MARCH 2014
On October 27, 1962, the world came
the closest it had ever been to total nuclear
destruction. Major Rudolf Anderson was
shot down over Cuba in a U-2 spy plane,
alerting the Soviets to continued American spying while also producing the single
casualty of the crisis. On the same day,
Captain Charles F. Maultsby – flying a
U-2 spy plane from Alaska to take highaltitude radioactive air samples – strayed
300 miles into Soviet airspace, alerting
Soviet MiGs to the possibility of a “nuclear bomber” approaching Moscow. The
Soviet air force chased Maultsby out of
their airspace, forcing him to glide back
to Alaska. Khrushchev later said that the
fear of a nuclear bomber nearly pushed
the Soviets to a “fateful step.” Also on
the 27th, eleven U.S. Navy destroyers located the Soviet nuclear-armed submarine
B-59 and began depth charging the vessel
in international waters in an attempt to
make it surface. The submarine had lost
all radio contact with Moscow, and captain Valentin Savitsky and political officer
Ivan Maslennikov were both convinced
after the American depth charges that a
nuclear war was underway and that they
should fire their missiles on the United
States. To launch their submarine’s nuclear arsenal, Savistky and Maslennikov
needed the consent of First Mate Vasily
Arkhipov, who dissented in favor of surfacing and ultimately dissuaded the two
from a nuclear launch after an intense
argument. Had Arkhipov not dissented,
or if Arkhipov had not been on the ship
and Savitsky needed only Maslennikov’s
consent, a nuclear war could certainly
have ensued. Indeed, any one of these
three events could have led to an all-out
war in even slightly altered circumstances.
Like Arkhipov, Kennedy also displayed
a bit of heroism after his earlier blunders.
The President, against a unanimous Joint
Chiefs of Staff, advocated a naval “quarantine” of Cuba over their preferred airstrike/invasion. This choice almost certainly prevented a nuclear war that the JCS
estimated might kill “80-100 million.”
The success of an American airstrike had
been predicated on the air force destroy-
DOMESTIC
ing the Soviet strike capacity in 500 sorties over seven days, but recent documents
have demonstrated that this would have
been impossible. Rather than the handful of ICBMs and the 8,000 soldiers the
JCS believed inhabite