on 27 october 1962, during the cuban missile crisis, a group of eleven united states navy destroyers and the aircraft carrier located the diesel-powered, nuclear-armed near cuba. despite being in international waters, the americans started dropping signaling depth charges, explosives intended to force the submarine to come to the surface for identification. there had been no contact from moscow for a number of days and, although the submarine's crew had earlier been picking up u.s. civilian radio broadcasts, once "b-59" began attempting to hide from its u.s. navy pursuers, it was too deep to monitor any radio traffic. those on board did not know whether war had broken out or not. the captain of the submarine, valentin grigorievitch savitsky, decided that a war might already have started and wanted to launch a nuclear torpedo.