You owe your life.

Grassroots democracy. We need to secure our country from the global elites. Act now! Get informed.

Moderator: Super Moderators

Post Reply
User avatar
voguy
Pirate
Posts: 4175
Joined: 06-01-2011 05:47 PM
Location: Moving Target (soon SA)

You owe your life.

Post by voguy » 03-26-2016 09:42 AM

This is a very good read!

"Curiously Krulwich" - A Blog by Robert Krulwich
You (and Almost Everyone You Know) Owe Your Life to This Man. - Fri, 03/25/2016


Temperament matters.

Especially when nuclear weapons are involved and you don’t—you can’t—know what the enemy is up to, and you’re scared. Then it helps (it helps a lot) to be calm.

The world owes an enormous debt to a quiet, steady Russian naval officer who probably saved my life. And yours. And everyone you know. Even those of you who weren’t yet born. I want to tell his story …

It’s October 1962, the height of the Cuban missile crisis, and there’s a Soviet submarine in the Caribbean that’s been spotted by the American Navy. President Kennedy has blockaded Cuba. No sea traffic is permitted through.

The sub is hiding in the ocean, and the Americans are dropping depth charges left and right of the hull. Inside, the sub is rocking, shaking with each new explosion. What the Americans don’t know is that this sub has a tactical nuclear torpedo on board, available to launch, and that the Russian captain is asking himself, Shall I fire?

This actually happened.

The Russian in question, an exhausted, nervous submarine commander named Valentin Savitsky, decided to do it. He ordered the nuclear-tipped missile readied. His second in command approved the order. Moscow hadn’t communicated with its sub for days. Eleven U.S. Navy ships were nearby, all possible targets. The nuke on this missile had roughly the power of the bomb at Hiroshima.

“We’re gonna blast them now!”

Temperatures in the submarine had climbed above 100 degrees. The air-conditioning system was broken, and the ship couldn’t surface without being exposed. The captain felt doomed. Vadim Orlov, an intelligence officer who was there, remembers a particularly loud blast: “The Americans hit us with something stronger than the grenades—apparently with a practice depth bomb,” he wrote later. “We thought, That’s it, the end.” And that’s when, he says, the Soviet captain shouted, “Maybe the war has already started up there … We’re gonna blast them now! We will die, but we will sink them all—we will not become the shame of the fleet.”

Had Savitsky launched his torpedo, had he vaporized a U.S. destroyer or aircraft carrier, the U.S. would probably have responded with nuclear-depth charges, “thus,” wrote Russian archivist Svetlana Savranskaya, understating wildly, “starting a chain of inadvertent developments, which could have led to catastrophic consequences.”

But it didn’t happen, because that’s when Vasili Alexandrovich Arkhipov steps into the story.
VasiliAlexandrovichArkhipov.jpg
VasiliAlexandrovichArkhipov.jpg (105.1 KiB) Viewed 3687 times
He was 34 at the time. Good looking, with a full head of hair and something like a spit curl dangling over his forehead. He was Savitsky’s equal, the flotilla commander responsible for three Russian subs on this secret mission to Cuba—and he is maybe one of the quietest, most unsung heroes of modern times.

What he said to Savitsky we will never know, not exactly. But, says Thomas Blanton, the former director of the nongovernmental National Security Archive, simply put, this “guy called Vasili Arkhipov saved the world.”

Arkhipov, described by his wife as a modest, soft-spoken man, simply talked Savitsky down.

The exact details are controversial. The way it’s usually told is that each of the three Soviet submarine captains in the ocean around Cuba had the power to launch a nuclear torpedo if—and only if—he had the consent of all three senior officers on board. On his sub, Savitsky gave the order and got one supporting vote, but Arkhipov balked. He wouldn’t go along.

He argued that this was not an attack.

The official Soviet debriefs are still secret, but a Russian reporter, Alexander Mozgovoi, an American writer, and eyewitness testimony from intelligence officer Orlov suggest that Arkhipov told the captain that the ship was not in danger. It was being asked to surface. Dropping depth charges left then right, noisy but always off target—those are signals, Arkhipov argued. They say, We know you’re there. Identify yourselves. Come up and talk. We intend no harm.

What’s Happening?

