It is not enough to honour Mahatma Gandhi’s birthday as a hollow formality. Instead, it is far more fruitful to recall a single act of courage and restraint that saved the world — at least in the short term. The story of Vasily Arkhipovwho was not even remotely close to nonviolence activism, is instructive at many levels.
Arkhipov was a Soviet naval officer who is credited with preventing a nuclear war between the US and USSR that could, potentially, have snowballed into a catastrophic World War III.
His story highlights two vital truths. One, that violence and nonviolence are not binary opposites but a spectrum within which most people are in constant motion. Two, that the courage, and clear-sightedness, of a single individual can sometimes make an epochal difference — particularly when that individual is embedded within the state structure.
Arkhipov was commodore of a Soviet flotilla and executive officer of the diesel-powered submarine B-59, which was submerged near Cuba in October 1962. This was the time of the Cuban Missile crisis when both the US and Soviet Union were in a confrontation over the Soviet decision to place nuclear missiles in Cuba.
On October 27th US navy destroyers, having detected the presence of Soviet submarines, began dropping signalling depth charges to force the Soviet subs to surface. By then the Soviet submarines had gone for many days without radio contact with Moscow. Some of the Soviet naval officers interpreted the dropping of depth charges as a signal that war had broken out between the US and USSR.
The captain of B-59 insisted that it was time for them to launch a nuclear torpedo. Fortunately, Soviet naval protocol required that three officers on board that ship had to authorise a nuclear launch. Two of the designated officers were in favour of firing the nuclear weapon. It was Arkhipov, as chief of staff of the brigade, who refused to go along.
Arkhipov, who had a reputation for being courageous, finally persuaded the captain of the submarine to surface and await orders from Moscow. With Washington and Moscow both backing down and the missile crisis ending, B-59 peacefully sailed back to the Soviet Union.
On returning home the officers did face the wrath of their superiors for various procedural issues. To what extent the Soviet system acknowledged Arkhipov’s contribution on that crucial day is not clear. He did rise to become a Vice Admiral and retired honourably in the mid-1980s.
In 2002, the then director of the US National Security Archive called Arkhipov “the man who saved the world” and the title has stuck — even if few outside the realm of academia know about him.
The significance of Arkhipov’s story is not limited to the danger of nuclear weapons. It is acutely relevant in our times when, in many societies, a large number of people display an enthusiasm for answering violence with stronger violence — both in the everyday life of ordinary folks as well as between nations.
It is difficult to say whether this pro-violence sentiment is based on the delusion that “contained” violence is possible or indifference to the human toll of an all-out violent confrontation — be it a communal holocaust within society or war between countries.
This pro-aggression phenomenon persists despite overwhelming evidence that violence inevitably begets more, even worse, violence — usually leaving the original problem unsolved. One key reason for this is that far too many people fear that an outright rejection of violence will make them weak and vulnerable. This happens largely because nonviolence is defined in absolute terms or caricatured as a self-defeating doctrine which asks you to perpetually turn the other cheek.
In its highest form, nonviolence is the power to transform your opponent through love and compassion. But there is a fertile and much inhabited low-lying ground around this “height” of nonviolence.
The story of Arkhipov highlights an important feature of this more accessible terrain. Namely, the power of self-restraint in a person or group with the means for violent first-action or retaliation. The key challenge here is one of perception. If self-restraint is itself seen as a weakness then we are on a slippery slope that goes straight down to abject suffering.
A naysayer might well ask: “…what if I practised self-restraint in the wrong moment, allowing those who wish to harm me to succeed?”
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This is a risk that has to be carefully calibrated. But is this risk really greater than the dark fall-outs of being driven by an aggressive trigger-happy machismo?
There must be countless individuals deep within the innards of formal power, who have faced their own “Arkhipov moment” and chosen self-restraint over machismo. They must be honoured in the annals of our species’ onward journey to higher levels of being.
The writer is an author and founder of the youtube platform Ahimsa Conversations.
