Posted: 7/19/2004 10:05:34 AM EDT
During the Cuban Missile crisis US destoyers began depth charging Russian nuclear submarines for failing to surface to display their nuclear missile cargo. Orders came down from Nikita Kruschev for the subs to fire their payloads at US soil. Capt. Vasily Arkhipov refused the order and prevented a nuclear war. The poor bastard probably spent his remaining years in a gulag in Siberia.
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Wasn't there a scene like this in Kevin Costner movie Thirteen Days? I can't remember if they actually used live depth charges or if they just kept on banging sonar probes off of the sub - but our Navy did get the Russians to stop and turn around. Just don't remember if they actually got the sub to surfacen or not. |
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How Soviet sub officer saved world from nuclear conflict By David Rennie in Washington (Filed: 14/10/2002) www.news.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2002/10/14/wcuba14.xml Only the caution of a Soviet naval officer saved the world from a nuclear fight to the death during the Cuban missile crisis, an unprecedented meeting hosted by Fidel Castro was told this weekend. Travel Robert McNamara, who was the American defence secretary when the confrontation took place 40 years ago, said it could "easily" have become a full-scale conflict. The world has long known that it came to the brink of war during the 13-day crisis after American spy planes confirmed that Moscow had deployed nuclear missiles in Cuba, only 100 miles from Florida. Only later did the West discover how close it came during a naval skirmish between an American destroyer and a Soviet B-59 submarine off Cuba on Oct 27, 1962. The destroyer dropped depth charges near the submarine to try to force it to surface, not knowing it had a nuclear-tipped torpedo. Vadim Orlov, a member of the submarine crew, told the conference in Havana that the submarine was authorised to fire it if three officers agreed. The officers began a fierce, shouting debate over whether to sink the ship. Two of them said yes and the other said no. "A guy named Arkhipov saved the world," one of the conference co-hosts, Thomas Blanton, of George Washington University, told the Washington Post. The conference studied thousands of newly declassified intelligence documents and photographs from American archives. Guests included many who were in leading positions. Besides Mr McNamara, there were other aides to President J F Kennedy: Arthur Schlesinger Jr and Theodore Sorensen. Ethel Kennedy, the widow of Robert Kennedy, also attended. Despite the atmosphere of reconciliation, fostered in part by Mr Castro's public condemnation of the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, for "misleading" Mr Kennedy over the presence of the missiles, old tensions still surfaced. Dino Brugioni, a CIA analyst who interpreted the first U2 spy plane photographs of the missiles, argued fiercely with Russian delegates who said the Soviet Union never intended to fire them. ]www.news.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2002/10/14/wcuba14.xml[\url] Found this. |
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I once had a little dog, and his name was: Bingo.
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