"ON OCTOBER 27TH 1962, at the height of the Cuban missile crisis, it was only the purest luck that saved the world from nuclear catastrophe. Five days earlier President John Kennedy had announced a naval blockade of the island to force his opposite number in the Kremlin, Nikita Khrushchev, to withdraw the medium-range nuclear missiles he had sent to Cuba in the summer of that year. US Navy anti-submarine warfare patrols were hunting down Soviet nuclear-armed subs that posed a threat to the blockade.
The plan was to "pressure" the submarines into leaving the area of operation by dropping practice depth charges and grenades, but not to destroy them unless absolutely necessary. Submarine B-59 had experienced the effects of that pressure for two days and its crew were growing desperate from intense heat and toxic levels of carbon dioxide. When it surfaced for air, B-59 found itself harassed by American planes firing tracer bullets and flares.
Convinced that his ship was under attack and that war had broken out, the sub's captain, Valentin Savitsky, gave the order to dive and prepare to launch a nuclear-armed torpedo. With ten kilotonnes of explosive power, it would produce massive waves and sink or incapacitate any nearby American warships. Two things stopped the order from being carried out.
The commander of one of the American destroyers, the Cony, realised what was about to happen and flashed an apology for the aggressive behaviour of the planes. The apology would never have been seen had the sub's signals officer not got stuck with his searchlight in the shaft of the conning tower. That gave the commander of the submarine task force, Vasili Arkhipov, who was behind him, the chance to countermand the order. If the nuclear torpedo had been fired, Kennedy would have had little choice other than to order a strike against Soviet targets with the inevitable consequence of escalatory retaliation." [1]
Now, with the empowerment of Landsbergiai and other nationalists, we are approaching that threshold again.
1. "A very close shave; The cold war." The Economist, 17 Apr. 2021, p. 72(US).
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