the acting Russian commodore, Vasili Arkhipov, refused to give an order to fire nuclear torpedoes. The two other officers on the submarine, convinced they were under attack, had brought the world within a split second of full-scale nuclear war.

However, there have been close calls where we were extremely lucky that there was a human in the loop. On October 27, 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, eleven U.S. Navy destroyers and the aircraft carrier USS Randolph had cornered the Soviet submarine B-59 near Cuba, in international waters outside the U.S. “quarantine” area. What they didn’t know was that the temperature onboard had risen past 45°C (113°F) because the submarine’s batteries were running out and the air-conditioning had stopped. On the verge of carbon dioxide poisoning, many crew members had fainted. The crew had had no contact with Moscow for days and didn’t know whether World War III had already begun. Then the Americans started dropping small depth charges, which they had, unbeknownst to the crew, told Moscow were merely meant to force the sub to surface and leave. “We thought—that’s it—the end,” crew member V. P. Orlov recalled. “It felt like you were sitting in a metal barrel, which somebody is constantly blasting with a sledgehammer.” What the Americans also didn’t know was that the B-59 crew had a nuclear torpedo that they were authorized to launch without clearing it with Moscow. Indeed, Captain Savitski decided to launch the nuclear torpedo. Valentin Grigorievich, the torpedo officer, exclaimed: “We will die, but we will sink them all—we will not disgrace our navy!” Fortunately, the decision to launch had to be authorized by three officers on board, and one of them, Vasili Arkhipov, said no. It’s sobering that very few have heard of Arkhipov, although his decision may have averted World War III and been the single most valuable contribution to humanity in modern history.38 It’s also sobering to contemplate what might have happened had B-59 been an autonomous AI-controlled submarine with no humans in the loop.

Fortunately, the decision to launch had to be authorized by three officers on board, and one of them, Vasili Arkhipov, said no. It’s sobering that very few have heard of Arkhipov, although his decision may have averted World War III and been the single most valuable contribution to humanity in modern history.

I dedicate this work to Vasily Arkhipov, the deputy commander of a Soviet nuclear submarine off the Cuban shore who said no to his comrades and may have saved the world. That was on October 27, 1962, around the time my father came home from his defense job and told me at the doorstep to our house that there was “only a twenty-percent chance, son” the next day would never come. No terrorist action today remotely poses that kind of existential threat for our world, and I hope you’ll keep that in mind in reading on.

But by the purest luck, submarine B-59 carried the commander of the entire flotilla, Captain Vasili Arkhipov, and so required his additional consent. Arkhipov refused to grant it. Instead, he talked Captain Savitsky down from his rage and convinced him to give up: to surface amidst the US warships and await further orders from Moscow.2

The reality is, we are in a great battle to save the world. The Purge War will occur at the end of this century, unless we can stop it before it starts. Putting it simply, if we fail, humanity is lost.” --Vasili Arkhipov from "Future Unfolds