Homo sapiens have existed on the planet for about 300,000 years, or greater than 109 million days. Probably the most harmful of all these days — the day when our species possible got here nearer than some other to wiping itself off the face of the Earth — got here 60 years in the past at present, on October 27, 1962. And the one who possible did greater than anybody else to forestall that harmful day from turning into an existential disaster was a quiet Soviet naval officer named Vasili Arkhipov.

On that day, Arkhipov was serving aboard the nuclear-armed Soviet submarine B-59 in worldwide waters close to Cuba. It was the peak of the Cuban missile disaster, which started earlier that month when a US U-2 spy airplane noticed proof of newly constructed installations on Cuba, the place it turned out that Soviet army advisers have been serving to to construct websites able to launching nuclear missiles on the US, lower than 100 miles away.

That led to the Chilly Struggle’s most risky confrontation between the US and the Soviet Union — 13 days of high-stakes brinkmanship between two nuclear powers that appeared one misstep away from complete warfare.

President John F. Kennedy had ordered what he referred to as a “quarantine” of Cuba, stationing a flotilla of naval ships off the coast of the island to forestall Soviet ships from carrying weapons to Cuba and demanding that the USSR take away the missiles. On October 27, the Russian sub B-59, which had been working submerged for days, was cornered by 11 US destroyers and the plane provider USS Randolph. The US ships started dropping depth prices across the sub.

The intention wasn’t to destroy it however to pressure it to floor, as US officers had already knowledgeable Moscow. However unknown to Washington, the officers aboard B-59 have been out of contact with their superiors and had each motive to imagine that their American counterparts have been making an attempt to sink them.

“We thought, ‘That’s it, the top,’” crew member Vadim Orlov recalled to Nationwide Geographic in 2016. “It felt such as you have been sitting in a steel barrel, which someone is continually blasting with a sledgehammer.”

Bettmann Archive through Getty Photographs

The tip on this case meant not simply the destiny of the submarine and its crew, however doubtlessly your entire world. Reduce off from outdoors contact, buffeted by depth prices, its air-con damaged, and temperatures and carbon dioxide ranges rising within the sub, the obvious conclusion for the officers of B-59 was that international warfare had already begun. However the sub had a weapon at its disposal that US officers didn’t learn about: a 10-kiloton nuclear torpedo. And its officers had permission from their superiors to launch it with out affirmation from Moscow.

Two of the sub’s senior officers wished to launch the nuclear torpedo. That included its captain, Valentin Savitsky, who in keeping with a report from the US Nationwide Safety Archive, exclaimed: “We’re gonna blast them now! We’ll die, however we are going to sink all of them — we won’t turn out to be the disgrace of the fleet.”

Fortunately, the captain didn’t have sole discretion over the launch. All three senior officers needed to agree, and Vasili Arkhipov, the 36-year-old second captain and brigade chief of employees, refused to provide his assent. He satisfied the sub’s high officers that the depth prices have been certainly meant to sign B-59 to floor — there was no different approach for the US ships to speak with the Soviet sub — and that launching the nuclear torpedo can be a deadly mistake. The sub returned to the floor, headed away from Cuba, and steamed again towards the Soviet Union.

Arkhipov’s cool-headed heroics didn’t mark the top of the Cuban missile disaster. The identical day, US U-2 pilot Maj. Rudolf Anderson was shot down whereas on a reconnaissance mission over Cuba. Anderson was the primary and solely casualty of the disaster, an occasion that would have led to warfare had President Kennedy not concluded that the order to fireplace had not been given by Soviet Premier Nikolai Khrushchev.

That shut name sobered each leaders, main them to open back-channel negotiations that finally led to a withdrawal of Soviet missiles in Cuba, a later pullback of US missiles in Turkey in response, and the top of the closest the world has but come to complete nuclear warfare.

In a scenario as complicated and pressured because the Cuban missile disaster, when either side have been working with restricted data, a ticking clock, and tens of hundreds of nuclear warheads (most, it must be famous, possessed by the US), no single act was actually definitive for warfare or peace. However Arkhipov’s actions nonetheless deserve particular reward. Trapped in a diesel-powered submarine hundreds of miles from house, buffeted by exploding depth prices and threatened with suffocation and demise, Arkhipov saved his head. Had he assented to the choice to fireplace a nuclear torpedo, possible vaporizing a US plane provider and killing hundreds of sailors, it might have been far tougher for Kennedy and Khrushchev to step again from the brink. And probably the most harmful day in human historical past might properly have been one in all our final.

For his braveness, Arkhipov was the primary particular person to be given the Way forward for Life award by the Cambridge-based existential danger nonprofit the Way forward for Life Institute (FLI), in 2017. It was posthumous — Arkhipov died in 1998, earlier than the information of his actions was broadly identified. However he might be, as FLI president Max Tegmark stated on the award ceremony, “arguably a very powerful particular person in trendy historical past.”

No nuclear weapon has been utilized in warfare because the atomic bombing of Nagasaki on August 9, 1945. However as tensions between the US and Russia solely develop over the warfare in Ukraine, and as Russian President Vladimir Putin makes veiled threats about wielding his nation’s nuclear arsenal, we must always keep in mind the terrible energy of those world-ending weapons. And we must always have a good time these, like Vasili Arkhipov, who in moments of existential determination, select life slightly than extinction.