Found Submarine Declassified Documents Reveals Horrifying Story

Ambient Songs:
By CoAg
https://www.youtube.com/@co.agmusic1823

Intro Theme by Swift Junai:
https://www.instagram.com/swiftjunai/?hl=en
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC6hf5nMJ8s6LJJfFR4OQ3lg
https://open.spotify.com/artist/1PoG2b18MHocWZA8zQgWjO

Writers and researchers: Jay Adams
https://instagram.com/jayadamsdigital?igshid=MzMyNGUyNmU2YQ==

Jordan Gottschick https://www.youtube.com/@DerpsWithWolves/playlists

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
There are moments in history that seemed like the Reddit
of fiction, moments where decisions came down to the last
minute or even the last second, forever altering the events afterward.
So in this video we're gonna look at two submarine
instants like this at the height of possibly the most
tense and consequential moment in global history. One of them
just happens to be one of the most brutal and

(00:20):
grueling things ever covered in the Channel. As always, viewer
discretion is strongly advised. In October of nineteen eighty six,
six hundred miles off the coast of Bermuda, the Soviet
submarine the K two nineteen moved through the depths of

(00:42):
the Atlantic, armed for the end of the world. Beneath
the ocean's surface, the ship carried a terrifying set of
weapons sixteen ballistic missiles, each capable of leveling an entire city,
and in total, the K two nineteen cared about thirty
nuclear warheads, more than enough to concinerate a constant if
the order ever came on the radar though, the K

(01:02):
two nineteen was just another vessel on routine patrol, but
in reality it was in one of the most sensitive
regions of the Cold War, close enough to strike the
eastern coast of the United States within minutes if necessary.
At the time, its mission was to conduct internal drills,
maintained readiness, and silently remind the Americans that if anything changed,
they were equally prepared. At the time as well, the

(01:22):
Soviet Union was standing on a razor's edge. Only six
months earlier, the world watched in horror as the Chernobyl
nuclear power plant sent radioactive fire into the sky. The
insidant embarrassed the Kremlin and enraged its people, and now
Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev was preparing for a summit with
US President Ronald Reagan and Rekyaevik. At the summit, nuclear
arms were planned to be discussed and tensions were thin.

(01:44):
So it's no exaggeration to say that this was a
high stakes moment in the Cold War now. As is
sort of a pattern of these sub stores in the Channel,
the K two nineteen was a relic of a rapidly
aging fleet in wartime. The technology just seems to progress
so rapidly that by the time something was an operation,
it was already at a date. The K two nineteen
was a Project six six seven, a Yankee class boat

(02:05):
which was considered to be a work course of the
Soviet Navy's Ballistic Missile Division. It had been pushed hard
over the years, and maintenance had begun to lag. Its
crew was also a thrown together group of young sailors
and veterans who barely attempted jail before being sent out
on this dangerous mission. Worse still, the sub already bore
scars in the passed. One of its missile tubes had
to be welded shut after a prior chemical incident had

(02:27):
nearly gone catastrophically wrong. Still, though the K two nineteen
cruised forward inside the control room, Captain's second rank Igor
Brittanoff stood watch. He had been commanding the vessel for
two years, but even he couldn't have predicted what was coming.
Something was brewing deep inside the K two nineteen. On
October third, as the sub continued its patrol in the Atlantic,

(02:48):
a sudden jolt went through the vessel. The Soviet correct
she first suspected a collision and believed that the Americans
were tailing them, specifically a US Navy attack submarine known
as the U S. S Augusta. The Soviets claimed the
Augusta had clipped the K two nineteen's hull, possibly damaging
its missile tubes. The US Navy, of course denied everything,
and to this day both sides maintained different truths. But

(03:10):
whether it was a bump in the dark or simple
bad luck, what happened next was far more catastrophic. At
five fourteen am, in one of the missile compartments, an
officer and an engineer spotted something no one inside a
submarine ever wants to see, which was water, just a
few drops at first, seeping from the plug of missile
tube number six on the port side. IGOR was immediately alerted,

