SYMHC Classics: Nuclear Close Calls

Stuff You Missed in History Class

This episode explores three harrowing historical moments when the world narrowly avoided a full-scale nuclear catastrophe. It details the standoff

Key takeaways

• Vasily Arkhipov prevented a nuclear torpedo launch from the B-59 submarine by refusing authorization during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
• In 1983, Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov correctly identified a satellite warning of five incoming US missiles as a false alarm caused by sunlight reflecting off clouds.

Main topics

• Cuban Missile Crisis
• Soviet Submarine B-59

Notable quotes

we will die, but we will sink them all. We will not disgrace our Navy.

Conclusion

The episode serves as a sobering reminder of the fragility of global p

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human. Happy Saturday. Today, at least on the day this episode is publishing, is the anniversary of a nuclear close call that happened in 1983 when an early warning system falsely showed five U.S. missiles headed toward the Soviet Union. We talked about this in our episode on nuclear close calls, which is today's Saturday classic. It originally came out on April 10th, 2017. September Speaker 2 (0:32) 26th is also now observed as the International Day for the Total Elimination of Nuclear Weapons, which was established by the United Nations in 2013. This episode's a little stressful, but enjoy. Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Speaker 1 (1:00) and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy B. Wilson. And I'm Holly Frey. Not long ago, I went to the Maritime Museum in San Diego, California, which if you like boats and ships and maritime history, it's worth a stop. It's also right down the road from the USS Midway Museum. So if you would like some military history and some maritime history all together, like you can just spend a whole day out there. Don't do what I did and lose your camera, though. If anyone saw my camera in San Diego, let me know. Speaker 2 (1:31) Yeah, I think I have the last known photo from that camera because you texted it to me from the museum. Speaker 1 (1:36) Oh, I took that from my iPhone. Fortunately, I didn't lose my phone. I only lost my point-and-shoot camera. Anyway, the actual point is, among the many seafaring vessels at the Maritime Museum is this Soviet Foxtrot-class submarine, which... is home to an exhibit about a really harrowing incident I had never heard about before. It was one of the surprisingly many moments in history when the world came perilously close to a full-scale nuclear war. And I did not actually know there were that many, that surprisingly many incidents until I started looking into it for this episode today. So today we are just going to look at three of them, including the one I learned about in San Diego, which inspired today's show. Speaker 2 (2:22) The incident aboard Soviet submarine B-59 is tangled up with the Cuban Missile Crisis and the nuclear arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union. With the help of its allies, the United States developed the first nuclear weapons through the Manhattan Project. Among the weapons the Manhattan Project produced were the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan in 1945. Speaker 1 (2:47) Not long after World War II, the Soviet Union successfully detonated its own nuclear bomb, and soon the United States and the Soviet Union were locked in a Cold War and a nuclear arms race. Both nations were simultaneously building more nuclear weapons and developing more powerful weapons that were able to travel greater distances and deliver bigger payloads. The Speaker 2 (3:09) Cuban Missile Crisis grew out of this Cold War and arms race. In July of 1962, the Soviet Union reached an agreement with Cuba to install several missiles there. The negotiation and the transportation of missiles to Cuba were conducted in secret, but the U.S. learned about it through aerial surveillance photography on October 14, 1962. Those photographs were delivered to the White House the next day. Speaker 1 (3:35) At this point, the United States nuclear arsenal was far, far bigger and more powerful than the Soviet Union's. And the United States also already had missiles stationed in Turkey, in easy reach of Soviet territory. But with the placement of missiles in Cuba for the first time, the Soviet Union also had missiles in easy reach of American territory. Even though the Soviets insisted that the missiles were only in Cuba as a defensive measure, this was a move that was both intended and interpreted as a threat. Speaker 2 (4:07) For a few days, news of the missile installation was also kept secret from the general public. But on October 22nd, President John F. Kennedy gave a televised address, giving Americans a detailed description of the missile sites being built. He called Soviets' placement of missiles in Cuba a, quote, clandestine, reckless, and provocative threat. And he announced a naval quarantine around Cuba to prohibit the delivery of any further materials or weapons. Speaker 1 (4:35) This quarantine really goes in air quotes. It was a blockade. But calling it a blockade would have presumed a state of war. So they chose the word quarantine to be nicer about it. Kennedy also wrote to Nikita Khrushchev, the first secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, basically the leader of the Soviet Union, to say that the United States would not tolerate the presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba. He also spelled out that any nuclear attack on any nation launched from Cuba would be viewed as a Soviet attack on the United States and the United States would retaliate in kind. Khrushchev, for his part, insisted that these missiles were just being placed there to defend Cuba from attack. For the Speaker 2 (5:22) whole of the 13 days of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the United States and the Soviet Union were in an incredibly tense stalemate, with the U.S. demanding that the Soviet Union remove the missiles, and the Soviet Union both refusing and continuing construction on the missile sites. And on October 27, things were particularly bad. The U.S. had been at DEFCON 2 with the armed forces ready to launch an all-out nuclear war for three days. And then that day, an American U-2 spy plane was shot down by a Russian missile over Cuba and its pilot, Major Rudolph Anderson, was killed. Speaker 1 (6:00) So the prevailing description of the Cuban Missile Crisis is that for this entire time, the world was on the brink of a nuclear war. But there was also this other element of it going on that wasn't known about until much later. There were four Soviet submarines, each of them with a nuclear-tipped torpedo among their armaments, and they were en route to Cuba as part of a submarine force that was going to be stationed there. These were all Foxtrot-class