Articles liés à Silent War: The Cold War Battle Beneath the Sea
L'édition de cet ISBN n'est malheureusement plus disponible.
Afficher les exemplaires de cette édition ISBN
Extrait :
Chapter One: In Peril Under the Sea
On the Nautilus men's hearts never fail them. No defects to be afraid of, for the double shell is as firm as iron, no rigging to attend to, no sails for the wind to carry away; no boilers to burst, no fire to fear, for the vessel is made of iron, not of wood; no coal to run short, for electricity is the only power; no collision to fear, for it alone swims in deep water; no tempest to brave, for when it dives below the water, it reaches absolute tranquillity. That is the perfection of vessels.
-- Jules Verne,
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1869)
In the bleak midwinter, the cold wind sweeps across Long Island Sound and funnels up the Connecticut valley of the Poquehanuck River, now called the Thames. Mariners know well the narrow channel that leads to the building yards of the Electric Boat Company and the Navy's submarine base in Groton, Connecticut, across the river from New London, where at pier after pier submarines make their preparations to go to sea. On one such day, in January of 1955, a great to-do of helicopters in the sky and ships in the channel gathered about the somber gray USS Nautilus. It was almost a year to the day since she had been launched, the traditional bottle of champagne broken on her bow. There was no ceremony or fanfare on this sullen winter day, but the media was out in force to cover the event -- the great submarine's moment of truth. Now, all lines cast off, she slipped away from her pier, making her way down the Thames toward Long Island Sound and then toward the open sea, as a lone quartermaster, manning the submarine's blinker, sent a message the world had never heard before: "Underway on nuclear power." Admiral Hyman G. Rickover, a unique figure, to put it mildly, in the long history of the United States Navy, had almost single-handedly led the successful struggle to introduce nuclear power to the fleet. USS Nautilus represented the first of his many victories over formidable opponents inside his own service, as well as throughout the nexus of the government and America's defense industries.
Rickover had not limited his responsibility to the design and operation of the reactor but had extended his influence over the entire system, exercising complete control over every nut and bolt. But a nuclear submarine is more than its power plant. It must unite that plant with hull and structure, with stability and control, with an environmentally sustainable life-support system and habitat, a skilled and trained crew, and a host of components that give it a mission, meaning, and being. And like the wonderful one-horse shay, it must last for more than a year and a day. In the years after World War II the importance of radically redesigning a new high-speed, long-endurance instrument of submarine warfare had been recognized by some, but budgets were limited and time was short. So the Nautilus that put to sea, apart from the glowing core of its reactor deep within its hull, was nearly indistinguishable from the most modern diesel submarines.
More than a year and a half later, in the first days of October 1956, there was neither press coverage nor ceremony on the Thames when the Nautilus slowly made her way to the Electric Boat Company dry dock. She had been tried at sea and had won every praise and laurel. Now, however, she was silently limping home. She was "down by the bow," as keen observers could see, but no one except her captain, Commander Eugene P. "Dennis" Wilkinson, had the slightest indication that the mighty Nautilus might be in grave danger.
dWilkinson's concern was communicated to retired Admiral Andrew McKee, chief designer for Electric Boat. By the very quaintness of its name, the Electric Boat Company proclaimed that it had been around a long time; it had in fact been building battery-powered submarines as long as submarines had been built for the United States Navy, and McKee was long in experience, too. His own name had become synonymous with World War II submarine design. In the early days of the war, the S-boats were doomed to sink if the engine room flooded. McKee added a sixteen-foot section to each hull that was no more than a buoyancy module, but it saved a fleet. As Electric Boat entered the nuclear age McKee's accomplishments kept pace. Like Wilkinson, he already knew that the Nautilus had been experiencing severe vibrations at high speed. The skipper had complained forcefully to the Navy's Bureau of Ships, whose structural engineers had measured these vibrations but had been unable to find their source. The problem had been assigned to the flow studies section of the David Taylor Model Basin and handed over to me.
