Jonah-Play-b12 — Arkhipov and the Steel Fish#
A modern Jonah Play, for Arkhipov Day (27 October) or any other. This amateur play designed for the Jonah Carnival stages the most dangerous day of the Cuban Missile Crisis aboard the Soviet submarine B-59, as the crew’s own accounts record it (with a bit of artistic license to make it work as a play). Then it asks the audience an existential question. It runs an estimated fifteen minutes or more (the spoken lines alone take about eight), needs at least four people, two bedsheets, a few flashlights to act as search-light beams, one mask (to mark actions of the abstract ASON) and one or more real dice. The play ends however the room and the dice decide. This is a ready-to-play mockup model for a play you can perform as it is written. You are also most welcome to rewrite and improve in any way you see fit. Its ancient sister play is Jonah-Play-b11 — Forty Days, Overturned. If either of these inspires you to write a completely new play for the Jonah Carnival, then all the better.
The gist
A submarine carrying a nuclear torpedo is a steel fish with global teeth. This one, in the Cuban Missile Crisis, came under what sounded like an attack. For days nobody inside has heard from headquarters in Moscow. The air is running out, the US ships above are dropping signal charges that sound like bombs, still nothing from Moscow. This same nothing fits “no war yet” and “WW3 killed Moscow”. The furious captain orders the nuclear torpedo readied. Vasili Arkhipov speaks up, explaining his case for peace in gentle kind reasonable terms. The captain understands and decides to surface instead. Yet, upon surfacing powerful US searchlights blind the captain. He gets furious again and orders an urgent dive with the nuclear torpedo tube ready for firing. Yet quick-thinking Arkhipov sees an American ship calling them by lamp, and cancels the deadly dive in the last moment. The worst enemy, ASON, the Ambiguous Semantics Of Nothing, almost would have killed the world back then. But ASON was defeated as Arkhipov pinned it down to a specific life-giving Semantics Organizing Nothing, which averted a global disaster. Yet, most people think “nothing happened” and move on, because they fail to understand how the universal superpower of nothing can change everything. So, over sixty years later, the dice of nuclear roulette still keep rolling, because everyone thinks that nothing is wrong with them. So nothing moves and nuclear roulette continues — until it destroys humanity for nothing. In this play, like in real life, the audience decides who they want to win: (0) the knowledge-faking idea that claims “it’s not my job to say something”, leading to death by default; or (1) the life-giving decision to stand up for life by pinning down the deadly ambiguity in nothing.
Before you start#
Cast of roles. VASILI ARKHIPOV, the brigade’s chief of staff, aboard the B-59 Soviet Diesel submarine, armed with a nuclear torpedo, but not actually in command of this sub · THE CAPTAIN of the B-59 (Valentin Savitsky) · THE RADIO OFFICER, who will remember it all forty years later and tell it (he is also the narrator) · THE POLITICAL OFFICER (who says nothing: no source records what he said) · THE SIGNALMAN · THE CREW (everyone else, the CHORUS) · THE US SHIPS ABOVE (two or three people with torches) · THE MACHINE (a voice, or a box with a torch in it; it has the die) · and ASON, a mask worn by whoever is nearest to deadly ambiguity in missing data. ASON is Hebrew for disaster, and on this site also stands for the Ambiguous Semantics Of Nothing (more details in ASON).
Props. A not-so-white sheet (grey or other colors for the surface of the sea, later the soot) and a white bed-sheet (for the blanket of nuclear winter). Flashlight torches for the searchlights; ideally one torch can blink to serve as the ship’s signal lamp. A mask for ASON. One real six-sided die; it is never loaded and never swapped. Pillows, if you play the fall of this global Nineveh by firing of nuclear (pillow) missiles.
For whoever organizes the performance.
Nobody here is a villain (Rule 2): not the Russian captain, who is exhausted and loyal; not the US ships above, whose charges were meant as signals; not Moscow, which simply could not be heard. Nor the US Navy, which was trying to prevent a nuclear war. The only real enemy is ASON, and the play should let the audience feel how close every one of them came to wearing it in the worst possible moment.