The Russian crew couldn’t tell what was going on above them: They’d gone silent well before the crisis began. Their original orders were to go directly to Cuba, but then, without explanation, they’d been ordered to stop and wait in the Caribbean. Orlov, who had lived in America, heard from American radio stations that Russia had secretly brought missiles to the island, that Cuba had shot down a U.S. spy plane, that President Kennedy had ordered the U.S. Navy to surround the island and let no one pass through. When Americans had spotted the sub, Savitsky had ordered it to drop deeper into the ocean, to get out of sight—but that had cut them off. They couldn’t hear (and didn’t trust) U.S. media. For all they knew, the war had already begun

We don’t know how long they argued. We do know that the nuclear weapons the Russians carried (each ship had just one, with a special guard who stayed with it, day and night) were to be used only if Russia itself had been attacked. Or if attack was imminent. Savitsky felt he had the right to fire first. Official Russian accounts insist he needed a direct order from Moscow, but Archipov’s wife Olga says there was a confrontation.

She and Ryurik Ketov, the gold-toothed captain of a nearby Russian sub, both heard the story directly from Vasili. Both believe him and say so in this PBS documentary. Some scenes are dramatized, but listen to what they say …



As the drama unfolded, Kennedy worried that the Russians would mistake depth charges for an attack. When his defense secretary said the U.S. was dropping “grenade”-size signals over the subs, the president winced. His brother Robert Kennedy later said that talk of depth charges “were the time of greatest worry to the President. His hand went up to his face [and] he closed his fist.”

The Russian command, for its part, had no idea how tough it was inside those subs. Anatoly Andreev, a crew member on a different, nearby sub, kept a journal, a continuing letter to his wife, that described what it was like:
For the last four days, they didn’t even let us come up to the periscope depth … My head is bursting from the stuffy air. … Today three sailors fainted from overheating again … The regeneration of air works poorly, the carbon dioxide content [is] rising, and the electric power reserves are dropping. Those who are free from their shifts, are sitting immobile, staring at one spot. … Temperature in the sections is above 50 [122ºF].
The debate between the captain and Arkhipov took place in an old, diesel-powered submarine designed for Arctic travel but stuck in a climate that was close to unendurable. And yet, Arkhipov kept his cool. After their confrontation, the missile was not readied for firing. Instead, the Russian sub rose to the surface, where it was met by a U.S. destroyer. The Americans didn’t board. There were no inspections, so the U.S. Navy had no idea that there were nuclear torpedos on those subs—and wouldn’t know for around 50 years, when the former belligerents met at a 50th reunion. Instead, the Russians turned away from Cuba and headed north, back to Russia.

Looking back, it all came down to Arkhipov. Everyone agrees that he’s the guy who stopped the captain. He’s the one who stood in the way.

He was, as best as we can tell, not punished by the Soviets. He was later promoted. Reporter Alexander Mozgovoi describes how the Soviet Navy conducted a formal review and how the man in charge, Marshal Grachko, when told about conditions on those ships, “removed his glasses and hit them against the table in fury, breaking them into small pieces, and abruptly leaving the room after that.”

How Arkhipov (that’s him up above) managed to keep his temper in all that heat, how he managed to persuade his frantic colleague, we can’t say, but it helps to know that Arkhopov was already a Soviet hero. A year earlier he’d been on another Soviet sub, the K-19, when the coolant system failed and the onboard nuclear reactor was in danger of meltdown. With no backup system, the captain ordered the crew to jerry-rig a repair, and Arkhopov, among others, got exposed to high levels of radiation. Twenty-two crew members died from radiation sickness over the next two years. Arkhipov wouldn’t die until 1998, but it would be from kidney cancer, brought on, it’s said, by exposure.

Nuclear weapons are inherently dangerous. Handling them, using them, not using them, requires caution, care. Living as we do now with North Korea, Pakistani generals, jihadists, and who knows who’ll be the next U.S. president, the world is very, very lucky that at one critical moment, someone calm enough, careful enough, and cool enough was there to say no.


Thanks to Alex Wellerstein, author of the spectacular blog Restricted Data, for his help guiding me to source material on this subject.
LINK TO STORY AND MORE PICTURES
"I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them." - Thomas Jefferson

User avatar
Doka
Pirate
Posts: 7967
Joined: 09-02-2009 08:15 PM

Re: You owe your life.