At thirty-two years old, I was the new kid on the block -- a physicist at the Washington, D.C., David Taylor Model Basin -- considered by virtue of my California Institute of Technology master's degree and University of Iowa Ph.D. a theoretical whiz in hydrodynamics and structures, though few knew of my practical experience with ships at sea.
How could they? It had been more than a dozen years since I had twice disgraced my father by failing to get into Annapolis and then by joining the Navy as a mere enlisted man -- breaking the long line of revered Craven family naval officers who had gone on from the Academy to distinguished Navy careers. A third and perhaps intolerable disgrace would have been my lockup on a court-martial offense in the brig, following an unjustifiable fistfight with a fellow enlistee while on duty. Instead, the apparent emergency of the gory injury to my fighting hand landed me in a hospital, where a magnanimous Navy doctor decided, after putting two and two together, that the break in my protruding bone had occurred when I ran into a door, or, rather -- to remove all fault on my part -- a door ran into me. When the hospital staff finally noticed that Seaman Craven, who was basking in a monthlong convalescence, was again fit for duty, I was summarily transported to still devastated Pearl Harbor. Assigned to the battleship New Mexico, I found her moored alongside the sunken but balefully visible battleship Arizona, which had been lost in the surprise attack. It was the first day of 1944 and we were headed for the Marshall Islands to fight the rest of the war, but luck had somehow attached itself to my side, where it stuck. My brief (six months) but intense encounters in battle were experienced as a helmsman of the New Mexico, flagship of a task force of some 100 ships of the line and the train.
Here I would meet naval officers who were destined to one day be my subordinates. Here I would participate in and hear firsthand of battles won or lost by technology or skill, or both. Here, as the lowest-ranking seaman, I would acquire the helmsman's feel of the sea in calm, wind, and storm, in head sea, quartering sea, beam sea, and following sea.
By war's end I was enrolled at Cornell University in a naval science training program, graduating two years later near the top of my class with a commission as an ensign in the Naval Reserve. It was too late to fulfill my family destiny but a career as a naval scientist might make for a happy compromise. Accepted for graduate studies at Cal Tech, one of the nation's elite science and technology institutions, I went on for the next few years as a GI Bill student with scarcely enough time to leave the laboratory or look up from my books. Thus had I been rendered the "whiz kid" who now stood on the pier with my seasoned elders, Commander Wilkinson and Admiral McKee, and the world-famous Nautilus in dry dock.
We inspected the submarine from stem to stern. Our first concern was the integrity of the pressure hull. This is the inner space capsule that resists the pressure of the deep ocean. At test depth it is exposed to more than one thousand pounds per square inch of seawater pressure. Ideally the hull should be a complete shell of steel with no openings to the sea. But the crew, the machinery, and the supplies must be loaded on board at the beginning of a patrol or a dive and so there must be a hatch or hatches. The standard hatches on submarines are only twenty-five inches in diameter; they are open in port but closed and battened down whenever the submarine is submerged. The inside of the pressure hull is maintained at atmospheric pressure or close thereto. But outside there is a forest of machinery and tankage that is exterior to the hull. There are anchors and winches and all sorts of marine hardware. There is a propeller, which has a shaft that penetrates the pressure hull. There are periscopes and masts that project from the command and control center up through the sail. All of these must be covered by plating called "fairwater" if it covers machinery on the deck or the "sail" if it covers the masts and the surface observation bridge. The hydrodynamic shape of a submarine is thus a composite of the bare hull, the fairwater over the machinery on the deck exterior to the hull, the sail that surrounds the periscope, the masts, and the bridge, and the exterior of the ballast tanks, which envelop the hull fore and aft. There are in addition appendages in the form of bow planes or sail planes, stern planes, and rudders.
