The Last Saturday of October: The Declassified Secrets of Black Saturday - Softcover

Gilbert, Douglas

Softcover

ISBN 10: 173216892X ISBN 13: 9781732168923

Publisher: Bibliopole, 2018

Synopsis

How close did we come to nuclear war? Within a word, but most people don't know the story.Based on the true story...Suffering PTSD and radiation poisoning from the K-19 disaster, Vasili Arkhipov rides the B-59 submarine carrying a nuclear torpedo into the Cuban Missile Crisis that thrusts him between Captain Savitsky and apocalyptic disaster. The Last Saturday of October is the real-life hero’s saga of the Russian sailor who saved the US from a nuclear firestorm on the most dangerous day in human history. It bears witness to the little-known B-59 incident in a scorching portrayal of the military standoff on Black Saturday 1962. It is a submarine thriller, delivered with the intensity of Red October and Das Boot, so detailed and gripping that it's hard to remember that the wild tale is true. The declassified story of Vasili Arkhipov, the Soviet naval officer who preempted a nuclear strike on America, is told from the claustrophobic confines of the Soviet submarine, B-59 beneath the sweltering sea. It reconstructs the submarine’s journey from Murmansk to the Cuban Missile Crisis in meticulous detail and recounts known events from inside the hull, shedding new light on accepted historical “truths.” The world watched in horror, never knowing that their only hope for survival was a sailor submerged beneath the Sargasso Sea. Declassified documents, US and Soviet, furnish evidentiary artifacts of the B-59’s voyage and provide the factual foundation for the story that reminds us of our tenuous existence in a nuclear world, and how we nearly lost it.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

In this book, Douglas Gilbert revisits the day that the US, Soviet, and Cuban governments came dangerously close to subjecting the world to death by firestorm. His focus is the existential risk and hope in a nuclear world and the role of sea power in the nuclear standoff of the Cuban Missile Crisis. It is the saga of secrets, submarines, and the Russian naval officer who saved us from ourselves.

About the Author:

Douglas Gilbert spent his engineering career developing submarine detection and tracking algorithms for the US Navy and underwater systems for the off shore oil exploration industry. He currently teaches mathematics at York Technical College and studies topics of historical interest.

About this edition

• Publisher: Bibliopole
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 173216892X
• ISBN 13: 9781732168923
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 325