Senior officers in the submarine, out of contact with Moscow and the rest of the world and believing they were under attack and possibly at war, came close to firing a T-5 nuclear torpedo at the US ships.

[5] A radio interception group on B-59 heard Kennedy warn America that there was a possibility of thermonuclear conflict with the Soviet Union.

[5] The need for the utmost secrecy had been emphasised, but B-130 was forced to surface in the Sargasso Sea after all three of its engines broke down,[11] which revealed the presence of the other submarines.

[18] On 27 October, after three days of searching,[19] blockading units of the United States Navy, an aircraft carrier-based search and attack group consisting of the aircraft carrier USS Randolph and destroyers using multi-frequency sonars, Julie sonobouys, towed sono-locators, radio hydroacoustic buoys and "all means available",[20] located B-59 off the coast of Cuba and used grenade explosions as a signal that it should surface.

[26] When B-59 was finally hit with something stronger than depth charges the captain, Valentin Grigoryevich Savitsky, who was by then "totally exhausted",[27] became furiously angry and ordered the officer assigned to the nuclear torpedo to assemble it to battle readiness and load it into its tube.

The other subs would only have required the captain and the political officer to approve the launch, but on B-59 Arkhipov's position as detachment commander meant that he also had to give his consent.

It surfaced amid the US warships that were pursuing it and was immediately subjected to intense harassment with searchlights and what appeared to be mock attacks from planes and helicopters from the Randolph.

[34][35] The submarine made contact with the destroyer USS Cony and after discussions with the ship, B-59 was ordered by the Russian fleet to set course back to the Soviet Union.

[37][38] During the three-day conference, between 11-13 October 2002, which was sponsored by the private National Security Archive, Brown University and the Cuban government,[39] Robert McNamara, Kennedy's Defence Secretary, said that nuclear war had come much closer than anyone had thought.