February 11, 2005

• So the Soviet submarine nearly used nuclear weapons against the US navy? Scary, but would that necessarily have unleashed MAD? Perhaps Kennedy would have held back from retaliation?
• Orlov's submarine, Б-59, was sitting right underneith USS Randolph. Had they discharged their nuclear torpedo, the Americans would have interpreted it as the first part of a deliberate nuclear attack designed to wipe out their fleet, and responded with nuclear weapons. Now, in 1962 it wasn't really a case of MAD. There would have been a lot of destruction, but we might not have seen the total destruction of humanity like we would have had later in the '80s. Ok, so we should pause to point out, here, that nobody really knows, for sure, what would have happened. These are purely 'counter-factual' speculations. However, in my opinion, this is one of those rare cases where counter-factuals are permissible, even neccesary, for historians. This is a) because we cannot grasp the importance of this event without speculating about what would have happened if things had gone wrong and b) because there is an unusual and very clear contingency here. All the evidence we have indicates that a) then and later nuclear weapons were kept on a hair trigger and b) in 1962 the Americans activelly considered using a nuclear first strike and spoke about a second strike as an inevitability. More later (if I have time).
• I probably should have posted a link to this story instead. That's where the tagline came from. Robert McNamara was National Security advisor at the time, and he came away from the event profoundly disillusioned about his own management of the crisis, proclaiming the human race had surived by "luck". You can see it in the amazing documentary, The Fog of War. Thomas S. Blanton of the National Security Archive organized the event. He agrees that Kennedy and Khruschev were determined not to start a war, but believes that events could have forced their hand anyway. See this archived discussion -- search the page for "Was it blind luck".
• Not the only "Soviet officer saves the world" story I've ever heard, but chilling nonetheless because we were truly on the brink of open war at that moment. I have no doubt that the history of the Cold War is full of such small acts of rational heroism, many of which we'll just never know.
• There's also a (not too bad) movie about this incident: Thirteen Days.
  
• This sort of dovetails with yesterday's FPP... National Security Archive has a Cuban Missile Crisis page, with declassified declassified documents, and a page on the most dangerous moment.
• Found on the above declassified documents page, a firsthand account of what happened in that Soviet submarine. There are other documents in there too but I'm out of time to look through them.
• If anyone should be immortalized as a War Hero Arkhipov should. That act alone saved more lives, on both sides of the conflict, than anyone can imagine.
• The Arkhipov article is awesome and chilling. Man, it's amazing the human race still exists at all since sometimes it seems we're not much better than paranoid apes with weapons.
• We are paranoid apes with weapons. Even worse.
• So the sequel to this story is that Orlov subsiquently changed his tune and said that the commander had never suggested using nukes (he merely ordered the nuclear torpedo loaded) and that his crew had never argued with him (see Wier and Boyne, Rising Tide, pp. 103-4). I've never had the chance to speak to Orlov, so I can't say for sure, but I suspect the first story is closer to the truth. His reconsidered opinion seems far too much like the kind of story that former Soviet submariners like to tell the outside world: the captain was angry and fierce but nonetheless wise; the crew was steadfast and obedient even to the crack of doom. Ultimately, it doesn't really matter whether this exact sequence of events happened the way this account says. The fact that the Soviets would risk uncontroled, tactical weapons in this way, and the fact that the Americans were literally dropping grenades on them, is enough to convince me that this was an extremely perilous episode that starkly illustrates just how lucky we were to have survived.