(03:31):
and at five twenty five am he ordered the sub
to ascend to a safer depth around one hundred and
fifty one feet of forty six meters. Pumps were then
engaged to dry out the missile tube and stopped the leak,
but it was already too late. The moment seawater met
the volatile mix of missile fuel, it triggered a chemical reaction.
Brown clouds of nitrogen dioxide and chlorine gas then began

(03:51):
hissing out from under the missile plug. The compartment then
immediately reeked of burning chemicals, and the deadly mist filled
the air. Several minutes later, at five thirty two am,
just as an officer called for an accident alert and
ordered the compartment sealed, the silo exploded. The force of
the blast was enormous and the missile, which was fully armed,
was ejected straight out of the submarine while it was

(04:11):
still under water. Water then flooded the missile compartment instantly,
killing two sailors on the spot. The shockwave also tore
through the hull and the K two nineteen began dropping
like a stone. From a cruising depth of around one
hundred and thirty one feet or forty meters, the submarine
plunged past nine hundred and eighty five feet or three
hundred meters in minutes. Communications were also crippled, The sub's

(04:32):
loudspeakers were dead, and compartment after compartment began sealing off
in the panic. At one point, up to twenty five
sailors were trapped in one section begging for help. It
was only after desperate deliberation that Egor gave the order
to open the hatch and let them out. Meanwhile, as
this was going on, water and corrosive gas continued to spread.
Egor then ordered every seawater pump aboard to full capacity,

(04:54):
and damage control teams worked by flashlight with gas masks
sealing more compartments to isolate the flooding. Miraculously, somehow the
crew edge to stop the descent and bring the sub
back to the surface on battery power. It then broke
the waves, battered and badly smoking. There was a new
and much more serious problem. Though in theory, the submarine's
two nuclear actors should have automatically shut down the moment

(05:16):
the explosion struck, but the blast to damage key control lines,
and down in the belly of the ship, coolant levels
were dropping and the reactor temperature was climbing. The automatic
systems had failed, so if the crew couldn't do it manually,
nothing stood between them and a full nuclear meltdown. Reactor
control officer Nikolai Belakoff and Sergey Premenin then rushed to
do what the automatic systems could not, which was to

(05:38):
manually insert the control runs to shut down the reactor.
This required them to enter the seventh compartment where the
reactor was located, which by then had become a hellish environment.
The temperature inside is believed to have climbed to as
high as seventy to eighty degree celsius, and the air
was thick with choking acid fumes and near zero visibility.
In fact, due to the proximity to the reactor, the

(05:59):
fumes are far worse than elsewhere in the sub Nikolai
would then enter first and managed to turn one of
the four rod assemblies on the first reactor before he
would run out of auction and die. So, with Nikolay
dead inside the reactor compartment and the other control rod
still unseated, there was no other choice. The twenty year
old surgate didn't hesitate to step forward and volunteer to

(06:19):
finish the job alone. He then opened the compartment hatch
and entered what was essentially a nuclear oven inside Compartment seven.
Every breath must have tasted like acid. The metal components
had begun to warp and swell from the heat, and
his uniform was useless against it. All. He knew this,
but he went anyway. Struggling through the smoke, Surgey reached
the fourth control rod and tried to drive it into place,

(06:41):
but it wouldn't budge. The rod's casing had deformed under
the heat. And the guide rilla was warped. He wrestled
with it, but the resistance was just too much. Then,
feeling like he too was about to scum to the
conditions inside the room, he rushed back out for a
moment before rushing back inside to try again. On his
second attempt, with his muscle stresing, his lungs burning, and
his vision fading, he forced the rod into position and