Archimedes' principle states that a body will displace its own weight in water. Most submarine hulls are designed so that when they are empty their weight is about 0.4 times the weight of water they would displace. Thus the hull by itself would float on the surface and be unable to submerge. The depth to which the hull can go is a function of the material of which the hull is made and its configuration. Small submersibles use a spherical shell, larger ones use a cylinder with spherical end caps, but a large military submarine employs a cylinder reinforced by girders of steel called stiffeners. These girders or stiffeners are inside the pressure hull for that part of the hull where the hull plating is a part of the hydrodynamic shape of the submarine. For those portions of the hull where ballast tanks and fairwaters completely surround it, the stiffeners will be external to the hull but are not exposed to the flow. In either case the stiffeners are attached at regular intervals to the pressure hull. These "pressure hulls" are designed so that there is a balance between one failure mode, called "buckling," and another, called "elastic failure." Everyone understands buckling because any empty can of beer or soda can be squeezed or stomped on to demonstrate the phenomenon. Everyone has also witnessed elastic failure, which means that a structure, say, the beer can or a car fender, will not return to its initial shape after it has been deformed. The interaction between the cylindrical hull and the ring stiffeners is vital to the submarine's ability to resist buckling and to maintain elasticity.
When Wilkinson, McKee, and I had completed our inspection of the hull we were in a state of shock. What we saw were ring stiffeners that had been torn away from the hull as though a giant hand had repeatedly twisted them until they failed in fatigue. We could put our hands between the hull and the stiffeners. McKee was in shock because that discovery implied that he had completely underestimated the forces between hull and stiffener. Wilkinson was in shock because he now realized that he had come closer to losing the Nautilus than he had ever thought, and I was in shock because I had studied the theory of inelastic buckling under the renowned Professor George Hausner at Cal Tech and I knew that McKee and Wilkinson were dead right. I had never before seen or imagined a structure so completely destroyed by stress and fatigue. It was well known that aircraft could fail from aeroelastic vibrations known as flutter, but it was assumed that the massive hull structures of submarines would not be affected by hydrodynamic forces produced by the sea as the submarine plows through the water. Something was happening to separate the ring stiffeners from the hull and as a result the collapse depth -- the level beneath the surface of the sea at which even the most powerful submarine hull will implode without warning as a result of the pressure of the water around it -- was greatly reduced.
But there was more. A submarine is more than a pressure hull. It must include mechanisms that allow it to submerge, to surface, or to maintain a specified depth. This is accomplished by the use of ballast tanks. These are nothing more than inverted cans shaped to match the contours of the hull with openings at the bottom. There are no valves on these openings, so air can flow in and out as the submarine changes depth and air pressure inside the tank is equal to the water pressure outside. For this reason these tanks are called soft tanks. The exterior of the ballast tanks is part of the skin of the submarine that gives it its good hydrodynamic shape. There are valves at the top of the tanks, which permit the tanks to be flooded with water and cause the submarine to submerge. There are bottles of compressed air inside the tanks that, when the valves at the top are closed, cause the water to be expelled from the tanks to be replaced by buoyant air so that the submarine can rise to the surface. All of these simple mechanisms must work or the submarine will sink.
Our inspection disclosed, to our horror, that all the ballast tanks showed splits along their sides. If the ballast tanks leak, then water will flood the tanks unless replacement air is continuously added. Otherwise the submarine sinks. For the Nautilus, already down by the bow, the splits in the tanks limited the size of the bubble that could be contained and caused a continuous drain of the air stored in the ballast tank air bottles. It was only a matter of hours before the onboard air supply would be exhausted. The air bottles that contain the precious compressed air had broken loose from their attachments to the hull inside the ballast tanks and were dangling from the piping that carried the air from bottle to tank. In a few hours, or at most a few days, the air bottles would detach completely and then the frames would separate from the hull and the Nautilus and her crew of 116 hands would be doomed. Thus three modes of failure were imminent: destruction of the pressure hull, loss of ability to hold ballast air, and the loss of air with which to blow ballast and provide the buoyancy to raise the submarine.
