Vasili Arkhipov

200 points by jbevain 12 years ago | 53 comments

strlen 12 years ago |

Interesting tidbit: when I describe my Soviet and early post-Soviet childhood to Americans, Americans of my age are surprised that their fears of Soviet nuclear attack, civil defense training ("duck and cover"), were not unique. "Whoa, you thought we were going to nuke you?! We thought you were going to nuke us." A popular (not very politically correct by US standards!) Soviet joke of this time conveyed the cynicism around the idea that once a nuclear war began, humanity would have any hope--

Armenian Radio (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Yerevan_jokes) was asked: "what do to if a nuclear attack is imminent?"

Armenian Radio responded: "wrap yourself in a linen sheet and slowly, in organized fashion, without creating any panic, crawl to a cemetery."

To paraphrase War Games (a classic which I watched only after coming to the US), the winning move is not to play."

guantes 12 years ago |

This is another interesting story about a Russian who may have saved the world: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov

fnordfnordfnord 12 years ago | |

Yup in 1983. Thanks to both of them. Petrov is still alive, so you can send him a Hallmark card if you're over 30 and glad to be alive.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov

enraged_camel 12 years ago | | |

Or if you are under 30 and glad to have been born. :)

mietek 12 years ago | | |

Do you have his address?

smsm42 12 years ago | |

Yes, when I first read the story I was kind of scared when thinking what could happen if he would just think "my duty is to pass the warning, higher ups would sort it out". Now of course everybody says "we'd caught it up anyway", but who knows what would actually happen.

ra 12 years ago | |

It's said that Able Archer 83 was the turning point in US thinking on the cold war.

Before this exercise Reagan actually believed that the USSR thought the US was too good and wholesome to ever launch a first strike.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Able_Archer_83

ucarion 12 years ago | |

There's a pretty extensive (if unrealistic) online alternative history around this incident: http://althistory.wikia.com/wiki/1983:_Doomsday

rfrey 12 years ago | |

If the Wikipedia article is accurate, that is one wonderfully humble man.

packetslave 12 years ago |

Oh look, another title edit that adds nothing and takes away from the original title that actually told us why we should care about Vasili Arkhipov. Get it together, mods!

Stratoscope 12 years ago | |

Out of curiosity, does anyone know what the original title was?

jbevain 12 years ago | | |

It was “A guy called Vasili Arkhipov saved the world”, a quote from a former NSA director, taken from the first paragraph of the article.

Karuma 12 years ago | | |

Something like "A guy called Vasili Arkhipov saved the world".

shurcooL 12 years ago |

It's a lonely and sad thought that the biggest heroes whose immense sacrifices and contributions to the well being of everyone around them are celebrated by... the blissful ignorance of everyone else.

Except in movies. There, we get to see and experience it all.

ekianjo 12 years ago | |

> Except in movies. There, we get to see and experience it all.

Well, movies often get the facts and the characters wrong (on purpose). Movies usually are adapted to fit to audiences who have no real understanding of History so things are made simple for them.

This being said, K-19 was a decent movie (despite the inaccuracies) and I'd recommend anyone to watch it AND read what actually happened.

shurcooL 12 years ago | | |

I was talking more about fictional movies.

Like pretty much any superhero movie, no one knows who spiderman or Clark Kent are. In the first spiderman movie, at the very end he "gets the girl" but has to walk away from her, because of his obligation to help the world and keep the girl out of trouble. So his sacrifice is known by the movie audience, but not the in-movie characters.

arbuge 12 years ago | |

It is also a scary thought that a decision on nuclear war was/is in the hands of a few individuals.

dfritsch 12 years ago | | |

Especially ones operating without any knowledge of what is going on elsewhere.

ekianjo 12 years ago | | |

It still is. Most nations' Commanders in Chief (i.e. the Presidents) have the power to order a nuke launch by themselves. Of course they have advisers and so on, but that does not mean they have less of a power.

huhtenberg 12 years ago | |

And still Chewie didn't get a medal.

rismay 12 years ago |

I was lucky enough to learn about this in high school - Andover. I forget the speakers name but he gave the speech between 2001 - 2005 (I can't remember). It was an incredible speech about Mutually Assured Destruction and how the theory was absurd. The speaker pointed out that no one thought that we would exit the Cold War without a horrible war. And then he asked, "Why did this not happen?" He pointed to Vasili's example as to how one SANE person can make a difference. He talked about several other examples. He ended the speech by repeating, "PEACE. PEACE. PEACE." At the moment I thought it was cheesy... but here I am more than 10 years later and I still remember it.

erikpukinskis 12 years ago | |

> At the moment I thought it was cheesy... but here I am more than 10 years later and I still remember it.

Incidentally, I think that's what good parenting looks like.

Killah911 12 years ago |

It's a shame that we have gotten ourselves to a point where we must rely on the level headed decision making of so few people to keep us from annihilation. To say 'saved' may be a bit premature. It's more of a shame that we have created such monstrosities with the gifts of technology and have kept them around and continue to threaten our very own existence with them. Here's to hoping for cooler heads and compassion to always prevail, for all our sakes.