(07:04):
it clicked. With that the reactor shut down. There would
be no second Schnobyl, nor would there be a radioactive
cloud spreading across the Atlantic. The shut down elimited the
risk of another explosion that could have triggered international panic
and possibly wore Sergey had saved not just his crewmates,
but possibly millions of lives. With his deadly mission complete,

(07:25):
he turned to escape the compartment, and when he reached
the hatch, he discovered that it wouldn't open. The gas
and heat caused by the near meltdout had warped the
pressure between compartments, and the hatch sealed shut like a
vacuum lock, sealing him inside. His crewmates tried to force
open from the other side, but the pressure balance was
too strong. Nothing worked. Sergey was trapped crew members called

(07:46):
him and pounded on the door, but inside it was
growing hotter by the second, and deadly gases were rapidly
replacing all the available auction. Somewhere in the swirling darkness
of Compartment seven, Sergey quietly collapsed and died in the chamber.
With the reactor finally silenced. Thanks to Sergei's bravery, the
worst case scenario had been averted, but the K two
nineteen was still bleeding from every physical, chemical, and structural

(08:08):
wounded that it suffered. Crows of gas was chewinged to
the pipes and electrical systems, and the submarine's ventilation system
was compromised. Crew Members trapped in the bow and Sterton
could no longer coordinate. Radiation levels in the missile compartments
were off the charts, and with each passing hour more
gas was spreading through the sub's narrow corridors. The explosion
had also rubbed a vessel of its propulsion system, leaving

(08:29):
it stranded on the surface and running on battery power alone.
But over the next few hours, the crew worked to
do damage control where they could and move into compartments
that were the safest to wait at a rescue. At
some point during this communications were partially restored and IGOR
managed to get a signal out to the Soviet fleet.
A nearby merchant vessel was then dispatched to assist, and
the new plan was to tow the K two nineteen

(08:50):
the forty three hundred miles or seven thousand kilometers back
to its home port in the Barren Sea. As the
merchant ship attached cables and began the slow pull north,
though it was immediate clear that it might not make it.
Poisonous fumes continued to leak. Compartments buckled under pressure, and
at one point a fresh rupture in the rear compartment
caused toxic guests to surgeons the half sections, contaminating even

(09:11):
more of the sub. The crew had to retreat again,
packed into the few ears that hadn't been overtaken yet,
and incredibly, in the midst of this, Egor was actually
ordered to hold position. Command in Moscow wasn't happy. They
wanted the sub repaired, the patrol resumed, and the mission salvaged.
They even dispatched the K two nineteen's political officer to
assume command if necessary, and forced the crew to remain

(09:33):
aboard the crippled vessel. Igor meanwhile, knew that this was
a death sentence. As conditions worsened, he made a decision
he wasn't authorized to make. He ordered the crew to
abandon ship. The Soviet sailors then climbed aboard the merchant ship, shaken, coughing,
and many still wearing gas masks. Igor was the last
to leave the sub He stood alone on a scorch

(09:53):
deck until it was clear that nothing else could be done.
Moments after he stepped off of the K two nineteen,
the tow cable snapped and walked surged into the submarine.
The K two nineteen then gave up the fight and
slip beneath the waves for the final time, sinking to
the bottom of the haterris Abysso plane eighteen thousand feet
or five four hundred and eighty six meters and taking
with it two nuclear actors and thirty nuclear warheads. Back

(10:17):
in Moscow, the sinking was a political nightmare. Soviet President
Gorbachev was already walking down a tightrope, as just six
months earlier, his handling of Chernobyl had shaken the Soviet
Union's credibility. The global outcried the internal humiliation and the
environmental devastation was still very raw, and now, in the
leap to a crucial arms control summit with the US President,
another nuclear catastrophe had occurred. Gorbachev's primary concern was the

(10:39):
optics of the situation. He didn't want to scandal before
the Rekuvic summit, so he did the opposite of what
he did in the aftermath of the Chernobyl meltdown. He
came clean. Gorbachev then contacted Reagan to inform him of
the disaster, and Reagan responded by offering any help the
United States could provide considering the denials and mishandling of Chernobyl.
This did little to repair the relationship between the two countries,

