A posthumous honor

last updated 8 January 2015

Moscow

The Soviet sub captain portrayed by Harrison Ford in the movie K-19: The Widowmaker has been posthumously nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. In 1961, with Cold War tensions high, Capt. Nikolai Zateev was commanding the K-19, the Soviet Union’s first nuclear submarine, off the coast of Norway. He averted a catastrophic nuclear accident by ordering his crew not to abandon ship after a coolant leak, and instead to fix it. Eight crew members later died of radiation poisoning, but the action prevented a nuclear explosion that could have been interpreted as a Soviet strike and caused nuclear war. Zateev’s deed was covered up by embarrassed Soviet authorities and only became known in 1990 under Mikhail Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost, or openness. Gorbachev, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990, nominated Zateev.