BLACK SATURDAY’S THREE marathon ExComm meetings covered every bit of bad news except one: the high-stakes game of cat and mouse involving Russian submarines and US destroyers. No one in Washington or Moscow had any idea how close the subs, and the ships that stalked them, were to taking the world into nuclear war.
The ExComm members didn’t discuss in great detail the dire threat posed by Soviet submarines. When the topic finally did arise, the president’s advisors shared incorrect information.1 Undersecretary of State George Ball asked hypothetically how the United States might respond if the Soviets announced they “were going to deploy atomic missile-carrying submarines off the coast of the United States.” Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara replied that Soviet subs had already been detected off the coast, but “as far as we know, they don’t carry missiles.”
McNamara could not have been more wrong. Four Soviet subs, sent on a mission to Cuba before the crisis started, were now approaching the quarantine line. In addition to twenty-one conventional torpedoes, each submarine carried one nuclear torpedo—with a fifteen-kiloton explosive yield, comparable to the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, in World War II—that could obliterate a US aircraft carrier.2
When the United States first announced the quarantine around Cuba, the Department of Defense had tasked the navy with developing a means to force a submarine to the surface without damaging it. A recently declassified memo, dated October 23, 1962, stated, “Mr. McNamara would like to have some means worked out by which a Soviet submerged submarine could be given a signal to surface. It is possible that the description of the signal would be sent to the Soviet Government so that they could transmit it to the Soviet submarine.” McNamara’s order to develop a signal was quickly implemented, but his second point about alerting the Soviet government as to what that signal would be never reached the commanders on the submarines. The US embassy conveyed the signal to the Soviet government, but it was not acknowledged and never relayed to the subs.3 It was a potentially disastrous failure of communication.
Navy captain R. L. Johns outlined the signal selected by the navy in a memorandum dated October 24. “US Forces coming in contact with unidentified submerged submarines will make the following signals to inform the sub that he may surface in order to identify himself: Quarantine Forces will drop four or five harmless explosive sound signals which may be accompanied by the international coded signal ‘IDKCA’ meaning rise to the surface.”
Chief of naval operations George Anderson was only too happy to show the Soviets who controlled the waters of the Caribbean. From the start he had advocated military action, and now he got his wish, albeit in a limited form. He thought the United States should deal with the Soviets by “unsheathing the cold blue steel of power.”4 And General Curtis LeMay endorsed that notion by firmly stating, “If there is to be war, there’s no better time than the present. We are prepared and ‘the bear’ is not.” McNamara had his hands full controlling both men and had heated exchanges with Anderson.
In his approach to impending war, John F. Kennedy showed none of the boastfulness of his military advisors, and he was still measuring every reaction so that he wouldn’t have to show the United States’ “cold blue steel of power.” The president clearly saw the potential for misunderstanding arising from the use of “harmless” but “explosive” depth charges. But no one had a better signaling means, and he allowed the instructions to stand. The quarantine applied to both ships and submarines, especially because several US military analysts warned that the subs might be carrying the nuclear warheads for the missiles being erected in Cuba. (This turned out to be incorrect. Some of the warheads were already in Cuba, and others were aboard the Soviet ship Aleksandrovsk, anchored in a Cuban port.)
ON OCTOBER 27, 1962, Soviet sub B-59, commanded by Captain Valentin Grigorievic Savitsky, cruised the waters near the quarantine line to the northeast of Cuba, shadowed by US Navy destroyers and the anti-submarine aircraft carrier Randolph. B-59 was a Foxtrot-classification diesel-powered submarine, not too different from the Nazi U-boats, which operated on batteries when underwater but needed to surface to run on the diesel power that would recharge the batteries. These crafts were larger than the World War II German subs and normally carried a crew of seventy-eight. Most of the B-59 crew did not even know the sub carried a nuclear-tipped torpedo, called a “special weapon.”5
According to Russian researcher Alexander Mozgovoi, who interviewed men serving on that sub, including communications officer Vadim Orlov, the practice depth charges, dropped by the navy ships, really rattled the crew. They exploded right next to the hull and sounded like “a sledgehammer on a metal barrel.”6 This went on for several hours. Orlov said, “The situation was quite unusual, if not to say shocking.” Making matters worse, the submarine was short of freshwater, and crewmen were limited to one glass per day. In fact some of the freshwater had to be diverted to the sub’s batteries—the warm water in this section of the Atlantic actually caused some of the batteries to dry out.
