Quote:
Originally Posted by CaptainCrunch
I don't know if I'd call it a win, it reached win conditions, but it set back a draw back on the cold war between the East and West and the reform of the Soviet Government by decades.
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Certainly wins in it, and the outcome could have been much worse.
We probably all owe our lives to an argument won by Vasily Arkhipov during the Cuban Missile Crisis. He was an officer aboard a submarine that lost contact with Moscow and was being forced up by depth charges from an American vessel. The Soviets in the sub didn't know they were depth charges and thought they were being directly attacked. The captain wanted to fire nuclear torpedoes. Arkhipov, as one of three officers on the sub that unanimously had to agree, disagreed and a heated argument took place. Eventually he was able to talk the captain of surfacing instead of firing the nuclear torpedoes. Had he not, it's likely that it becomes nuclear war.
Because of the secrecy around the cold war, surfacing was considered cowardly and no one knew how close they were to firing the nukes. So he was seen as a disgrace initially rather than the hero who saved the world.
The crazy thing was that the other three submarines that were part of the mission only required the captain and the political officer (each who had half of the set of keys) to initiate the nuke. Arkhipov was overseeing the mission and, as far as I could tell, could have been on any of the other three submarines. If he had been on B-4 instead of B-59, we're living in a nuclear holocaust.