When McKee, Wilkinson, and I wriggled out of the ballast tanks and alerted Washington, there was the kind of glowering consternation that precedes the dreaded public embarrassment of the Navy. The long shadow of a national disaster was falling and heads might have to roll. All of the top brass of the Bureau of Ships -- that powerful department of the Navy that oversees all aspects of naval vessels from the drawing of plans through commissioning and right through to the end of a ship's life -- descended on Connecticut.
A notable exception was Hyman Rickover, who never allowed his name to be associated with failure. He would leave the mess to Wilkinson, his personal choice as the first skipper of the Nautilus. At the emergency meeting in New London, Wilkinson briefed the BuShips admirals on the damage, and a consensus emerged that the Nautilus should be laid up for a reevaluation of the design to uncover the mechanisms of the failure. When at the end of a long day they got around to me, I pointed out that I had a plan and a package of instruments designed to investigate the problem. "Why don't we repair the damage," I said, "and try to find the cause." The breakdown had taken place over eighteen months and was not likely to recur during the short period...
Présentation de l'éditeur :
On the Nautilus men's hearts never fail them. No defects to be afraid of, for the double shell is as firm as iron, no rigging to attend to, no sails for the wind to carry away; no boilers to burst, no fire to fear, for the vessel is made of iron, not of wood; no coal to run short, for electricity is the only power; no collision to fear, for it alone swims in deep water; no tempest to brave, for when it dives below the water, it reaches absolute tranquillity. That is the perfection of vessels.
-- Jules Verne,
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1869)
In the bleak midwinter, the cold wind sweeps across Long Island Sound and funnels up the Connecticut valley of the Poquehanuck River, now called the Thames. Mariners know well the narrow channel that leads to the building yards of the Electric Boat Company and the Navy's submarine base in Groton, Connecticut, across the river from New London, where at pier after pier submarines make their preparations to go to sea. On one such day, in January of 1955, a great to-do of helicopters in the sky and ships in the channel gathered about the somber gray USS Nautilus. It was almost a year to the day since she had been launched, the traditional bottle of champagne broken on her bow. There was no ceremony or fanfare on this sullen winter day, but the media was out in force to cover the event -- the great submarine's moment of truth. Now, all lines cast off, she slipped away from her pier, making her way down the Thames toward Long Island Sound and then toward the open sea, as a lone quartermaster, manning the submarine's blinker, sent a message the world had never heard before: "Underway on nuclear power." Admiral Hyman G. Rickover, a unique figure, to put it mildly, in the long history of the United States Navy, had almost single-handedly led the successful struggle to introduce nuclear power to the fleet. USS Nautilus represented the first of his many victories over formidable opponents inside his own service, as well as throughout the nexus of the government and America's defense industries.
Rickover had not limited his responsibility to the design and operation of the reactor but had extended his influence over the entire system, exercising complete control over every nut and bolt. But a nuclear submarine is more than its power plant. It must unite that plant with hull and structure, with stability and control, with an environmentally sustainable life-support system and habitat, a skilled and trained crew, and a host of components that give it a mission, meaning, and being. And like the wonderful one-horse shay, it must last for more than a year and a day. In the years after World War II the importance of radically redesigning a new high-speed, long-endurance instrument of submarine warfare had been recognized by some, but budgets were limited and time was short. So the Nautilus that put to sea, apart from the glowing core of its reactor deep within its hull, was nearly indistinguishable from the most modern diesel submarines.
More than a year and a half later, in the first days of October 1956, there was neither press coverage nor ceremony on the Thames when the Nautilus slowly made her way to the Electric Boat Company dry dock. She had been tried at sea and had won every praise and laurel. Now, however, she was silently limping home. She was "down by the bow," as keen observers could see, but no one except her captain, Commander Eugene P. "Dennis" Wilkinson, had the slightest indication that the mighty Nautilus might be in grave danger.