Captain Savitsky tried and failed to establish communications with Moscow for instructions. Unwilling to surface, fearing his sub could be captured or worse, he stayed submerged, which caused the temperature in the sub, with its rudimentary ventilation system, to climb each hour, ultimately reaching 122 degrees. Communications officer Orlov recalled that Captain Savitsky was “totally exhausted” and becoming more unnerved by the minute. The crew was in no better shape, suffering from dehydration, lacking sleep, and feeling trapped.
As the afternoon of October 27 progressed, so too did the predicament of Captain Savitsky. Because of the low battery charge, the sub was operating on its emergency ventilation system, and dangerous concentrations of carbon dioxide were building up inside, causing some crewmembers to faint. US aircraft had also located the sub and were dropping the practice depth charges that most military men at the time called hand grenades. More destroyers rushed to the scene.
Communications officer Orlov later described the experience as similar to being imprisoned and pounded while inside a “metal barrel” for four hours, tormented by the pursuing ships and planes above them. One of those ships, the destroyer USS Beale, recorded the chase in its deck logbook, chronicling how in the late afternoon it “proceeded in company with USS Cony and the USS Murray at 25 knots to investigate an unidentified submarine.”7 The young sailors aboard the destroyers must have felt both tension and excitement. Had they known the sub carried a nuclear torpedo, however, they would have been terrified.
The destroyers arrived over the submarine in just under an hour. Exactly nineteen minutes later the destroyer “dropped five hand grenades as a challenge to submarine for identification. No response.” Within a thirty-minute interval the other destroyers did the same. It must have been sheer hell for the Soviet crew in the sweltering heat with more and more blasts sounding in their ears and batteries so low the lights were dimmed to conserve power. Orlov did not think they would survive. “We thought—that’s it—the end.”8
Captain Savitsky must have felt like the Cuban antiaircraft men below the Crusaders, wondering if the next plane overflight or, in the case of the sub, the explosion might prove lethal. Some of the submariners interviewed by Alexander Mozgovoi reported that certain blasts were louder than others, making them wonder if war had broken out. Captain Savitsky likely thought along the same lines, because he became “furious” and ordered preparation of his nuclear-tipped torpedo for firing. He shouted, “Maybe the war has already started up there while we are doing summersaults here. We’re going to blast them now! We will die, but we are going to sink them all!”9
Only two people stood between Savitsky and the order to fire the nuclear torpedo: deputy brigade commander Second Captain Vasili Arkhipov and political officer Ivan Maslennikov. The political officer agreed with the captain that war had likely started and it was their duty to fire the “special weapon.” The thirty-six-year-old Arkhipov did not agree. He would not normally have been on board, but on this mission he served as chief of staff of the submarine flotilla.10 He held the same rank as Savitsky, but Savitsky commanded B-59. An argument erupted.
It is remarkable how such a small occurrence can change human history. Had a different man than Arkhipov been on sub B-59, the confrontation at sea between the superpowers might have ended in nuclear war. Instead, Arkhipov calmed the captain down, convincing him that they did not know if war had broken out and that all three officers must agree to use the nuclear torpedo when they could not reach Moscow by radio. He reasoned that surfacing was the correct step.
Captain Savitsky reluctantly agreed, and under cover of darkness B-59 surfaced. Illumination flares dropped from aircraft immediately lit it up. The destroyers moved closer.
War had not broken out, and the sub was merely photographed rather than bombed. Many hours later, after charging the batteries, Savitsky ordered the sub to dive, and it moved away from the quarantine line. The sailors on the destroyers never knew how close they came to being vaporized by the “special weapon.”
When Robert McNamara learned of these details years later in 2002, he said, “We came very close [to nuclear war], closer than we knew at the time.”11 Thomas Blanton, former director of the nongovernmental National Security Archive, said it best: “a guy called Vasili Arkhipov saved the world.”
All mankind is certainly lucky Arkhipov made the decision he did. Perhaps it reflected his previous experience dealing with a crisis on a submarine. Just a year earlier he had served as deputy commander on a brand-new nuclear-propelled ballistic missile submarine, K-19.12 The sub had a nuclear accident, and Arkhipov not only put down a potential mutiny but lent his hand to stop an overheating reactor from melting down. Eight men died almost immediately from the poisonous fumes. Arkhipov lived until 1998, but the radiation from that ordeal was cited as a factor in his death.
WE DON’T KNOW if the United States detected the movements of other Soviet submarines in different parts of the world during the crisis. One sub that the US Navy should have tracked, B-88, left its base at the Kamchatka Peninsula with orders to sail to Pearl Harbor to attack the base there if the crisis led to war.13