Neo Bretonnia
14-01-2009, 20:30
Ever seen the movie "Crimson Tide?" If you haven't, the movie is about a fictional international crisis in which a United States nuclear missile submarine is given orders to launch nuclear weapons at a renegade faction in Russia. At that moment, an enemy sub attacks just as a new message was being received from Washington, but was cut off.
The captain wanted to go ahead and launch, but the Executive officer wanted to find out the contents of the lost message before proceeding, on the chance that it was an order NOT to launch. This provides the conflict for the movie, as both had to agree in order to release nukes.
Something like that happened in real life, only it was the other way around:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasili_Alexandrovich_Arkhipov
On October 27, 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, a group of eleven United States Navy destroyers and the aircraft carrier USS Randolph entrapped a nuclear-armed Soviet Foxtrot class submarine B-59 near Cuba and started dropping practice depth charges, explosives intended to force the submarine to come to the surface for identification. Allegedly, the captain of the submarine, Valentin Grigorievitch Savitsky, believing that a war might already have started, prepared to launch a retaliatory nuclear-tipped torpedo.
Three officers on board the submarine — Savitsky, Political Officer Ivan Semonovich Maslennikov, and Second Captain Arkhipov — were entitled to launch the torpedo if they agreed unanimously in favour of doing so. An argument broke out among the three, in which only Arkhipov was against making the attack, eventually persuading Savitsky to surface the submarine and await orders from Moscow. The nuclear warfare which presumably would have ensued was thus averted.
At the conference commemorating the 40th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis held in Havana on 13 October 2002, Robert McNamara admitted that nuclear war had come much closer than people had thought. Thomas Blanton, director of the National Security Archive, said that "a guy called Vasili Arkhipov saved the world."
:eek:
That guy should be honored.
The captain wanted to go ahead and launch, but the Executive officer wanted to find out the contents of the lost message before proceeding, on the chance that it was an order NOT to launch. This provides the conflict for the movie, as both had to agree in order to release nukes.
Something like that happened in real life, only it was the other way around:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasili_Alexandrovich_Arkhipov
On October 27, 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, a group of eleven United States Navy destroyers and the aircraft carrier USS Randolph entrapped a nuclear-armed Soviet Foxtrot class submarine B-59 near Cuba and started dropping practice depth charges, explosives intended to force the submarine to come to the surface for identification. Allegedly, the captain of the submarine, Valentin Grigorievitch Savitsky, believing that a war might already have started, prepared to launch a retaliatory nuclear-tipped torpedo.
Three officers on board the submarine — Savitsky, Political Officer Ivan Semonovich Maslennikov, and Second Captain Arkhipov — were entitled to launch the torpedo if they agreed unanimously in favour of doing so. An argument broke out among the three, in which only Arkhipov was against making the attack, eventually persuading Savitsky to surface the submarine and await orders from Moscow. The nuclear warfare which presumably would have ensued was thus averted.
At the conference commemorating the 40th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis held in Havana on 13 October 2002, Robert McNamara admitted that nuclear war had come much closer than people had thought. Thomas Blanton, director of the National Security Archive, said that "a guy called Vasili Arkhipov saved the world."
:eek:
That guy should be honored.