It’s hard not to feel cynical in 2024, as digital alerts about climate change and wars and migrants and mental illness all pump into our brains like water against an unstable dam. Amid this doom and gloom, we ought to acknowledge we do not live in the “the Darkest Timeline,” as joked about by the cult classic NBC sitcom Community. Crucially, though, we only live outside of this timeline thanks to one man—and one decision. Let me explain.
In October 1962, the United States and Soviet Union, the world’s two nuclear-armed superpowers at the time, threatened the Earth with nuclear annihilation due to a standoff around storing atomic bombs in Cuba. Both sides were ready to fire on the other and kill hundreds of millions, if not billions, with nuclear hellfire. In the midst of this dispute, one Soviet submarine detected American explosives going off nearby. Consequently, the submarine’s staff had good reason to believe that the United States had attacked the Soviet military, and that nuclear war had begun. Two out of the three senior officers on the submarine signed off on launching their own nuclear missiles to annihilate the American military. They needed just one more man to sign off on this false retaliation and kick-start a nuclear apocalypse.
That man said no. Vasily Arkhipov, the third-in-command of this isolated B-59 submarine, wanted more time to be sure that nuclear war had already begun. The submarine’s staff launched into a heated debate with him, but Arkhipov—standing alone—kept his composure. Minutes after his veto, he was proven right. Communication was back alive, and so was humanity.
Part of me is surprised that we don’t celebrate Arkhipov’s legacy more often. Nuclear war would’ve meant the extinction of hundreds of millions of people—including the bulk of Europe, Asia and the Americas. It’s an impossible scenario to process, but it was almost a very likely reality were it not for him.
Another part of me understands that Arkhipov was just doing his job. One could argue that his fellow officers were out of line and that he was the only one to act sensibly. After all, although the crew lost contact with the USSR, they could still pick up American radio broadcasts. If nukes had dropped, wouldn’t American broadcasts have stopped too? We can’t dig Arkhipov’s comrades out of their graves to answer these questions, but we can be grateful that he saw through their panic. To an extent, then, Arkhipov really didn’t do all that much. He simply refused to go along with his fellow officers’ irrational fears. And, after the crisis concluded, he didn’t see himself—or sell himself—as the hero that saved the world.
Refusing to make a horrific, nuclear-armed mistake probably shouldn’t qualify you for a Nobel Peace Prize. If that was the standard, then every nuclear-armed political leader since President Truman deserves immense praise for having had the capability to destroy the world with nukes, but deciding not to do so. What made Arkhipov different from these leaders is that he made an active decision to say no in the face of universal pressure to say yes.
I’m in no position to call for worldwide nuclear disarmament, nor do I perversely believe we should “have gratitude for every day, since you never know when a nuclear bomb will kill us all!” Rather, I believe the story of Vasily Arkhipov is a thought exercise about life’s fragility, not only about why it’s so fragile, but how we can save it. Sometimes, saving the world means not pressing the button—even when everyone wants you to.
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