Here’s a quick Cold War story from 1962’s Cuban Missile Crisis that few people know of: a single Soviet naval officer prevented a nuclear exchange.

During the Cuban Missile Crisis off of the coast of Cuba, on October 27, 1962, four Soviet submarines had been detected by the US Navy, and were being bombarded by non-lethal depth charges intended to make them surface. The Soviets did not know this, and thought they were under attack.

Second-in-Command of Soviet submarine B-59, Brigade Chief of Staff  Vasili Arkhipov was the lone dissenter refusing to fire a 10-kiloton nuclear torpedo during the Cuban Missile Crisis that would have surely destroyed its target, the USS Randolph, an aircraft carrier leading an American task group of multiple ships and submarines.

The submarine did not need Moscow’s permission to fire the torpedoes. The other submarines only required its captain and political officer to agree, however, on the B-59, three were required to agree: Captain Valentin Savitsky, the political officer Ivan Semyonovich Maslennikov, and Chief Brigade Officer Arkhipov, who was equal in rank to Savitsky but the senior officer aboard B-59.

As another captain in the brigade put it in an interview with PBS decades later: “I had a written order that I could release it,” says Ketov. “And if there was an order to fire the torpedo I would do it without a second thought. For the first time in life a commander of a submarine had a nuclear weapon and had the authority to fire the missile at his command.”
–– Soviet submarine commander Ryurik Ketov

Even though Arkhipov was second-in-command of the submarine B-59, he was in fact chief of staff of the entire submarine flotilla, including B-4, B-36 and B-130. He was also a hero of the Soviet Union, having helped save the Hotel-class K-19 ballistic missile submarine in 1961. That no doubt gave him great sway over the captain and political officer of B-59, both of whom were convinced they were in a wartime scenario and that all options were on the table.

Had they launched the torpedo and had it damaged surface ships (which it surely would have) then the response from the US would have undoubtedly been a thermonuclear exchange.

You could say we are all here because of Arkhipov.