Time to think - Russians rules of engagement and why we are, luckily, still exist: On 27 October 1962, at the tensest moment of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Vasili Arkhipov, second-in-command of the Soviet nuclear submarine B-59, blocked an order to fire nuclear-powered missiles in retaliation for an attack by US destroyers. Even though B-59 was in international waters, and hence outside the exclusion zone the US had decreed around Cuba, the US destroyers were dropping depth charges to force the submarine to the surface. B-59 was so deep that it was receiving no radio signals from either Moscow or Washington and its captain believed that war might already have broken out. Fortunately, Soviet rules of engagement required the unanimity of the three most senior officers in a submarine before a nuclear missile could be launched. Arkhipov may literally have saved the world. This incident was first revealed publicly in 2002 at a conference in Havana to mark the fortieth anniversary of the crisis, attended by surviving political leaders and military commanders from Cuba, the US and the former Soviet Union. Robert McNamara, US secretary of defense during the crisis, stated at the conference that ‘we came very close’ to nuclear war, ‘closer than we knew at the time’. Gareth Jenkins Montpellier
Posted on: Thu, 06 Mar 2014 08:02:37 +0000
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