Soviet submarine B-59.
Today, the Archive marks the 60th anniversary of the underwater Cuban Missile Crisis by publishing for the first time in English the only public recollection of Vasily Arkhipov, the submarine brigade's chief of staff, who was on board B-59 at the critical moment and helped Captain Savitsky avoid making the potentially ...
In 2002, retired commander Vadim Pavlovich Orlov, a participant in the events, held an interview revealing the submarines were armed with nuclear torpedoes and that Arkhipov was the reason those weapons had not been fired.
And the person who likely did more than anyone else to prevent that dangerous day from becoming an existential catastrophe was a quiet Soviet naval officer named Vasili Arkhipov. On that day, Arkhipov was serving aboard the nuclear-armed Soviet submarine B-59 in international waters near Cuba.
Arkhipov is credited with preventing a Soviet nuclear strike during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Fifty-nine years ago, a senior Russian submarine officer, Vasili Alexandrovich Arkhipov, refused to fire a nuclear torpedo at an American aircraft carrier and likely prevented a third world war and nuclear destruction.
DEFCON stands for Defense Readiness Condition. Levels range from DEFCON 1 to DEFCON 5, with DEFCON 1 being the highest level of readiness. To the public's knowledge, the U.S. has never reached DEFCON 1. The U.S. Joint Military Command and the Joint Chiefs of Staff set the current DEFCON level.
The Soviet officer who stopped World War III - The Washington Post. A show for history lovers, featuring stories about the past, rediscovered. In 1983, Stanislav Petrov, a lieutenant colonel in the Soviet Union's Air Defense Forces, trusted his gut and averted a global nuclear catastrophe.
A declassified document shared by nuclear historian Alex Wellerstein gives the verdict that scientists at the Los Alamos laboratory and test site reached in 1945. They found that "it would require only in the neighborhood of 10 to 100 Supers of this type" to put the human race in peril.
According to Admiral Foggo, the commander of the US Naval Forces Europe, the Yasen class submarines are "very quiet, which is the most important thing in submarine warfare".
Putin said in December that the country would be building more nuclear-powered submarines, "which will ensure Russia's security for decades to come."
The Belgorod (K-329) is a unique submarine. She is around 178 meters (583 ft) long, 15 meters (50 ft) wide and in the region of 30,000 tons. This makes it by far the largest built anywhere in the world since the famous Typhoon class. She is armed with the Poseidon strategic weapon which itself is unique.
Yasen-class, also known as Project 885, is Russia's newest line of nuclear-powered cruise missile submarines and among the most capable submarines in the world.
The Kriegsmarine's Type-XX1 U-boat, known as the Elektroboote', is rightly considered the most advanced submarine of World War Two. It was slicker and stealthier and than any other boat and incorporated both technical and doctrinal advances.
The first military submarine was Turtle in 1776. During the American Revolutionary War, Turtle (operated by Sgt. Ezra Lee, Continental Army) tried and failed to sink a British warship, HMS Eagle (flagship of the blockaders) in New York harbor on September 7, 1776.
Arkhipov received little recognition during his lifetime, but to his wife Olga, Vasili was always a hero. In a 2012 PBS documentary titled The Man Who Saved the World, Olga Arkhipov said, “The man who prevented a nuclear war was a Russian submariner. His name was Vasili Arkhipov.
The study published in the journal Risk Analysis describes Australia, New Zealand, Iceland, Solomon Islands and Vanuatu as the island countries most capable of producing enough food for their populations after an “abrupt sunlight‐reducing catastrophe” such as a nuclear war, super volcano or asteroid strike.
A new video simulates the explosion of thermal nuclear weapons in the Challenger Deep. Tsar Bomba is the most powerful nuclear bomb ever made. One bomb would be stanched, but a million could easily destroy the Earth.
Trieste is a Swiss-designed, Italian-built deep-diving research bathyscaphe which reached a record depth of about 10,911 metres (35,797 ft) in the Challenger Deep of the Mariana Trench near Guam in the Pacific.
A nuclear submarine can dive to a depth of about 300m. This one is larger than the research vessel Atlantis and has a crew of 134. The research vessel Atlantis, shown at the surface, is 274 feet long.
Many nuclear historians agree that 27 October 1962, known as “Black Saturday”, was the closest the world came to nuclear catastrophe, as US forces enforced a blockade of Cuba to stop deliveries of Soviet missiles.
Thirty years ago, on 26 September 1983, the world was saved from potential nuclear disaster. In the early hours of the morning, the Soviet Union's early-warning systems detected an incoming missile strike from the United States. Computer readouts suggested several missiles had been launched.
Sir Adrian Carton de Wiart was a one-eyed, one-handed war hero who fought in three major conflicts across six decades, surviving plane crashes and PoW camps. His story is like something out of a Boy's Own comic. Carton de Wiart served in the Boer War, World War One and World War Two.