Soviet submarine B-59

It's October 1962.

In the Atlantic, north of Cuba, just 600 miles from the US, the crew of Soviet submarine B-59 are nearing their limit.

Weeks of cramped conditions, temperatures now exceeding 100 degrees Fahrenheit, dwindling water supplies, and they cannot surface, and Moscow is unreachable.

This Soviet sub is one of four patrolling the waters.

The day that went down in history as Black Saturday.

It all comes to a head.

The captain of the B-59, Valentin Savitsky, has tried everything to shake the Americans.

But nothing has worked.

Which brings us to a moment that everyone needs to know.

The story of the Soviet submarine B-59.

Oh, this is the scariest part of the whole crisis.

It's October 27th.

And suddenly, the submarine is rocked by explosions.

What happened?

A U.S. Navy destroyer group had detected the B-59 and began dropping practice depth charges, essentially underwater grenades, trying to force the submarine to surface for identification.

But the Soviet captain, Valentin Savitsky, didn't know they were practice charges.

A Northern Fleet report describes atrocious conditions aboard since the boats were not built for tropical waters.

According to the archive's 2022 posting, flotilla officers recall that the commander of B-59, Valentin Savitsky, was alarmed and called for an urgent dive and for the nuclear torpedo to be readied.

The same posting says his command was never transmitted to the officer in charge of the torpedo.

In those accounts, Vasily Arkhipov, a senior officer, saw that the Americans were signaling rather than attacking and calmed the commander down.

The archive's documents, as we have read them, do not establish that, and a key account is described as controversial.

The archive says more may emerge.

What is documented: B-59 surfaced that evening, and nothing worse happened.

Afterward, both capitals agreed they needed a faster, plainer way to talk.

The sparks continued to fly, and one of those sparks could easily have ignited history's biggest mound of gunpowder.

The scariest moment for many was about to take place in the Sargasso Sea, where American warships had located a Soviet nuclear submarine, B-59.

Couple of weeks before, on the 1st of October, B-59 and three other Foxtrot-class submarines had slipped out of Kola Bay and into the Barents Sea, uh, in the Arctic.

Nuclear torpedoes were aboard, lying in their cradles, sealed orders resting in their safes.

A couple of weeks later, on that fateful day, Saturday, October the 27th, that B-59 was now quite near the coast of Cuba, and it was caught up in the middle of the American blockade.

The vessel had been submerged for, uh, 18 hours to avoid being spotted.

Oxygen was running low.

He's going to ignore Khrushchev's b- harsh language, bellicose language.

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

showThe 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.

There's a little bit of discrepancy in accounts among the people who were actually there.

Some of them say that dropping four or five loud but non-damaging charges was an official signal, uh, to surface, but others say that they were intentionally dropping these charges to harass the s- the submerged submarines in the hope of basically forcing them up to the surface.

Aboard the B-59, though, the Soviets had no idea what was going on.

They had not gotten new orders from Moscow in more than a week, and they were overheated, dehydrated, and exhausted As battery power failed, life support systems did as well, and the air aboard had less and less oxygen.