UnNews:Two words that saved the world: 'Dude, no.'
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This article is part of UnNews, your source for up-to-the-picosecond misinformation. |
28 October 2012
MOSCOW, Russia -- Fifty years and one day after the day a possible nuclear war was averted, translators from UnNews were able to decipher the exact words that were responsible for the entire UnNews staff's parents, and by extension the UnNews staff itself, even being born.
"Dude, no" were the words spoken by Russian fleet commander Vasili Arkhipov during the Cuban Missile Crisis, a period of heavy tension and paranoia instigated by the Russians attempting to deliver missiles to Cuba. The U.S. had set up a blockade, and U.S. aircrafts were scouring the ocean looking for "commie" submarines trying to sneak past the blockade - because everything "commie" was bad in those days, including Sub B59, a Russian Sub armed with "special weapons". Little did most of the crew know that "special weapon" was actually a euphemism for "apocalypse-initiating nuclear torpedo".
Needless to say, the submarine, like pretty much all the others in the fleet, was eventually spotted, and took an emergency dive. The crew lost contact with Moscow almost immediately after being spotted, and had little contact with the outside world during the week they stayed below the surface.
The crew lived in terrible conditions, being forced to ration themselves to just one glass of water a day. To make matters worse, the anti-communist pop music they picked up on the radio was more offensive than amusing, much to the disappointment of the crew, who had always thought American pop culture was one of the dumbest phenomena ever created by man.
Things came to a boiling point on October 27, 1962, when U.S. forces dropped practice deep charges into the water to "scare" the submarine into coming out. The captain, Valentin Savitsky, thought that a nuclear war had already begun and they were going to die. He proposed that they fire the torpedo as "it would be a shame for such an awesome weapon to go to waste." In their excitement to see the "special weapon" at work, all the officers joined in to accept his proposal. All, except Arkhipov who exercised his veto power as Commander of the Fleet, saying the two words that changed the captain's mind: "Чувак, не." Translation: "Dude, no." He then suggested that maybe nuclear war hadn't started after all, causing the crew to look at things from a very different paradigm.
The submarine eventually surfaced and surrendered, and the crew returned home to jeers of "гнойный", "трус" and "Империалистическая Американская свинья". But little did they know that this one act of cowardice had saved mankind as we know it, and allowed that awesome film X-Men: First Class to be produced last year.
Sources[edit | edit source]
- Leon Watson, Mark Duell "Soviet submariner who single-handedly averted WWIII at height of the Cuban Missile Crisis" Mail Online, September 25, 2012