The centerpiece · Cuban Missile Crisis

27 October 1962

On the most dangerous day of the Cuban Missile Crisis, USS Cony was one of the destroyers in the antisubmarine hunter-killer group built around the carrier USS Randolph (CVS-15), holding the quarantine line in the western Atlantic. That evening her deck log recorded a single line about a Soviet submarine the world would only learn to fear forty years later.

For background, see Cony's earlier antisubmarine service.

The contact

The Soviet Foxtrot-class submarine B-59 had been submerged for days — out of contact with Moscow, her batteries nearly exhausted, her air fouling in the heat. On 27 October at about five o'clock in the afternoon, Cony detected a sonar contact. It was B-59. Which ship first found her is unsettled in the record: the published B-59 literature credits Cony with the detection, while Beale's own log credits a third destroyer, Murray, with classifying the contact — and patrol aircraft had held contacts earlier still. The logs of both ships record what each did next.

The American protocol for an unidentified submarine was a signaling challenge: small practice charges meant to order the submarine to surface — "hand grenades" in the language both ships' logs used. USS Beale's log records its own five-grenade challenge at 4:59 PM. Cony's log records hers at 5:29 PM:

"Challenged submarine contact by dropping five (5) hand grenades"

USS Cony deck log · 5:29 PM, 27 October 1962 · published by the National Security Archive

Gary Slaughter, then a young communications officer aboard Cony, recalled in a public anniversary account that the ship also used her underwater communication gear: "In addition to dropping the five practice depth charges, using underwater communication equipment, Cony transmitted the International Code signal 'I D K C A' meaning 'Rise to the Surface.'"

8:52 PM

B-59 surfaced at 8:52 PM — just under four hours after Cony's challenge — among the American destroyers. She had not heard from Moscow in days. Her crew did not know whether the war they feared had already begun.

The next morning, B-59's signalmen asked Cony for bread and cigarettes. Cony closed to about eighty feet alongside, and her boatswain's mates fired a shot line to the submarine's sail to pass supplies across. It is the smallest, most human detail in the whole account: two crews who had spent the night in a submarine hunt, passing bread in the morning.

What was aboard — the account that surfaced in 2002

What Cony's crew did not know — what her deck log cannot record — is what B-59 carried: a nuclear-armed torpedo. The documented account that emerged after 2002 holds that her captain, Valentin Savitsky, believing war might already have begun, moved to ready it; that launching required agreement he did not fully have; and that flotilla commander Vasili Arkhipov, embarked in B-59, withheld the consent the launch required. The submarine surfaced instead.

This is the mainstream account now, drawn from participant testimony and scholarship published from 2002 onward — Peter Huchthausen's October Fury, the National Security Archive's "Submarines of October" project, and Serhii Plokhy's Nuclear Folly. Individual elements — exactly how close the launch decision came — are still debated by historians. This page prints it as the documented post-2002 account, not as a fact of Cony's deck log. On this site, those are two different kinds of truth, and they are labeled differently.

"Until the 2002 publication of Peter Huchthausen's October Fury, none of us aboard Cony was aware that B-59 was armed with a nuclear-tipped torpedo." Gary Slaughter, USS Cony communications officer — Nashville PBS, 50th anniversary, 2012

A crewman's plain account

Slaughter's telling is valuable for what it refuses to dress up. Asked whether he felt empathy for the Soviet submariners at the time, he answered as the officer he had been:

"As a professional anti-submarine warfare (ASW) specialist, I was trained to hunt and, if necessary, to kill Soviet submarines. We proudly created the 'plight' that the B-59 officers and crew were forced to endure. That was our job." Gary Slaughter — Nashville PBS, 2012

He also kept, for forty years, the discipline the moment asked of him: he told no one — including his wife and family — about the incident until the story became public. When the documentaries came on the fiftieth anniversary, he told it plainly.

Documented sequence and both deck-log entries: Burr & Blanton, "The Submarines of October" (National Security Archive), which publishes Cony's 5:29 PM challenge and B-59's 8:52 PM surfacing; Beale's 4:59 PM challenge is in the same publication. Detection credit: unsettled — the B-59 literature gives Cony; Beale's log credits Murray with classifying the contact; patrol aircraft held earlier contacts; and Cony's own 26 October contact is "possibly C-19" in the NSA chronology. Printed as the documented variance, not resolved. Bread, cigarettes, the eighty-foot pass and the shot line: Huchthausen, October Fury (2002), as carried in the packet. Nuclear torpedo, Savitsky and Arkhipov: the post-2002 documented account (Huchthausen; the National Security Archive project; Plokhy, Nuclear Folly, via CSIS 2022). Crew voice: Gary Slaughter's interview with Nashville PBS (WNPT), 17 October 2012 — quoted verbatim; a typo in that source's narration calls the ship "DD-608"; Cony is DD-508. One timing note for the record: Slaughter's retelling says "nearly five hours" of interrogation; the deck logs bracket the encounter from the 5:29 PM challenge to the 8:52 PM surfacing, and this page prints the log times.