At the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Soviet submarine commander Vasili Arkhipov had the power to decide whether or not World War III would begin.
With the United States and the Soviet Union on the brink of nuclear war, the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis was one of the tensest moments in modern history.
But at the peak of the crisis, one Soviet naval officer managed to keep a cool head and avert nuclear devastation.
After weeks of U.S. intelligence gathering that pointed toward a Soviet arms buildup in Cuba, the inciting incident came on Oct. 14 when an American spy plane flying over the island photographed missile sites under construction.
With Cuba a mere 90 miles from the U.S. mainland, missiles launched from there would be able to strike most of the eastern United States within a matter of minutes.
The Soviets and their fellow communist allies in Cuba had secretly reached a deal to place those missiles on the island in July. The Soviets wanted to shore up their nuclear strike capabilities against the U.S. (which had recently placed missiles in Turkey, bordering the Soviet Union, as well as Italy) and the Cubans wanted to prevent the Americans from attempting another invasion of the island like the unsuccessful one they’d launched in April 1961.
Through a series of tense negotiations over the coming days, the Americans and the Soviets worked out a deal to end the conflict. By Oct. 28, the Americans had agreed to remove their missiles from Turkey and the Soviets had agreed to remove their missiles from Cuba.
But while the two countries’ leaders were handling the negotiations, they were largely unaware of a much more precarious situation that was going on below the surface in the Caribbean.
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