You Probably Didn't Know That Vice Admiral Vasili Alexandrovich Arkhipov Saved Our World.

Vasili Alexandrovich Arkhipov

He was a Soviet Union Naval Officer who prevented the launch of a nuclear torpedo during the Cuban Missile Crisis and therefore possibly a nuclear war.

He was a very shy and modest person, intelligent and smart, very polite. He was always in touch with the modern world. Vasili was born on January 30th, 1926 into a peasant family in Staraya, Kupavna.  At the age of 16, he enrolled into Pacific Higher Naval School and participated in the Soviet–Japanese War in August 1945, serving aboard a minesweeper. The Soviet Union's defeat of Japan's Kwantung Army in the Soviet-Japanese War helped in the the termination of World War II.

Later, Vasili transferred to the Caspian Higher Naval School where he  graduated in 1947. Right after graduation, Vasili served in the submarine service aboard boats in the Black Sea, Northern and Baltic Fleets. 

K-19 "Hiroshima"

In July 1961, Vasili was appointed deputy commander and also acted as the executive officer of the submarine K-19. It was a first generation nuclear submarine equipped with nuclear ballistic missiles. It was also one of the first two of the Project 658 class and was hastily built as a part of the arms race against the United States.

As the crew conducted exercises off the south-east coast of Greenland, an extreme leak in the reactor coolant system of the submarine was detected. On July 4, 1961, the leak eventually caused cooling system failure and also damaged the radio communications systems. 

Unable to make contact with Moscow, Commander Nikolai Vladimirovich Zateyev ordered the entire engineering crew to come up with a solution to avoid nuclear meltdown. This entailed them to work in high radiation levels for extended periods. After Vasili helped to stop a mutiny, the engineering team was able design a secondary cooling system,  preventing the reactor from a meltdown. The crew survived, but they were all exposed to high levels of radiation. The exposure to high radiation caused the deaths of all the members of the engineering team, as well as their divisional officer, within a month of the incident. 15 more members of the crew died during the next two years, and Vasil later developed kidney cancer. He also received a medal for his loyalty, bravery, and calm demeanor.

The tragic story of of K-19 and the crew was adapted into a 2002 movie called "K-19: The Widowmaker." It stars Harrison Ford, Liam Neeson and Peter Sarsgaard. The most significant difference between the plot and the historical events is the scene that replaces an incident where the all the submarine's small arms were thrown overboard out of concern about the possibility of a mutiny; the film instead portrays an actual attempt at mutiny.

The Cold War And The Cuban Missile Crisis

As World War II ended the Cold War began. The Cold War was an ongoing series of largely political and economic clashes between the United States and the Soviet Union.

During this time, a Latin American country openly allying with the Soviet Union was regarded by the US as unacceptable. So, when leftist revolutionary leader Fidel Castro aligned himself with the Soviet Union, the United States was less than thrilled. 

By October 1st, 1962, Vasili was the commander of an entire submarine fleet of four diesel-powered, nuclear-armed Soviet Foxtrot-class submarines. The fleet left the base on the Kola Peninsula and was carrying nuclear weapons that the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, had agreed to secretly place in Cuba.

The Kennedy administration had previous launched a failed attack on the island, the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, and Castro and  Khrushchev hoped the missiles would deter further U.S. attacks.

On October 14th, Vasili, aboard the flagship B-59 and acting as its second-in-command to Captain Valentin Grigorievitch Savitsky, reached the Caribbean the day Tropical Storm Ella hits. Trailing him are a B-4, a B-36, and a B-130. They were all diesel-powered and became saunas in the tropical waters.

Also on the 14th, a pilot of an American U-2 spy plane making a high-altitude pass over Cuba, photographed a Soviet SS-4 medium-range ballistic missile being assembled for installation.  

The fact that the nuclear-armed Cuban missiles were being installed, just 90 miles south of Florida meant that they were capable of quickly reaching targets in the eastern U.S. This didn't sit right with Kennedy and ExCom and they wanted to orchestrate their removal without initiating a wider conflict–and possibly a nuclear war. The Joint Chiefs of Staff unanimously agreed that a full-scale attack and invasion was the only solution, but Kennedy was skeptical. He didn't want U.S. allies thinking of the country as "trigger-happy cowboys". However, less than a month before the crisis, Kennedy had promised the American people, "if Cuba should possess a capacity to carry out offensive actions against the United States... the United States would act," so he had to do something.

Kennedy decided he would employ the U.S. Navy to establish a blockade, or quarantine, of the island to prevent the Soviets from delivering additional missiles and military equipment. He also raised the country’s defense readiness condition (DEFCON) from 4 to 3 (in readiness for war), a first in its history.

On the 15th, Moscow ordered Vasili and his fleet to leave Cuban waters and head east to the Sargasso Sea. With no more messages arriving from Moscow, the fleet relies on American radio broadcasts for information. They heared about a U.S. invasion of Cuba, the launch of U.S. warships and planes, and the possibility of Soviet submarines in the area.

On the 24th, By October 24, the U.S. is on DEFCON 2, the final step before a nuclear war, and the Soviet fleet neared the line of U.S. vessels enforcing the blockade. 

The air conditioning in the vessel that Vasili and his men were in failed and temperatures rise to 65°F. In the diesel section, it was over 70°. Since they never arrived at Cuba, they were short on supplies and men were limited to one glass per man a day. High levels of carbon dioxide were also present in the submarine.

The fleet stayed hidden just below the surface to charge their batteries and hoped not to be detected.

On the 27th, an U.S. reconnaissance plane was shot down over Cuba, and a U.S. invasion force was readied in Florida. 

Also on the 27th, Vasili and his fleet of ships were discovered by a group of eleven United States Navy destroyers and the aircraft carrier USS Randolph. They began dropping non-lethal depth charges to encourage the Soviet submarines to surface. The submarines were submerged too deep to even hear the radio communications of the U.S. ships and the crew of B-59 thought they were witnessing the beginning of a third world war. 

Unknown to the U.S. forces, the Soviets had a ten kiloton nuclear torpedo on board and the officers had permission to launch it without waiting for approval from Moscow. Temperatures in the B-59 exceeded 120 degrees and the batteries were about to go out.  They had to do something soon or perish. Two of the vessel’s senior officers wanted to launch the missile, but all three senior officers on board had to agree to deploy the weapon. Vasili refused to sanction the launch of the weapon and calmed the captain down. The torpedo was never fired. 

They contacted the the U.S. ships, who gave them permission to surface, then they were ordered back in to head home. One of Vasili's superiors told him that it would have been better had he died.

After the Cuban Missile Crisis, Vasili commanded submarines and later submarine squadrons. He was promoted to rear admiral in 1975, and became head of the Kirov Naval Academy. He was promoted to vice admiral in 1981 and retired in the mid-1980s.

He settled in Kupavna (which was incorporated into Zheleznodorozhny, Moscow Oblast, in 2004). He died there on August 19th, 1998 from kidney cancer. Vasili Arkhipov leftt behind his wife, Olga and their daughter named Yelena.

Nikolai Vladimirovich Zateyev died nine days later. Both Vasili and Nikolai were 72.

Vasili received the first "Future of Life Award," which was presented to his family in 2017. The award recognizes exceptional measures, often performed despite personal risk and without obvious reward, to safeguard the collective future of humanity.