Vasily Arkhipov

Vasily Aleksandrovich Arkhipov (; 30 January 1926 – 19 August 1998; sometimes romanized as Vasili Arkhipov) was a senior Soviet Naval officer who prevented a Soviet submarine from launching a nuclear torpedo against ships of the United States Navy at a crucial moment in the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962. The course of events that would have followed such an action cannot be known, but speculations have been advanced, up to and including global thermonuclear war.

Off the coast of Cuba, US ships had dropped depth charges. The captain of the diesel-powered Soviet submarine and the political officer believed that war had started and that they were under attack. Arkhipov, as flotilla chief of staff and executive officer on board the submarine, refused to consent to the use of nuclear weapons in retaliation, a decision which required the agreement of all three officers. In 2002, Thomas S. Blanton, then director of the US National Security Archive, credited Arkhipov as "the man who saved the world".

He was promoted to rear admiral in 1975 and became head of the Kirov Naval Academy. He was promoted to vice admiral in 1981 and retired in the mid-1980s. He subsequently settled in Zheleznodorozhny, Moscow Oblast, where he died on 19 August 1998 due to kidney cancer, which might have been induced by his occupational radiation exposure. Provided by Wikipedia