(11:00):
but it was a step in the right direction. Meanwhile,
inside the Soviet Union, gorbich Ud have rushed to place
the blame, and it landed mostly on Igor For all
intents and purposes, he was thrown under the bureaucratic bus,
charged with negligence, sabotage, and treason. Luckily, though all charges
against him were dropped in nineteen eighty seven. In the aftermath,
as well, the Upper Brass scrambled to explain what happened

(11:23):
A recon team that had been sent to inspect the
subwhell it was still being towed, uncovered gas leaks in
multiple compartments, corrosion eating through systems, electrical shorts, and reactor
cooling issues that could have turned catastrophic. According to the findings,
the crew had made a fatal mess calculation by activating
the water pump in the leaking missile tube before confirming
the electrical status, and this caused a short circuit that

(11:43):
likely triggered the explosion. At least that is what is
said to have happened. As with many things from that
part of the world, it's not entirely clear if this
is actually the case or if this is simply the
official store. Whatever the case, since the K two nineteen
sank with its full complement of warheads, there are now
plutonium lace missiles lying at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.
As for survey, he was awarded the title of Hero

(12:05):
of the Russian Federation in an official capacity. Unofficially, he's
known as the Hero who prevented a second Chernobyl. Before
dawn on October one, nineteen sixty two, four Soviet Union
submarines slipped out of Seta Bay right along the Kola Peninsula.
One by one, at thirty minute intervals, their diesel engines

(12:27):
turned on and the ships moved into the Black Arctic waters.
Among these were B thirty six, a B one thirty,
a B four, and a B fifty nine sub and
their mission was the furthest thing from a routine patrol. Instead,
their departure was part of a Soviet shadow operation code
named Anitor, and only a select few and the entire
planetary that what could occur in the next few weeks

(12:48):
could potentially bring about the complete end of humankind. Stacked
within the bell of each boat were torpedoes, and among
them was one tipped with something catastrophic. In the forward
compartment of the B fifty nine was z A T
five nuclear torpedo with a ten kiloton warhead roughly the
sides the bomb dropped on Hiroshima during World War Two.
The submarines were planned to reach Mario, Cuba and establish

(13:10):
a Soviet naval presence strong enough to anchor Moscow's rapidly
escalating support of Cuban President Fidel Castro, but even most
of the Soviet commanders were not aware of the full
scope of the mission. True to Soviet doctrine, Operation Entitor
had been cloaked into deception, and even many of the
ship captains were told half truths or nothing at all.
The real purpose of the mission was to place the
United States with an easy striking range of nuclear annihilation,

(13:33):
while also prepared to repel any American invasion of Cuba,
and the B fifty nine was the most crucial piece.
As the last traces of the Soviet coastline slipped from
view and the B fifty nine disappeared into the ocean,
its crew had no idea they were sailing right into
the Cold War's most dangerous moment. Above the surface, the
war was reaching a boiling point. Just weeks after the
B fifty nine and its sister subs slipped into the Atlantic,

(13:55):
an American U two reconnaissance plane flew a routine surveillance
run over Cuba, and what U it was jarring to
President John F. Kennedy's administration. There were rows of long,
unmistakable launch pads under construction, and military analysts quickly confirmed
that they were Soviet missile installations less than one hundred
miles from the Florida coast. Panic then immediately set in
behind closed doors in Washington, the Soviets weren't stockpiling defensive

(14:18):
weapons in Cuba. These were medium and intermediate range ballistic
missiles capable of vaporizing American cities within minutes of launch,
and these were being built in secret, right under the
nose of the world's most powerful military. Kennedy then addressed
the nation on October twenty second. He didn't use the
word blockade, which might imply an act of war under
international law, but he did call his next move a quarantine.

