Arkhipov received a new assignment in September 1962 as flotilla commander for a group of four diesel submarines, armed with nuclear-tipped torpedoes, headed out for an undisclosed location. As flotilla commander he would ride along on the B-59 under Captain Valentin Savitsky. What Arkhipov did not know upon departing was that Cuba, recently fallen into the Soviet orbit after Fidel Castro’s revolution, was receiving military aid from the Soviet Union. That aid included the construction of launch sites for Soviet medium and intermediate-range nuclear ballistic missiles, capable of accurately reaching the major population centers of the United States within thirty minutes.
By 15 October the B-59 had reached the Sargasso Sea northeast of Cuba. There it received its first transmission from Moscow in some time telling it to hold the station and wait for further orders. That same day President Kennedy received a communication of his own from American U-2 spy planes that had just photographed the launch sites in Cuba. It was an incredible provocation, from the American perspective, making the United States vulnerable to a first strike.
Still, Kennedy’s options were limited. Failing to act would compromise the security of the United States, but an invasion of the Cuba would likely draw the two superpowers into a shooting war. Kennedy opted for a middle path, instituting a blockade – or what he called a “quarantine” – to prevent Soviet ships from bringing additional weapons to Cuba, and announcing it to the American public and to the world on television.
The majority of the Atlantic fleet steamed to the Caribbean for the quarantine as the U.S. deployed forty destroyers, four aircraft carriers, and three-hundred-fifty-eight aircraft. A portion of this force was tasked with hunting submarines, in this case Arkhipov and the B-59. The Soviets had heard nothing from Moscow in days, though they had picked up on American mobilization by listening to civilian broadcasts. It sounded like war was coming. To make matters worse, inside the submarine it was hellishly hot. The B-59 had been designed to operate in the Arctic, not the 80 degree waters of the Sargasso Sea. The air conditioning failed, and temperatures inside the sub climbed to as high as 120 degrees. All the same, with the American fleet closing in on them, they cut the diesel engine, switched on the batteries, and slipped into the sea.
On 27 October an American aircraft finally spotted them. Despite being down to five percent battery, Captain Savitsky order an evasive crash dive, but it was too late. Twelve American ships closed in on the B-59. Soon the Americans had the B-59 surrounded, but their orders were to force it to surface rather than to attack it directly. The ships bearing down on the B-59 raked it with sonar pings, pulses of sound that submariner Vadim Orlov remembered as “like you were sitting in a metal barrel, which someone is constantly blasting with a sledgehammer.”
When the B-59 refused to surface under this treatment, the sub-hunters escalated their warning by beginning to drop practice depth charges. In the Soviet navy three such charges were meant as a signal that a submarine should surface. No one ever told the Americans, though, so they went on dropping them one after the other. Under the pressure of the depth charges, his nearly dead battery, and the intense heat Captain Savitsky made a decision. He had not heard from Moscow, the Americans had been mobilizing, and now he was under attack. Concluding that a war had already started, he ordered that the B-59 fire its nuclear torpedo at the American fleet.
At the time a Soviet submarine commander did have the authority to release a tactical nuclear weapon without authorization from Moscow, but he also had to secure the agreement of the ship’s political officer, Ivan Maslennikov. In this case, because Arkhipov was present as flotilla commander his consent was required as well. Perhaps he was motivated by memory of what had happened to his country in the Second World War or maybe it was visions of the radiation poisoning that he had witnessed firsthand on the K-19, but when Savitsky said fire and Maslennikov seconded the order Arkhipov said no.
In a moment it was over. The B-59 surfaced and departed back to the Soviet Union in unearned shame. Back-channel negotiations between the United States and the Soviet Union deescalated the crisis, and the world went on spinning. But if someone else had been in Arkhipov’s place that day it may have been different.