#Unherd the post cracked#
Perhaps we don’t know the names of the American counterparts to Arkhipov and Petrov because the US state has never been cracked open in a similar way. Doubtless this notoriety is partly an artefact of the collapse of the USSR, which opened up Soviet archives and made available so many hitherto classified Soviet military and state secrets. Of all the times the world has skirted close to Armageddon since the start of the Atomic Age, Arkhipov and Petrov nonetheless remain as the only two named people who are not political leaders and are commonly identified as having played a specific individual role in blocking the path to nuclear escalation - and certainly the only two with any historic or public notoriety. So, given the structure of nuclear arms control agreements has been allowed to decay, eroding the capacity for jointly managing de-escalation between Washington and Moscow, we must ask ourselves an uncomfortable question: are there still Arkhipovs and Petrovs on the Russian side, and would their counsel would once again prevail over that of their superiors and fellow officers?Ī sceptic could legitimately ask why we only seem to expect Russian officers to save the world from nuclear war. With the Russian front currently crumbling under the Ukrainian counter-attack, and the intimations of Russian president Vladimir Putin that he is willing to use nuclear weapons, as well as the renewed fighting between Armenia and Azerbaijan on Russia’s borders, today’s geopolitics bear a striking relation to those of the early Eighties - if not the Cuban Missile Crisis itself. Schlesinger, Jr., a senior adviser to the Kennedy administration at the time, later characterised the dispute as “not only the most dangerous moment of the Cold War, the most dangerous moment in human history”. When the submarine eventually managed to surface and radio contact was restored, Arkhipov was vindicated – war had not erupted, and the ship returned to the USSR. Their sub was too deep underwater to receive radio commands from Moscow, and the submarine’s captain, Valentin Savitsky, believed that a Third World War had already broken out on the surface, necessitating that they strike back. As the deputy commander of a flotilla of Soviet submarines deployed to Cuba during the Missile Crisis of October 1962, Arkhipov vetoed the decision of his two fellow officers to fire a nuclear-tipped torpedo at the US destroyers that were harassing their submarine in the waters around the island. Vasily Arkhipov was also a Soviet officer, this time in the navy, who made a critical decision that avoided US retaliation. Petrov is not the only Russian with the claim to have saved humanity from nuclear war. To this day, his name circulates annually on social media as one of humanity’s overlooked heroes. As Petrov’s role became more widely known, he was celebrated, being awarded prizes from various Western civil society groups. Petrov retired from the military the following year, and his role in averting nuclear war only became public in 1998, with the publication of the memoirs of General Yuri Votintsev, commander of the Soviet nuclear forces at the time of the incident. It turned out that the Soviet satellites had mistaken the reflection of sunlight on clouds for the flare of a rocket launch. He ignored the protocol that demanded he immediately report any suspected US nuclear attack up the chain of command, thereby avoiding a Soviet retaliation which could have precipitated a full-blown thermonuclear war. Petrov knew he had 25 minutes before the nuclear missiles hit Soviet territory.ĭespite the warnings flashing up before him, Petrov decided that the incoming missiles were more likely a bug in the newly installed computer system than an actual US nuclear strike. According to Soviet satellites, five intercontinental ballistic missiles were hurtling from the US towards Russia. In the early hours of 26 September 1983, Stanislav Petrov, a 44-year-old Lieutenant Colonel in a Soviet Air Defence command centre outside of Moscow, was covering for a sick colleague when an alarm when off. He is author most recently of The New Twenty Years’ Crisis: A critique of international relations (2020). Philip Cunliffe is Associate Professor of International Relations at the Institute of Risk and Disaster Reduction, University College London.
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