(14:39):
American naval ships were an immediately dispatched to encircle the
island in order to intercept any Soviet vessel caring weapons.
Kennedy also demanded that the missiles be it dismantled and removed,
but Soviet President Nikita Khrushchev naturally saw things differently. The
Soviet leader denounced the quarantine as piracy and promised that
ships would continue their journeys to Cuba, and so began

(15:00):
thirteen days of an excruciating standoff, two superpowers eyeing each
other through crosshairs, fingers twitching above the big red button,
daring each other to make the first move. This period
would later become known as the Cuban missile crisis. But
while American jets flew over the Caribbean and General's mapped
out strike planes below the surface, something else was happening
deep beneath the ocean. The small fleet of Soviet subs

(15:21):
that left at the beginning of the month were inching
their way toward Cuba and mostly undetected. Their mission had
also been carefully timed with missile deliveries. The Americans didn't
know yet that the Soviet Union had actually moved forty
thousand combat troops into Cuba, or that tactical nuclear weapons
were already stationed there under Cuban soil. Operation Andator had
worked brilliantly and terrifyingly well. Even as American destroyers circled

(15:45):
the island, they had no idea how many enemies were
hidden just below the surface. Around this same time, in
the sea just east of Cuba, the B fifty nine
and its sister submarines arrived with orders to maintain radio silence.
But almost immediately everything started going wrong. These oox Trot
class submarines, designed for Arctic waters, were unfit for the
blistering Caribbean, and mechanical problems began piling up The B

(16:07):
one thirty three diesel engines would end up giving out completely,
forcing the subsurface in open ocean. This was exactly the
kind of spectacle the Soviet Navy had wanted to avoid,
and this visual setting alone kicked the US Navy into
high gear. Suddenly, the Americans realized they weren't just dealing
with surface ships hauling missiles. American aircraft carriers Essex, Randolphin,
Wasp then launched a wave after wave of anti submarine

(16:29):
aircraft and destroyers fanned out across the ocean. More than
two hundred US combat ships for carrier groups and nearly
two hundred aircraft were now committed to the hunt. This
was the largest anti submarine effort the US Navy had
ever launched in peacetime. The Soviets, meanwhile, were being systematically cornered.
Every submarine in the group was suffering the B four's
deckcatchup in bent and was leaking. The B thirty six

(16:51):
at a broken decoy ejector. The B one thirty was
essentially dead in the water, and the B fifty nine
wasn't immune from trouble either. It was quite literally a
hot mess beneath the ocean. The ship's cooling system had
been contaminated by salt water, seals were leaking, and its
electric air compressors had failed as a result. Inside the ship,
it was hellish. A submarine is a tight squeeze under

(17:12):
the best conditions. Add in broken ventilation, nine extra men
from a radio intercept unit, and a tropical sea, and
you get basically a sweating steel coffin. By October twenty seventh,
the Bee fifty nine had been submerged for days, hiding
from American sonar, start of oxygen and low on battery.
Radio silence also meant they hadn't received orders or updates
from Moscow in more than seventy two hours. The only

(17:34):
thing they'd managed to pick up before going quiet was
President Kenny's voice over civilian radio stations, and he was
warning of the possibility of thermonuclear war. No one aboard
knew whether or not the war had actually already begun.
In addition, when a US Navy aircraft finally detected the
Bee fifty nine beneath the surface in the early hours
of that Saturday, the Americans didn't hesitate. They started dropping

(17:54):
depth charges, not to destroy, but to signal the ship
to the surface. The problem was the Bee fifty nine nine,
He didn't know that the signal wasn't getting through as intended. Instead,
to the men aboard, it felt like they were under attack.
With temperatures inside the submarine soaring to above one hundred
and thirteen degrees fahrenheit or forty five degrees celsius auxygen dwindling,
trench foot setting in, and the battery power almost gone.