What is sourced, and what is not. The events, the orders and the quoted lines come from the crew’s own accounts, as set out in the Matheo-b16 paper forecasting waiting times until accidental nuclear winter (its Appendix SIA-X7), with uncertainties about the reconstruction listed there. What Arkhipov said below the surface is not recorded. His lines in Scene 1 are a potential reconstruction, made with artistic license, and so is all dialogue not marked as quoted. The quotation policy: a line of dialogue in “quotation marks” gives words that the crew’s own accounts record, in the closest translation; the fine print below the scene names the source. Everything without quotation marks is a potential reconstruction or a paraphrase, including who says a quoted line where the source does not name the speaker. Quoted words are never roughened or polished beyond the source. Say so, if anyone asks. Yet also note that the overall frame of what happened is as robust as such reconstructions can be and that what matters most here is that some form of the logic expressed here was used. Which parts of it were said out loud at the time in which words is much less important than the fact that the load-bearing core elements of this logic were present to pin down the monster in the Ambiguous Semantics Of Nothing at the time. This core logic is what this play is aiming to get across. Because it still matters today.
How to stage ASON. ASON is a mask, not a character. The CAPTAIN wears it when the fury takes him, and a SHIP ABOVE when a signal looks like an attack. The RADIO OFFICER picks it up whenever Moscow says nothing. It must change wearers at least three times, and at the end it lies on the floor with nobody in it. More ways to show it: ASON.
The racket. Whenever anyone says some version of “and nobody said anything” (e.g., “and Moscow said nothing”, or some other form of ASON), someone puts on the mask of ASON and the room makes as much noise as it can.
Dialling the language. This play is about the greatest disaster this world can currently produce in short order, and there is a real tension in how to speak about it. On one side, the cleanest-sounding words in the script are the most obscene: “Ready the special weapon” is a polite phrase for a torpedo with roughly the yield of Hiroshima. Clean language can hide murder. On the other side, men under depth charges at the edge of suffocation do not talk like a parish newsletter, and a play that pretends they do stops sounding true. One old school dictionary explained the English f-word as the word people reach for when a situation is far beyond “irritating”; accidental nuclear winter is the clinical term for exactly such a situation. So the play has a dial, and the organizer sets it for their room:
Clean (church halls, schools, families): no profanity at all. The masked lines keep their anger in the tone, not in the words.
Light (the script as written): a few rough words, and only from whoever is wearing the mask of ASON.
Rough (adult rooms): the masked lines may say it as it is, as hard as sailors or pilots at the end of their tether would. “Fucking” is not out of place for the biggest fuckup this world can produce.
Whatever the setting, the rough words stay with the mask. Whoever wears ASON curses and dehumanizes; when the mask comes off, the language clears. The audience learns, without a lecture, that dehumanizing talk is ASON’s voice, and that the polished euphemism is its most dangerous form. Quoted lines are never roughened beyond what the source says.
The rules. Keep the seven rules of Jonah Plays. Above all, no sound in the room may resemble a real alert. Knocking on the floor is fine for the charges; sirens are not. Tell the room before you begin that tonight’s play simulates a possible end of the world, but that simulation in itself is harmless and does not use sounds or effects that would be used in any real-world disaster scenarios. This is a play about the fire that may well burn down the world, but it is implemented in this crowded room without anyone ever shouting fire! Maintaining clarity in signalling is imperative for overcoming the current communications disaster. Hence, creating a Jonah Play that confuses these types of signalling is not OK and will not be rewarded with positive mentions on this website.
Scene 1 — Three days in the steel fish#
27 October 1962, afternoon. Deep under the sea near Cuba.
The CREW crowd together under the grey sheet, held low: it is hot, the air is foul, and there is no room. The SHIPS ABOVE walk around the sheet and knock on the floor.
A loud knock on the floor. Everyone flinches.
CREW 3 sways and faints. The others prop him up; there is nowhere to lie down.
RACKET. The RADIO OFFICER puts on the mask of ASON.
Three knocks, close together. The CAPTAIN takes the mask and puts it on.
The CREW freeze. Nobody moves towards the torpedo, and nobody says anything either.
In the silence the CREW begin to sing, very quietly, without moving their lips much, as if the mask on the CAPTAIN’s face were singing through them:
The captain’s line is quoted as the radio officer remembered it, translated as closely as possible: “Может, наверху уже война началась, а мы тут кувыркаемся… Мы сейчас по ним шарахнем!” The slang шарахнем is rough but not obscene (“whack them”), so do not roughen it further. The order to ready the torpedo is paraphrased; note that its politest word, “special”, is the most obscene in the scene. Play him as a loyal, exhausted man, not as a madman. Beat: this is the moment of courage in the play. Arkhipov is not in command. Stage it so that speaking up costs him something: he stands in the cramped space, and he speaks calmly, which takes more nerve than shouting.
