On what historians call Black Saturday, Soviet submarine B-59, believing itself under attack by U.S. depth charges, prepared to fire a nuclear torpedo; only the dissent of officer Vasili Arkhipov, who refused to authorize the launch, prevented catastrophe. The same day, an American U-2 reconnaissance pilot, Major Rudolf Anderson, was shot down over Cuba by a Soviet SAM, killing him and pushing the crisis to its most perilous point before backchannel diplomacy resolved it days later.
Deep beneath the Caribbean, submarine B-59 had been running silent for days, cut off from radio contact with Moscow, its air growing foul and its crew exhausted. When American destroyers began dropping practice depth charges to force the sub to surface, the captain, Valentin Savitsky, believed war had already begun above and ordered the nuclear-tipped torpedo readied. Under standing orders, launching required agreement from three officers; two agreed, but the flotilla commander aboard, Vasili Arkhipov, refused, and his objection alone stopped a nuclear strike that could have triggered general war.
Above the waves that same day, Major Rudolf Anderson flew a high-altitude U-2 spy plane over Cuba and was struck by a Soviet surface-to-air missile, fired without direct authorization from Moscow by nervous local commanders. Anderson became the only combat casualty of the entire crisis.
President Kennedy's advisors urged immediate retaliation, but Kennedy held back, choosing negotiation over escalation. Arkhipov's quiet refusal, unknown to the wider world for decades, is now frequently cited as the single closest the world came to accidental nuclear war, a decision made not in a war room but in the sweltering, oxygen-starved hull of a submarine under the sea.
Key people: Vasili Arkhipov, Valentin Savitsky, Rudolf Anderson