(18:14):
The psychological pressure was crushing, and then came a louder explosion,
one that rocked the boat harder than any before, and
at that moment the line between signal to surface and
outright aggression shattered. The Bee fifty nine Captain Valentine Sevitsky
had had enough. He stood, sweat drenched and furious, and
he gave the order to ready the nuclear torpedo. This
began what would become known as Black Saturday. On land,

(18:37):
the situation was also rapidly spinning toward chaos. US bombers
loaded with nuclear payloads were placed on standby, and Strategic
Air Coman ready thousands of nuclear warheads aimed at Soviet targets. Meanwhile,
under the ocean, the Bee fifty nine was reaching its
own breaking point. Depth charges were still slamming into the
water around the sub for hours. From the perspective of

(18:58):
the US, this was all by the book ter issue
low charge grenades meant to tell the sub to rides
to the surface. Valentin's perspective, though, was much different. There
were fourteen US warships surrounding the sub, planes flo overhead
blinding light slash in the water. The submarine was suffocating,
with no fresh air, nearly no diesel power left, and
barely an hour of battery life remaining. Temperatures inside the

(19:19):
engine room reached one hundred and forty nine degrees fahrenheit
or sixty five celsius, and the crewmen were collapsing at
their stations. To Valentine, there was only one logical conclusion
to make of this chaos. A full scale nuclear war
had already begun. After he gave the order to ready
the nuclear torpedo, he assured the crew that they would
all die, but they'd take as many Americans with them
as they could. There was simply no way he was

(19:41):
going to disgrace the Soviet Navy by surrendering before he
could initiate that. Though, there was just one last step
Soviet protocol aboard the Bee fifty nine required that three men,
all senior officers, agreed before launching a nuclear weapon. Valentin
was more than ready, and so was the political officer. Ivan.
That left one man, a quiet, serious officer with a
haunted look on his face. His name was Vasili Archipov.

(20:05):
In the sweat soaked, auction starve command center of the
B fifty nine, Vasily stood at a crossroads most people
could never comprehend, and strangely, he had been in a
somewhat comparable situation just a year earlier, when he'd been
aboard the K nineteen. That sub suffered a catastrophic reactor
leak and the instant nearly ended in a nuclear meltdown.
Vasili had survived it, but not unscathed. Many of his

(20:27):
shipmates died from radiation exposure from that crisis within a
month of it occurring. So Vasili was intimately familiar with
this kind of pressure. And not only was Vasily a
senior officer board the B fifty nine, he was also
the most senior officer across all four submarines in the detachment.
This meant that his consent was not optional. It was
required on the three other subs. A two men approval

(20:48):
would have been enough, But on the B fifty nine,
at the edge of annihilation, Vasili had the last say.
What followed wasn't exactly a calm discussion. It was a raw,
heated and desperate argument. The air stank of diesel, and
see when men were still fainting from heat exhaustion, lights flickered,
and amidst at all, Vassily raised his voice, not in
panic but in reason. He argued that a war hadn't started.

(21:10):
He believed that if the US really meant to destroy them,
they already would have. The Americans had numbers, firepower, and
air superiority. The relentless depth charging wasn't an attack in
his mind, so he proposed something radical. Send out a
sonar pang one loud signal to see what came back. Valentin,
still fuming but listening to reason, agreed. The ping then

(21:30):
ran out throughout the ocean, and the crew braced for retaliation,
but nothing came, and suddenly there were no grenades or blasts,
just silence. Sonar swept through the era and three American destroyers,
which had been aggressively pursuing the Bee fifty nine, had
come to a full stop. It seemed Vassily's gamble had worked.
He turned to Valentin and told him plainly that launching
the torpedo would ignite global war and there would be

(21:52):
no coming back from him. Millions, possibly hundreds of millions
would die in response. Slowly and reluctantly, the captain gave
the order to stand down. The nuclear torpedo was not launched,
and the world, completely oblivious to how close it come
to its end, was spared. Late on the evening of
October twenty seventh, after nearly a full day of being hunted, suffocated,