dWilkinson's concern was communicated to retired Admiral Andrew McKee, chief designer for Electric Boat. By the very quaintness of its name, the Electric Boat Company proclaimed that it had been around a long time; it had in fact been building battery-powered submarines as long as submarines had been built for the United States Navy, and McKee was long in experience, too. His own name had become synonymous with World War II submarine design. In the early days of the war, the S-boats were doomed to sink if the engine room flooded. McKee added a sixteen-foot section to each hull that was no more than a buoyancy module, but it saved a fleet. As Electric Boat entered the nuclear age McKee's accomplishments kept pace. Like Wilkinson, he already knew that the Nautilus had been experiencing severe vibrations at high speed. The skipper had complained forcefully to the Navy's Bureau of Ships, whose structural engineers had measured these vibrations but had been unable to find their source. The problem had been assigned to the flow studies section of the David Taylor Model Basin and handed over to me.
At thirty-two years old, I was the new kid on the block -- a physicist at the Washington, D.C., David Taylor Model Basin -- considered by virtue of my California Institute of Technology master's degree and University of Iowa Ph.D. a theoretical whiz in hydrodynamics and structures, though few knew of my practical experience with ships at sea.
How could they? It had been more than a dozen years since I had twice disgraced my father by failing to get into Annapolis and then by joining the Navy as a mere enlisted man -- breaking the long line of revered Craven family naval officers who had gone on from the Academy to distinguished Navy careers. A third and perhaps intolerable disgrace would have been my lockup on a court-martial offense in the brig, following an unjustifiable fistfight with a fellow enlistee while on duty. Instead, the apparent emergency of the gory injury to my fighting hand landed me in a hospital, where a magnanimous Navy doctor decided, after putting two and two together, that the break in my protruding bone had occurred when I ran into a door, or, rather -- to remove all fault on my part -- a door ran into me. When the hospital staff finally noticed that Seaman Craven, who was basking in a monthlong convalescence, was again fit for duty, I was summarily transported to still devastated Pearl Harbor. Assigned to the battleship New Mexico, I found her moored alongside the sunken but balefully visible battleship Arizona, which had been lost in the surprise attack. It was the first day of 1944 and we were headed for the Marshall Islands to fight the rest of the war, but luck had somehow attached itself to my side, where it stuck. My brief (six months) but intense encounters in battle were experienced as a helmsman of the New Mexico, flagship of a task force of some 100 ships of the line and the train.
Here I would meet naval officers who were destined to one day be my subordinates. Here I would participate in and hear firsthand of battles won or lost by technology or skill, or both. Here, as the lowest-ranking seaman, I would acquire the helmsman's feel of the sea in calm, wind, and storm, in head sea, quartering sea, beam sea, and following sea.
By war's end I was enrolled at Cornell University in a naval science training program, graduating two years later near the top of my class with a commission as an ensign in the Naval Reserve. It was too late to fulfill my family destiny but a career as a naval scientist might make for a happy compromise. Accepted for graduate studies at Cal Tech, one of the nation's elite science and technology institutions, I went on for the next few years as a GI Bill student with scarcely enough time to leave the laboratory or look up from my books. Thus had I been rendered the "whiz kid" who now stood on the pier with my seasoned elders, Commander Wilkinson and Admiral McKee, and the world-famous Nautilus in dry dock.
We inspected the submarine from stem to stern. Our first concern was the integrity of the pressure hull. This is the inner space capsule that resists the pressure of the deep ocean. At test depth it is exposed to more than one thousand pounds per square inch of seawater pressure. Ideally the hull should be a complete shell of steel with no openings to the sea. But the crew, the machinery, and the supplies must be loaded on board at the beginning of a patrol or a dive and so there must be a hatch or hatches. The standard hatches on submarines are only twenty-five inches in diameter; they are open in port but closed and battened down whenever the submarine is submerged. The inside of the pressure hull is maintained at atmospheric pressure or close thereto. But outside there is a forest of machinery and tankage that is exterior to the hull. There are anchors and winches and all sorts of marine hardware. There is a propeller, which has a shaft that penetrates the pressure hull. There are periscopes and masts that project from the command and control center up through the sail. All of these must be covered by plating called "fairwater" if it covers machinery on the deck or the "sail" if it covers the masts and the surface observation bridge. The hydrodynamic shape of a submarine is thus a composite of the bare hull, the fairwater over the machinery on the deck exterior to the hull, the sail that surrounds the periscope, the masts, and the bridge, and the exterior of the ballast tanks, which envelop the hull fore and aft. There are in addition appendages in the form of bow planes or sail planes, stern planes, and rudders.
