Saturday, September 6, 2014

THE MAN WHO SAVED THE WORLD - RUSSIA, UKRAINE - MY FIRST INSTINCT IS TO STRIKE

 
 
History goes round and round and people hungering for freedom or food or power keep on killing and killing and killing.
 
There was killing and killing, and then there was Hiroshima. And if that wasn't enough, there was Nagasaki, and then there was the Cuban Missile Crisis in October, 1962.
 
If good sense and courage had not stayed the hands of John F. Kennedy and Nikita Kruschev and this one sailor in a Russian submarine out at sea near Cuba, chances are you and I and everyone we know would not be alive today.
 
Following the news on television around the world now, I see the danger, and my first instinct is to strike now! strike fast! - before ...  But then I am glad I do not have to decide. I do not have my finger on that red button. I do not have to kill anyone.
 
And I am so grateful to those in our recent past who did not strike:
 
Phyllis Carter
 
 
The man who saved the world: The Soviet submariner who single-handedly averted WWIII at height of the Cuban Missile Crisis.
 
U.S.S.R. and U.S. stood on brink of nuclear war during Cuban Missile Crisis Four Russian submarines secretly set sail to Cuba, with nuclear weapons Vasili Arkhipov, who died in 1998, used last veto against firing sub's torpedo The Russians instead surrendered and his action avoided World War Three.
 

But to his widow Olga, he was always a hero. She said: 'He knew that it was madness to fire the nuclear torpedo. In Cuba, in honour of the 40th anniversary of the crisis, people gathered.

'They said that the person who prevented a nuclear war was the Russian submariner Vasili Arkhipov. I was proud and I am proud of my husband always.'

 

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