(22:12):
and shaken, the men aboard the Beef fifty nine finally
broke the surface. The ocean around them then erupted into
chaos as blinding searchlights from the USS Coney flooded the
submarine's conning tower, helicopters buzzed overhead, and American destroyers circled.
Aircraft from the Randolph dropped phosphorus markers igniting mid air,
and bursts of fifty million candlepower light The Americans that

(22:33):
seemed to were putting on a show one met to intimidate, overwhelm,
and maybe even humiliate. Valentine then sent a message to
the American ships quote this ship belongs to the Union
of Soviet Socialists Republics. Halt your provocative actions. There was
then a pause, and then remarkably, response came in the
form of an apology from the US. The Americans also
didn't board the submarine or forced the crew to disarm.

(22:54):
They simply monitored the Bee fifty nine as it waded
in the water. When orders finally came in from Moscow
for the sub towards turn home. In response, the crew
didn't celebrate, and there was no cheering or relief, just exhaustion.
And with that, the Bee fifty nine quietly slipped away
from the American ships back into the Atlantic and turned
toward home. Back on land, both superpowers took a long,
hard look at what had just happened. Secret negotiations then accelerated,

(23:18):
and by the week's end President Khrushchev agreed to remove
Soviet missiles from Cuba. Then quietly, in a separate deal,
President Kennedy agreed to pull American missiles from Turkey. And
so the Cuban missile crisis was over. But no one
understood just so close the world had truly come to catastrophe.
For decades, the store of the b fifty nine was
kept covered up. The B fifty nine returned to the

(23:39):
Soviet Union under a veil of secrecy, and there were
no medals or heroes welcome. In fact, it was quite
the opposite. One Soviet admiral, after being briefed on the
subs encounter, reportedly told the crew that it would have
been better if they had gone down with their ship.
The political elite didn't want to hear about heat stroke
or the nuclear torpedo that came within moments of being fired.
They wanted clean narratives, and what happened aboard the Bee

(24:00):
fifty nine did fits. The world remained blissfully unaware of
how close did it come to being destroyed. As for Vasili,
who returned to duty with no awards or promotions tied
to his actions that day, it continued to serve quietly,
eventually becoming the head of the Cure of Naval Academy
and retiring as Vice Admirable. The world had no idea
that a soft spoken, unassuming man from a peasant family

(24:20):
near Moscow had stead alone in a boiling tin can
under the Atlantic and said no to the end of civilization.
It was in untail the early two thousands that the
full story began to surface. In two thousand and two,
at the fortieth anniversary conference of the Cuban Missile Crisis
held in Havana, American and Russian officials began comparing notes,
and that's when the truth came out. Robert McNamara, Kennedy's

(24:41):
Secretary of Defense during the crisis, was floored. He admitted
openly that nuclear war had come far closer than anyone
had imagined. The Americans had no idea that the Bee
fifty nine was carrying in nuclear torpedo. Historian Arthur M.
Schlesinger Junior, who had served in the Kennedy administration, called
it quote not only the most dangerous moment of the
Cold War, it was the most dangerous moment in human history. Meanwhile,

(25:04):
the director of the National Security Archive, Thomas Blenn, put
it simply, Vasily quote save the world. In twenty seventeen,
nearly two decades after his death from kidney cancer, likely
a consequence of his earlier radiation exposure aboard the Doomed
k nineteen, Vasily was finally honored the Future of Life
Institute awarded him the first ever Future of Life Award

(25:24):
given to individuals who often without recognition or reward, made
choices that protected humanity's future. His wife, Olga, accepted the
award on his behalf. She had always known the kind
of man. He was, calm, rational, and humble to a fault.
Vasily was the kind of man who carried the wit
of history on his shoulders and never once bragged about it.
For him, it was never about glory. It was about

(25:44):
doing the right thing, and because of that we're all
still here.