Archimedes' principle states that a body will displace its own weight in water. Most submarine hulls are designed so that when they are empty their weight is about 0.4 times the weight of water they would displace. Thus the hull by itself would float on the surface and be unable to submerge. The depth to which the hull can go is a function of the material of which the hull is made and its configuration. Small submersibles use a spherical shell, larger ones use a cylinder with spherical end caps, but a large military submarine employs a cylinder reinforced by girders of steel called stiffeners. These girders or stiffeners are inside the pressure hull for that part of the hull where the hull plating is a part of the hydrodynamic shape of the submarine. For those portions of the hull where ballast tanks and fairwaters completely surround it, the stiffeners will be external to the hull but are not exposed to the flow. In either case the stiffeners are attached at regular intervals to the pressure hull. These "pressure hulls" are designed so that there is a balance between one failure mode, called "buckling," and another, called "elastic failure." Everyone understands buckling because any empty can of beer or soda can be squeezed or stomped on to demonstrate the phenomenon. Everyone has also witnessed elastic failure, which means that a structure, say, the beer can or a car fender, will not return to its initial shape after it has been deformed. The interaction between the cylindrical hull and the ring stiffeners is vital to the submarine's ability to resist buckling and to maintain elasticity.
When Wilkinson, McKee, and I had completed our inspection of the hull we were in a state of shock. What we saw were ring stiffeners that had been torn away from the hull as though a giant hand had repeatedly twisted them until they failed in fatigue. We could put our hands between the hull and the stiffeners. McKee was in shock because that discovery implied that he had completely underestimated the forces between hull and stiffener. Wilkinson was in shock because he now realized that he had come closer to losing the Nautilus than he had ever thought, and I was in shock because I had studied the theory of inelastic buckling under the renowned Professor George Hausner at Cal Tech and I knew that McKee and Wilkinson were dead right. I had never before seen or imagined a structure so completely destroyed by stress and fatigue. It was well known that aircraft could fail from aeroelastic vibrations known as flutter, but it was assumed that the massive hull structures of submarines would not be affected by hydrodynamic forces produced by the sea as the submarine plows through the water. Something was happening to separate the ring stiffeners from the hull and as a result the collapse depth -- the level beneath the surface of the sea at which even the most powerful submarine hull will implode without warning as a result of the pressure of the water around it -- was greatly reduced.
But there was more. A submarine is more than a pressure hull. It must include mechanisms that allow it to submerge, to surface, or to maintain a specified depth. This is accomplished by the use of ballast tanks. These are nothing more than inverted cans shaped to match the contours of the hull with openings at the bottom. There are no valves on these openings, so air can flow in and out as the submarine changes depth and air pressure inside the tank is equal to the water pressure outside. For this reason these tanks are called soft tanks. The exterior of the ballast tanks is part of the skin of the submarine that gives it its good hydrodynamic shape. There are valves at the top of the tanks, which permit the tanks to be flooded with water and cause the submarine to submerge. There are bottles of compressed air inside the tanks that, when the valves at the top are closed, cause the water to be expelled from the tanks to be replaced by buoyant air so that the submarine can rise to the surface. All of these simple mechanisms must work or the submarine will sink.