Shivetya 12 years ago |

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4VPY2SgyG5w is an hour long documentary about this man and the incident he is famous for

keithpeter 12 years ago |

"Three officers on board the submarine [...] were authorized to launch the torpedo if agreeing unanimously in favor of doing so. An argument broke out among the three, in which only Arkhipov was against the launch."

Opportunity for a playwright to write a really tight two scene piece there. Doubt if we could get it up to 50,000 words[1] even if we did the 'follow three scenarios with multiple endings' trick, and even if we had the Bobby Kennedy/LBJ dynamic in the committee going.

Edit: The K-19 'incident' would have made a major psychological impression on anyone, even allowing for the high threshold that I imagine Soviet navy commanders of that era had.[2]

[1] http://nanowrimo.org/

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_submarine_K-19

keithpeter 12 years ago | |

http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB75/

Has the charts, photos, signals and some wonderfully unreliable reminiscences by crew members. (edit link has gone hence reply to my own post).

snird 12 years ago |

the guardian wrote about his story: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/oct/27/vasili-...

austinz 12 years ago |

Well, I'm glad the worst is over. It's chilling how many near misses there were. How many more near misses might we have endured, had the Cold War gone on, before the one not-any-kind-of-miss that would have destroyed human civilization?

fnordfnordfnord 12 years ago | |

I've been reading a lot of Bamford lately for obvious reasons. Apparently, the CIA, NSA, and Chair Force were quite provocative during the Cold War. Something like twenty US aircraft were shot down by the Soviets (over Soviet airspace).

jjh42 12 years ago | | |

I find it amazing the US officials thought it a good idea to drop small (trainer) explosives on a nuclear armed USSR sub during one of the tensest standoffs of the Cold War.

Is it only in retrospect that this seems poorly thought through?

erbo 12 years ago |

An essay in the book What Ifs? of American History (Robert Cowley, ed.) by Robert L. O'Connell, "The Cuban Missile Crisis: Second Holocaust," details what might have happened if Arkhipov had not been successful and the Randolph had in fact been hit by a nuclear torpedo.

In the aftermath, the U.S. military executes air strikes on Cuba followed by an invasion. The Soviet forces obliterate Guantanamo with a nuclear strike, send nuclear cruise missiles at the incoming invasion force,and, most seriously, manage to launch two of the SS-4 missiles...one of which hits Washington D.C. and wipes out the entire National Command Authority. In response, U.S. forces execute the entire SIOP against the Soviet Union, an effort which gives "overkill" a new name.

The aftermath of "The Two Days' War" includes the near-extermination of the Soviet Union, radiation issues in large parts of the world, and a "nuclear twilight" causing worldwide food shortages and famine. Ultimately, the United States was viewed as the aggressor by the rest of the world, compounded by the actions of President Richard Nixon (elected in 1964, replacing Acting President John McCormack). The U.S. stood alone in refusing to join the Geneva Convention for the Abolition of Nuclear Armaments in 1966, and renounced UN membership in 1968, ordering the organization out of New York City. The American public felt Nixon had taken the wrong turn, and elected Eugene McCarthy to succeed him in 1972.

The essay is written as the report of an investigative commission written in 1972 and finally declassified in 2002, in part by the actions of U.S. Archivist Newton Leroy Gingrich (who never went into politics in this timeline) at the New Capital District in Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado.

Houshalter 12 years ago |

Should we extend Petrov Day to him too? http://lesswrong.com/lw/jq/926_is_petrov_day/

Intimatik 12 years ago |

Holly Molly, I live 1 mile far from this guy's last home(which was in Kupavna, Moscow region, a place where Russian air defense command resides)

guard-of-terra 12 years ago |

Vice Admiral is hardly "a guy", while I'm not sure he had this rank at the time of incedent.

dnautics 12 years ago | |

he was a flotilla captain, 2nd in command of the boat, but in command of two others, according to the WP article.

dredmorbius 12 years ago |

Спасибо, товарищ.

Intimatik 12 years ago | |

KGB watches you, tovarisch!

D9u 12 years ago |

We read about this 7 months ago...

https://paste.xinu.at/hVamTs/

mnml_ 12 years ago |

Great story, but not really tech related

abrichr 12 years ago | |

From the Guidelines [1]:

On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

[1] http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

ballard 12 years ago | | |

http://damninteresting.com started with lots of obscure nonfiction, under-reported stories. Haven't checked it lately.

oldgirl 12 years ago | | |

That basically translates to "any off-topic shit that the community and mods will tolerate". Shame on them.

keithpeter 12 years ago | |

No, not directly, but don't you just like 'hacking' the possible futures that could have arisen from that discussion among the three men in a tin can? Games theoretic approaches to what they could have known under the sea with failing air supplies?