Post by Doka » 03-26-2016 11:48 AM

Facinating! What a year that was! 1962. My Mother died in May(from the same disease that Kennedy had, he would not have lived that long, but they shot him any way). The Cuban Missile Crises, Kennedy shot in November. It certainly was a year that changed the World, in one way for sure for us, as I believe Kennedy was the last president elected by the PEOPLE, the rest have been CHOSEN FOR US.

Needless to say it was a life changing year for me and like most young and un-informed idiots took it all events personally, took me awhile to "Find the pony in all the crap".
KARMA RULES

Those Who Can Make You Believe Absurdities, Can Make You Commit Atrocities': Voltaire

User avatar
voguy
Pirate
Posts: 4175
Joined: 06-01-2011 05:47 PM
Location: Moving Target (soon SA)

Re: You owe your life.

Post by voguy » 03-26-2016 06:27 PM

I recall it as being October 1962.
"I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them." - Thomas Jefferson

User avatar
kbot
Pirate
Posts: 7302
Joined: 03-12-2008 05:44 AM

Re: You owe your life.

Post by kbot » 03-26-2016 08:52 PM

As I recall, I was in grammar school, the people around here were scared **** thinking that the Russians had Cuba capable of striking up past New York city. My father who served n the Pacific wit the Marines during WWII remembered well the atomic bomb hits on Japan, and the nuns were teaching us to dive under our desks........ truly strange, unforgettable times. We have a destroyer, the USS Joseph Kennedy docked at a permanent war memorial here in my hometown. She was riding the blockade around Cuba ta the time. Had the chance to go aboard a few times over the years..... We also have a Russian Navy missile guided frigate, a battleship (USS Massachusetts) a WWII submarine, PT boat and a few other exhibits. There was talk of being able to get either the carriers Forestall or Saratoga, since they were mothballed down in the old Newport Navy Base, but they got sold for scrap and sunk as artificial reefs.......
There you go man, keep as cool as you can. Face piles and piles of trials with smiles. It riles them to believe that you perceive the web they weave. And keep on thinking free. (Moody Blues)

User avatar
voguy
Pirate
Posts: 4175
Joined: 06-01-2011 05:47 PM
Location: Moving Target (soon SA)

Re: You owe your life.

Post by voguy » 03-27-2016 08:00 AM

I remember Duck and Cover, as well as the threats in the news of where strikes could happen. Dare I say we're no better now than back then? With "Little Kim Korea" talking about lobbing hydrogen bombs at us, the thought is in the back of the mind.
"I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them." - Thomas Jefferson

User avatar
Diogenes
Pirate
Posts: 5784
Joined: 07-14-2011 03:01 PM

Re: You owe your life.

Post by Diogenes » 03-27-2016 01:29 PM

Our neighbor up the street built a bomb shelter - remember it well. Those days waiting to see how it would go were quite tense in the old neighborhood.

To Doka's point about JFK the last President elected by the people - interesting because I watched the Road to the WH on CNN narrated by Kevin Spacey and they didn't pussy foot around about the dead folks in Texas who had voted by the thousands and also in Illinois under the Mayor Daley regime. I had read all this years before but while watching made me think if we have ever had an honest election.
A man's character is his fate

User avatar
voguy
Pirate
Posts: 4175
Joined: 06-01-2011 05:47 PM
Location: Moving Target (soon SA)

Re: You owe your life.

Post by voguy » 04-09-2016 01:38 PM

Diogenes wrote:To Doka's point about JFK the last President elected by the people - interesting because I watched the Road to the WH on CNN narrated by Kevin Spacey and they didn't pussy foot around about the dead folks in Texas who had voted by the thousands and also in Illinois under the Mayor Daley regime. I had read all this years before but while watching made me think if we have ever had an honest election.
That's a good point. A few of my old buddies in the news business suggest that only 73% of the election votes are legitimate, which if you know how to work statistics allows for a gross manipulation of the results. But here is the part none of us understand.

Even when three journalists in Cleveland OH had documentable evidence of fraud, neither the FBI, agencies dealing with voting, or some of the larger news organizations wanted to investigate or report on it. It seems to me pretty cut and dry. If you have 27,000 people show up in a county (including absentee ballot), and the results show 31,000 voted, you have a problem. Likewise, if you have photographic evidence of one person casting their ballot at four different locations, you have a problem. This problem is a felony. And by our elected officials and law enforcement ignoring this evidence they have become an accessory to the felony.

The question is, Dio, what do we do about it?
"I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them." - Thomas Jefferson

Post Reply

Return to “American Survival”