Our inspection disclosed, to our horror, that all the ballast tanks showed splits along their sides. If the ballast tanks leak, then water will flood the tanks unless replacement air is continuously added. Otherwise the submarine sinks. For the Nautilus, already down by the bow, the splits in the tanks limited the size of the bubble that could be contained and caused a continuous drain of the air stored in the ballast tank air bottles. It was only a matter of hours before the onboard air supply would be exhausted. The air bottles that contain the precious compressed air had broken loose from their attachments to the hull inside the ballast tanks and were dangling from the piping that carried the air from bottle to tank. In a few hours, or at most a few days, the air bottles would detach completely and then the frames would separate from the hull and the Nautilus and her crew of 116 hands would be doomed. Thus three modes of failure were imminent: destruction of the pressure hull, loss of ability to hold ballast air, and the loss of air with which to blow ballast and provide the buoyancy to raise the submarine.
When McKee, Wilkinson, and I wriggled out of the ballast tanks and alerted Washington, there was the kind of glowering consternation that precedes the dreaded public embarrassment of the Navy. The long shadow of a national disaster was falling and heads might have to roll. All of the top brass of the Bureau of Ships -- that powerful department of the Navy that oversees all aspects of naval vessels from the drawing of plans through commissioning and right through to the end of a ship's life -- descended on Connecticut.
A notable exception was Hyman Rickover, who never allowed his name to be associated with failure. He would leave the mess to Wilkinson, his personal choice as the first skipper of the Nautilus. At the emergency meeting in New London, Wilkinson briefed the BuShips admirals on the damage, and a consensus emerged that the Nautilus should be laid up for a reevaluation of the design to uncover the mechanisms of the failure. When at the end of a long day they got around to me, I pointed out that I had a plan and a package of instruments designed to investigate the problem. "Why don't we repair the damage," I said, "and try to find the cause." The breakdown had taken place over eighteen months and was not likely to recur during the short period...
The Cold War was the first major conflict between superpowers in which victory and defeat were unambiguously determined without the firing of a shot. Without the shield of a strong, silent deterrent or the intellectual sword of espionage beneath the sea, that war could not have been won.
John P. Craven was a key figure in the Cold War beneath the sea. As chief scientist of the Navy's Special Projects Office, which supervised the Polaris missile system, then later as head of the Deep Submergence Systems Project (DSSP) and the Deep Submergence Rescue Vehicle programme (DSRV), both of which engaged in a variety of clandestine undersea projects, he was intimately involved with planning and executing America's submarine-based nuclear deterrence and submarine-based espionage activities during the height of the Cold War. Craven was considered so important by the Soviets that they assigned a full-time KGB agent to spy on him.
Craven takes readers inside the highly secret DSSP and DSRV programmes, both of which offered crucial cover for sophisticated intelligence operations. He weaves a compelling tale of intrigue, both within the U.S. government and between the U.S. and Soviet navies providing an enthralling insider's account of how the submarine service kept the peace during the dangerous days of the Cold War.
John P. Craven was a key figure in the Cold War beneath the sea. As chief scientist of the Navy's Special Projects Office, which supervised the Polaris missile system, then later as head of the Deep Submergence Systems Project (DSSP) and the Deep Submergence Rescue Vehicle programme (DSRV), both of which engaged in a variety of clandestine undersea projects, he was intimately involved with planning and executing America's submarine-based nuclear deterrence and submarine-based espionage activities during the height of the Cold War. Craven was considered so important by the Soviets that they assigned a full-time KGB agent to spy on him.
Craven takes readers inside the highly secret DSSP and DSRV programmes, both of which offered crucial cover for sophisticated intelligence operations. He weaves a compelling tale of intrigue, both within the U.S. government and between the U.S. and Soviet navies providing an enthralling insider's account of how the submarine service kept the peace during the dangerous days of the Cold War.
Les informations fournies dans la section « A propos du livre » peuvent faire référence à une autre édition de ce titre.
- ISBN 10 1417720824
- ISBN 13 9781417720828
- ReliureRelié
- Evaluation vendeur
(Aucun exemplaire disponible)
Chercher: Créez une demandeSi vous ne trouvez pas un livre sur AbeBooks, nous le rechercherons automatiquement pour vous parmi les livres quotidiennement ajoutés au catalogue.
Créez une demande