The CAPTAIN, masked, turns slowly to face each of them in turn, and the CREW sing the riddle to him, louder now:
ARKHIPOV stands up.
The mask slips on the CAPTAIN’s face. The singing stops.
A long silence. The POLITICAL OFFICER looks from one to the other, and says nothing. CAPTAIN takes off the mask of ASON and drops it.
The CREW raise the grey sheet up and over their heads: they are surfacing.
Arkhipov’s lines are a potential reconstruction: what he said is not recorded. One witness credits him with the crucial role in talking the captain out of “any rash actions”. Replace his words with your own, but keep the reasoning: the same silence fits two worlds, so weigh the cost of being wrong.
Why Rumpelstiltskin. The three rhymes follow the Brothers Grimm’s Rumpelstilzchen, and the parallel is structural. The little man spins straw into gold for a price nobody grasps until it is too late; ASON spins nothing into a reason to fire (the citysticians of play b11 spin gold from nothing, too). His power lasts only as long as his name stays unknown, and he sings his secret gleefully where he thinks no one is listening; the queen’s messenger overhears him, as Arkhipov somehow overhears ASON by realizing the ambiguity of nothing. Once the queen says his name, Rumpelstiltskin’s power is gone. ASON’s power, too, lasts only as long as the nothing stays unnamed: once somebody says precisely what the silence is (a nothing that fits two worlds and therefore proves neither), it loses its grip. The queen gets three rounds of guessing; the rhyme comes three times here, and the third time it is answered. As a nod to the German original, and to this play’s German roots, the crew may add/replace the Grimms’ own two lines, with ASON in Rumpelstiltskin’s place:
Two recent screen stories play with the same power of names. In Once Upon a Time (ABC, 2011–2018, was on Netflix for a while), fairy-tale figures mixed together, Rumpelstiltskin at their centre, bargain over true names, and learn again and again that “all magic comes with a price”. The magic of using MAD Mutually Assured Destruction to guard a surprisingly long period of relative global peace comes at the horrific price of inviting a global nuclear crocodile into our world that is every bit as much an ambush-predator as biological crocodiles. In The School for Good and Evil (Netflix, 2022, after Soman Chainani’s novels), the labels “good” and “evil” are handed out by appearances, and it is exactly this confident naming that hides the disaster in the making. This film plays with “good defends” vs “evil attacks” stereotypes in interesting ways that are relevant to nuclear defense discussions.
Scene 2 — The surface at night#
The same day, at night. The submarine surfaces in the dark, surrounded.
The grey sheet is now the sea, held at waist height. ARKHIPOV, the CAPTAIN and the SIGNALMAN (who carries a torch of his own) climb onto the bridge. The SHIPS ABOVE switch on their torches, all together, full in their faces. Aircraft pass; torch beams sweep across the bow, like tracer fire, in silence.
A SHIP ABOVE picks up the mask of ASON and puts it on.
The CAPTAIN turns for the hatch. The SIGNALMAN goes first, and gets stuck in the hatch with his searchlight.
In that moment one torch among the SHIPS ABOVE starts to blink, slowly, in a pattern. ARKHIPOV sees it.
The dive is cancelled. The SHIP ABOVE takes off the mask of ASON.
A pause. Then, one by one, the torch beams stop sweeping. The torches stay on, but still. Silence. Nothing is being pinned down for this context as no more aggression happens. The firing stops. The aircraft leave. There is no war, this time. The height of the Cuban Missile Crisis was over as later analyses would show. The ambiguous semantics of nothing was defused for this frame of action. The MAD Crisis at hand was averted and the world returned to its former Risky state.
But as nothing continues to happen, ASON continues to play nuclear roulette with everyone.
The signalman stuck in the hatch with his searchlight is a true detail, and may be played as funny: the fate of the world, delayed by a man stuck in a hole with a lamp. “Belay” is the naval command for “cancel that order” (in Russian отставить, “as you were”): Arkhipov did not delay the dive, he called it off. The captain’s order to dive, with tubes one and two ready to fire, is quoted from the memoir of Mikhailov, an officer aboard. “Belay the dive” is quoted: “The chief of staff, Captain 2nd Rank Arkhipov, gave the command: belay the dive.” The lamp exchange (“Whose ship?” — “The ship belongs to the USSR. Stop the provocation!” — “Not understood.”) is quoted from the same officer’s memoir (Leonenko); after it, he writes, the firing and the flights stopped. He writes “we answered”; that the signalman sends it is this play’s choice.
Scene 3 — The dice keep rolling#
Today’s half. Play it completely straight. No jokes at all.
