Nikolai Konstantinovich Beloborodov

Николай Константинович Белобородов

1910–2003 ○ natural causes

First deputy chief of the 12th GUMO who commanded Soviet nuclear warheads in Cuba and, three decades later, wrote the definitive report

"During my many years of military service, the most dangerous and stressful periods were the years of the Great Patriotic War, and the months of the Cuban missile crisis in 1962."

Nikolai Beloborodov graduated from the Zhukovsky Air Force Engineering Academy in 1941, served as a technical officer in aviation units, and fought in the Great Patriotic War. From 1958 he commanded a central nuclear weapons storage base of the 12th GUMO, and in 1962 during Operation Anadyr he led the nuclear-technical support group, personally delivering nuclear warheads aboard the ship Indigirka to the port of Mariel, Cuba. Over 59 days on the island he maintained combat readiness of all warheads and supervised their withdrawal; after retirement, in the 1990s he produced a detailed report based on contemporaneous documents that revealed the true scale of the crisis for the first time. As first deputy chief of the 12th GUMO from 1966 to 1983 he was a pillar of the Soviet nuclear weapons management system, and he received the USSR State Prize.