The Cold War was the period from 1947 until 1991 during which the world constantly faced the threat of nuclear annihilation. As the capitalist western democracies faced off against the communist east, the threat that one day the bombs would drop was omnipresent in society. The concept of “duck and cover” was a hallmark of the age, as the governments did their best to calm panicked citizenry.

Navy Crow is going to take you on a journey back to this period as we explore the day one man stopped the entire planet from becoming a nuclear graveyard.

The B-59 Submarine Incident

B-59 after surfacing to US Navy ships.

Everybody knows about the Cuban Missile Incident. It’s taught widely in American schools as the time the United States faced off the Soviet Union and won. Many people think that the peak danger of this incident was the Soviet ships carrying arms to Cuba approaching the US blockade, but few people know exactly how close we came to fighting World War 3 that day, and how one man might have saved the entire planet.

B-59 was a Foxtrot-class submarine based out of the Kola Peninsula, operating in the Caribbean to support the Russian arms shipments. The Captain of B-59, Valentin Savitsky, had kept her undersea several days before October 27, 1964: the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Since she had been undersea so long, she hadn’t received any new communication from Moscow. To make matters worse for B-59, it had been detected by the US Navy and was being pursued.

It’s important to note that during the Cold War, detecting and pursuing submarines was almost a sport to both sides, and there was a lot of important tactical information that could be gained by shadowing the other side’s subs.

In order to identify her, the Americans began dropping practice depth charges, which were loaded with very little charge, in order to force her to surface for positive identification. This was a common method of underwater communication between countries on the opposite side of the Iron Curtain, and actually posed very little threat to the targeted submarine.

Nevertheless, B-59’s Captain interpreted this as an attack, assumed that the Cold War had just turned into World War 3, and ordered the submarine’s crew to load her sole nuclear-tipped torpedo.

Fortunately for everybody on the planet, the launching of the torpedo required the three most senior officers onboard to sign off on the launch: the Captain, the Second-in-Command, and the Political Officer. This wasn’t always the case, and fortunately, the Second-in-Command, Vasili Arkhipov, was also the commander of the entire sub flotilla, and his consent was required. Even more fortuitously, he opposed the launch against the Captain and Political Officer and convinced the Captain to surface.

Vasili Arkhipov. Do you hear that? That’s the sound of his gigantic brass balls hitting each other.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, was the day Vasili Arkhipov saved the entire f*cking planet.

Were you a veteran of the Cold War? Be sure to check out Navy Crow’s Cold War Veteran T-shirt! Get it for yourself or your loved one who served during the Cold War!