The man who stopped WW3 from ever happening

One levelheaded decision taken by Vasily Alexandrovich Arkhipov about six decades ago may have changed the fate of the world.

Fifty-nine years ago, a senior Russian submarine officer, Vasili Alexandrovich Arkhipov, refused to fire a nuclear torpedo at an American aircraft carrier and likely prevented a third world war and nuclear destruction.

It was an era when the two greatest world powers, the US and Soviet Union, were at the brink of war over the presence of Soviet nuclear-armed missiles in Cuba, just 90 miles off the coast of Florida.

The premier of the Soviet Union at the time, Nikita Khrushchev, while promising to defend Cuba with the USSR’s military, may have miscalculated how severe the US’ reaction would be.

In July 1962, after learning about Soviet Union’s missile shipments to Cuba and the construction of new military facilities there with the help of Soviet technicians, US President John F Kennedy declared a naval blockade of Cuba.

By October 27, 1962, the tension between the two sides had spiked to a point where US warships began dropping explosives on a Soviet submarine B-59 after it was spotted in the Caribbean by the American navy.

The US Navy tried to force the submarine to rise to the surface but they were not aware of the fact that the B-59 was laced with a nuclear-tipped torpedo with roughly the power of the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima.

There were four Soviet submarines carrying the same bomb and the commander of each was empowered to act and use them without getting direct orders from Moscow in case of a threat.

The crew of the B-59 was exhausted after travelling for almost a month. They failed to keep themselves up to date with the latest developments as some technical issues resulted in a lack of communication with Moscow.

With US forces dropping depth charges, the B-59 crew faced a new wave of explosions. It was then that Valentin Savitsky surmised that the nuclear war had already started between his country and the US. He ordered the firing of the B-59’s biggest weapon, the ten kiloton nuclear torpedo to target the giant aircraft carrier, the USS Randolf which was leading the US task force.

However, as per the procedures of the Soviet Army, such an attack would take place with the approval of three senior submarine officers.

It was precisely at this moment that the Soviet officer Vasili Alexandrovich Arkhipov came forward and expressed his disagreement with Savitsky. While explaining his reasoning to Savitsky, Arkhipov argued that the submarine was not in danger, saying the US navy was only trying to figure out the submarine’s identity.

In addition, Arkhipov stressed the fact that they had not taken orders for a long time from Moscow and such a destructive move like firing a nuclear torpedo at the US navy would be ill-advised and insisted on the B-59 to rise to the surface first to make contact with Soviet officials.

Thanks to his warning and prudent advice, the Soviet submarine met the US destroyer on the surface. The US officers neither got onboard nor conducted any inspections. Now, the Russians turned their course from Cuba and headed for Russia.

In the following days, Soviet premier Khrushchev offered the dismantling of the bases his country had built in Cuba in exchange for the promise of Kennedy to lift the blockade and not invade Cuba. Thus, a major crisis was averted, and the fear of nuclear war was replaced by a mild reconciliation.

Arkhipov kept serving in the navy and retired in the mid-1980s after becoming an admiral. He died in 1999 due to health complications caused by radiation that he had been exposed to during his naval career.

Three years after his death, Director of the American Research and Archival Institution, Tom Blanton while commenting on the move of Arkhipov said; “A man called Vasili Arkhipov saved the world.”

Today, many believe that if the B-59’s nuclear torpedo had been launched, the world would have entered a nuclear war that could have devastated humanity.

In 2017, years after his death, Arkhipov was honoured with the “Future of Life Award” by a US-based organisation called Future of Life Institute whose members of the advisory board included prominent figures like Elon Musk and Morgan Freeman.

Source: https://www.trtworld.com/magazine/how-a-russian-soldier-prevented-world-war-iii-59-years-ago-12774934

The answer to the second impossible riddle

@zen1 actually got it right. The answer is no. At the end, it says “Can you guess the riddle?”

And the answer is no because there isn’t anything in the world that can do that.

Another impossible riddle

When Harvard students were asked to answer this, 98 per cent of them got it wrong while 83 per cent of kindergarteners got it right

I turn polar bears white and I will make you cry. I make guys have to pee and girls comb their hair. I make celebrities look stupid and normal people look like celebrities. I turn your pancakes brown, and I make your champagne bubble. If you squeeze me, I’ll pop. If you’ll look at me, you’ll pop. Can you guess the riddle?

The answer to the impossible riddle

The prisoner goes to the box with their number. If their number is there, they get out and let the next person go in. If their number isn’t there, they have to go to the box which has the number on the palate they found. Keep doing this till they find their number.

Ex: Prisoner 1 goes to box 1. He finds paper 8. He goes to box 8. He finds paper 48. He goes to box 48. And so on until his 40 tries are up or when he finds his paper.

There is about a 33% chance of them succeeding.

The Impossible Riddle

100 prisoners are sentenced to death, but they get a chance to survive. Each prisoner goes in a room one by one. There are 100 boxes in the room. The boxes have papers with numbers 1-100. All boxes are labeled with numbers

Ex: box one has the number 1 on it, box 2 has the number 2 on it and so on.

Each prisoner is also assigned a number. The first one has the number 1, the second has 2, the third has 3 and so on.

The goal is to find your own paper in 50 tries. The papers are randomly placed in different boxes.

Ex: Paper 2 might be in box 50, paper 100 might be in box 76

Only one prisoner can go in at a time, and they can’t talk to the other prisoners when they find their number. They can discuss strategies before. What is the best strategy?

We don’t know what dinosaurs looked like

Sure, we have fossils and stuff, but no skin. Most people draw dinosaurs using a technique called paleo art. It’s not really a good technique. Below are some pics of modern day animals drawn using it. Visit the link to find out which animals they are and to see more pics.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/natashaumer/dinosaur-animals

White Holes

White holes are theoretical cosmic regions that function in the opposite way to black holes. Just as nothing can escape a black hole, nothing can enter a white hole.

To a spaceship crew watching from afar, a white hole looks exactly like a black hole. It has mass. It might spin. A ring of dust and gas could gather around the event horizon — the bubble boundary separating the object from the rest of the universe. But if they kept watching, the crew might witness an event impossible for a black hole — a belch. \”It\’s only in the moment when things come out that you can say, \’ah, this is a white hole,\’\” said Carlo Rovelli, a theoretical physicist at the Centre de Physique Théorique in France.

Physicists describe a white hole as a black hole\’s \”time reversal,\” a video of a black hole played backwards, much as a bouncing ball is the time-reversal of a falling ball. While a black hole\’s event horizon is a sphere of no return, a white hole\’s event horizon is a boundary of no admission — space-time\’s most exclusive club. No spacecraft will ever reach the region\’s edge.

Objects inside a white hole can leave and interact with the outside world, but since nothing can get in, the interior is cut off from the universe\’s past: No outside event will ever affect the inside. \”Somehow it\’s more disturbing to have a singularity in the past that can affect everything in the outside world,\” said James Bardeen, a black-hole pioneer and professor emeritus at the University of Washington.

https://www.space.com/white-holes.html#:~:text=White%20holes%20are%20theoretical%20cosmic%20regions%20that%20function%20in%20the,collapsed%20star%20brethren%2C%20black%20holes.