Soviet officer honoured for averting nuclear war
BRITAIN/RUSSIA: Fifty-five years ago yesterday, at the zenith of the Cuban missile crisis, the US Navy hunted down a nucleararmed Soviet submarine off the coast of Cuba.
As the depth charges fell and the air conditioning crashed, leaving the crew on the brink of carbon dioxide poisoning, there was no word from Moscow. The Soviet vessel went rogue, launching a tenkiloton atomic torpedo at a US aircraft carrier and triggering the volley of ICBMs that ushered in World War III.
Only the last of these events didn’t happen. This was thanks to the sangfroid of one man, the detachment commander Vasili Arkhipov, who countermanded the captain’s order to fire. Arkhipov’s bravery was recognised overnight at a ceremony in London led by some of the world’s leading scientists, who argue that his stand was ‘‘perhaps the single most valuable contribution to human survival in modern history’’.
Arkhipov died in relative obscurity in 1998, aged 72. A US$50,000 (NZ$73,000) prize was to be collected instead by his daughter, Yelena Andriukova, 65, and his grandson, Sergei, 34, at the Institute of Engineering and Technology in London. ‘‘He always thought that he did what he had to do, and never considered his actions heroism,’’ Andriukova said.
Her father will become the first person to be honoured by the Future of Life Institute (FLI), an organisation that funds research into the existential risks facing humanity. Its backers include Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking.
The timing is no accident. With relations curdling between the US and Iran, Russia and North Korea, the threat of nuclear conflict is as great today as it has been since the end of the Cold War, according to Beatrice Fihn, the head of the Nobel peace prize-winning International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons. ‘‘Arkhipov’s story shows how close to nuclear catastrophe we have been in the past. And as the risk of nuclear war is on the rise right now.’’
The FLI is worried about bigger problems than nuclear missiles, though. Its chief concern is the strides computer scientists are taking towards the development of artificial super-intelligence, algorithms that could one day outcompete the human mind.
Max Tegmark, professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and one of the FLI’s founders, said Arkhipov was ‘‘arguably the most important person in modern history’’ and was an example of how individuals of integrity could prevent technology from unleashing devastation on the world. -