The mask of ASON lies on the floor. THE MACHINE has the die.
RACKET. Someone in the chorus puts on the mask.
RACKET. Someone in the chorus puts on the mask.
RACKET. Someone in the chorus puts on the mask.
RACKET. Someone in the chorus puts on the mask.
RACKET. Someone in the chorus puts on the mask.
RACKET. Someone in the chorus puts on the mask.
RACKET. Someone in the chorus puts on the mask.
RACKET. Someone in the chorus puts on the mask.
RACKET. Someone in the chorus puts on the mask.
The incidents are the near-misses the forecast paper itself counts, told in one line each; the full record is in the paper and its sources. In November 1983 the American who declined to escalate was Lieutenant General Leonard Perroots. From 2022 on, the list gives the signals that the danger has been rising: the war in Ukraine; the Doomsday Clock of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (90 seconds in 2023, 89 in 2025, 85 on 27 January 2026, the closest ever); Annie Jacobsen’s Nuclear War: A Scenario (2024); Russia’s revised nuclear doctrine (19 November 2024); the expiry of New START on 5 February 2026; and the American president’s post on 7 April 2026, aimed at Iran. The words in quotation marks are his, as published. Add your own country’s incidents, or cut some, but keep the rolling going long enough that the room grows bored. Boredom is the point: the audience is watching the shape of the risk, a low chance, taken again and again, by nobody, on behalf of everybody. Every “nothing happens” is ASON, the Ambiguous Semantics Of Nothing: the same nothing fits a safe world and a doomed one.
Scene 4 — Who do you want to win?#
The audience decides how the nothing in ASON will be rigged:
Death by default by doing nothing because nothing goes wrong when nothing is wrong and nothing can move.
Rigging the game by choosing life through deliberately life-giving decision-making.
If you want the crocodile of nothing to win, all you need to do is nothing. Then stay in your seat, don’t lift a finger, and tell your self that you can always deal with this “later”. Or that God will save the world without you. Or that the world deserves to be destroyed. Or that someone will take care of this. Or that it isn’t as bad and that making money is more important.
Every “Later” is a roll. Whoever says it may pick up the ASON mask (and the audience makes a Racket in that moment).
When more than half of the room is standing, THE MACHINE stops.
Somebody from the audience takes the die and holds it up for all to see in a way that stops it from rolling.
If the third six comes up first, pillows fall on the city from every side, thrown by the cast onto the stage, never at the audience: those are the missiles. The CHORUS draws the grey sheet over everyone on stage (the soot), then the white blanket (the winter), and everyone under them lies still.
Silence, for as long as the room can bear it. (Dedicate this minute or more of silence to the many who will die if we don’t act appropriately.) There is no second try for living our unique lives on our unique planet
Either way, the cast then stands up as themselves.
The mask of ASON lies on the floor with nobody in it right now. But make no mistake. This advanced persistent threat will reconfigure itself in no time to launch its next assault. Because nothing is almost never equal to nothing. You can know that next time someone tells you they were talking about nothing.
Epilogue.
Say where to check: Science or in the Matheo-b16 study. The odds on the dice used here (e.g. get three times a six, or a twenty-sided die) belong to the play, not to the scientific analysis.
Yet, the Risky <==> MAD Crisis –> Dead model is easy to play out with real dice for those who want to run through it a few times on stage using real dice to simulate a potentially real world-history forecast.
END. Take a bow, make a racket, eat something, and discuss the play and potential plans.
The smallest version. If fifteen minutes is too much, do it in 2-5 minutes, with one line and one die. Someone says: “27 October 1962. A furious captain. A nuclear torpedo. One officer spoke up.” Someone else says: “Belay the dive.” Somebody rolls a die, and asks the room who they want to win. That counts, and it gets a link too.
After the performance. Tag it #JonahPlay and #AuditTheMath, and tell the Jonah Carnival where it happened and what went wrong and what you learned form it. If you rewrote the script, send the rewrite: it may become the next Jonah Play in the list on this site.
Free to share: the Jonah License
Everything on this page is under the Jonah License (JoLi): CC0, public domain. Copy it, perform it, change it, translate it, sell tickets or not, keep none of the words or all of them. No permission is needed. Credit is welcome but not required.
The Jonah Licence’s one twist is about nothing. Doing nothing with it is not nothing. The license asks a single thing of all who use it, and cannot enforce it: “Prepare to explain on Judgement Day what you failed to do with any material you received under the Jonah License.”