Vasili Alexandrovich Arkhipov (30 January 1926 – 19 August 1998) was a Soviet military officer. As second-in-command of a nuclear-armed submarine during the Cuban Missile Crisis, Arkhipov blocked the captain's decision to launch a nuclear torpedo against the US Navy, likely averting a large-scale nuclear war. Reflecting on this incident forty years later, Thomas Blanton, director of the National Security Archive, remarked that "a guy called Vasili Arkhipov saved the world."[1]
In 2017, Arkhipov was posthumously awarded the inaugural Future of Life Award. In presenting the award to Arkhipov's surviving family, Future of Life Institute president Max Tegmark remarked that "Vasili Arkhipov is arguably the most important person in modern history, thanks to whom October 27 2017 isn’t the 55th anniversary of World War III."[2]
One of the rooms in the Future of Humanity Institute is named after Arkhipov.