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60 years since the Cuban Missile Crisis
How cool heads prevented a Soviet-US naval encounter sparking a nuclear war
http://www.rt.com/news/564393-dangerously-close-to-nuclear-destruction/
Publisher: RT
Date Written: 12/10/2022
Year Published: 2022
Resource Type: Article
This October marks the 60th anniversary of the 'underwater' component of the Cuban Missile Crisis. It was an extraordinary episode that precipitated the infamous standoff between Moscow and Washington weeks later, and likewise brought the world to the brink of nuclear destruction. With frenzied Western accusations abounding that the Kremlin is preparing to use atomic weapons in the Ukraine conflict, and spirited denials emanating from the opposite direction, it’s never been more important to revisit the incide
Abstract:
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Excerpt:
On October 1, 1962, four Soviet submarines, each equipped with nuclear-armed torpedoes, departed Kola Bay in the Barents Sea en route to Cuba. The mini-fleet was intended to secretly bolster a vast Soviet military presence on and around the island and protect the construction of defensive missile sites requested by Havana in the wake of the CIA’s disastrous Bay of Pigs operation, in which Washington-backed rebel forces attempted to storm Havana and overthrow the popular Communist government of Fidel Castro.
According to the private account of Vasily Arkhipov, the vice-admiral of submarine B-59, now published for the first time in commemoration of the event by the US National Security Archive, the weather during the transit was “generally conducive to keeping secrecy” over the long journey – “stormy weather, low clouds, low visibility, snow squalls, rain.”
Along the way, they detected “an elevated level of activity of anti-submarine aircraft radiolocation stations working in a short-interval regime,” but the covert convoy went unnoticed until October 18, when Soviet intelligence “intercepted a message from a French radio station informing some correspondents that Soviet submarines [had] entered the Atlantic and were now traveling to the American shores.”
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