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In October 1962, the United States government demanded that the Soviet Union remove long-range tactical missiles that it had positioned in Cuba, a short flight from targets like Washington and New York. After nearly a week's wait, during which the world braced for nuclear war, the Soviet government finally relented. It did so, in part, because its capitalist foe had one weapon that it then did not: 10 dozen submarine-mounted nuclear missiles that could be fired from beneath the waves and reach targets inside the Soviet Union within a matter of minutes. In The Silent War , John Craven, an architect of the Polaris missile program, writes that the episode offered unambiguous proof of the value of "a strong silent deterrent" and of the importance of a superb submarine force in preserving the balance of power. In this memoir, he recounts the evolution of the Polaris weapons system during the cold war. Along the way, he reveals little-known incidents of espionage and saber rattling that will give readers pause to wonder how war was avoided for all those years. A bonus for Tom Clancy fans (who are likely to enjoy his book in any event) is Craven's sketchy but fascinating tale of a real hunt for a lost Soviet submarine that took place during his tenure as well as his accessible but nonetheless detailed account of the advanced military technology he helped bring into being. --Gregory McNamee From Publishers Weekly In May 1968, submarine specialist John Craven, then chief scientist of the navy's special projects office, had just crossed into Virginia from Washington, D.C., on his way home from work when he heard an alarming news report on the radio. The USS Scorpion, a submarine, was missing in the ocean with 99 men on board. On hearing the news, Craven writes, "I immediately turned my car around and headed for the war room of the Pentagon." Amazingly, the loss of the Scorpion coincided with the disappearance of a Soviet submarine. How Craven spearheaded the search for the two ships a search that inspired The Hunt for Red October is the centerpiece of this fascinating series of set pieces that delve into the life-and-death mechanics of Cold War-era submarine service. Craven, who had previously been known as the head of the Polaris sub-based missile program, has surfaced mysteriously in the press over the years, most recently in the critically acclaimed Blind Man's Bluff: The Untold Story of American Submarine Espionage; here, he is forthright about much of his background and activities. Anecdote-based chapters include descriptions of repairs to a newly launched USS Nautilus, rough briefings to the press and to the chain of command on Polaris, diving into the transoceanic cable-tapping Man-in-the-Sea program and much more. Craven quotes Byron, Verne and others with feeling throughout, and his explanations of the complicated physics related to his various projects are clear if sometimes still classified making this is a distinctively well-crafted intelligence-community memoir. (Apr. 4) Forecast: As Russo-American relations over espionage heat up, this book should find a general audience primed for a re-examination of the intricacies of the Cold War. While not quite Red October, it should reach beyond the buff market. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc. From Library Journal A retired chief scientist of the navy's Special Projects Office and a minor character in Sherry Sontag's Blind Man's Bluff, Craven does not generate enough information or dramatic activity to create a Cold War espionage best seller along the lines of Blind Man's Bluff or Tom Clancy's The Hunt for Red October. The author was a pivotal player in the underwater research for the navy and is especially remembered for his work on deep-sea submersibles. Unfortunately, he does not reveal much that is not already known, except perhaps that the Soviet missile sub that sank around the time of the USN Scorpion was possibly a rogue and may have sunk while trying to launch a missile toward Hawaii. A good read about undersea research, this is ultimately not as not as riveting as other Cold War expos s. This is a hot topic, however, and little has been declassified to date. Recommended for military collections. Richard Nowicki, Emerson Vocational H.S., Buffalo Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Booklist Sherry Sontag's best-selling Blind Man's Bluff (1998) has created a ready market for Craven's memoir of his role in the U.S. Navy's submarine espionage against the Soviet Union. Craven designed the navy's minisubmarines in the 1950s and 1960s, and technology perforce guides many of his anecdotes. Other flavors in his war storytelling are bureaucratic politics and encounters with such forceful personalities as Edward Teller and Hyman Rickover. Craven's style is to jump from one adventure to the next, which in itself keeps the pages flapping. Insofar as the intelligence agencies allow, he reveals his involvement with such submarines as the Nautilus , the Polaris ballistic missile boats, the ill-fated Thresher and Scorpion , and the sunken Soviet sub that the CIA partially raised in the early 1970s. That last sub, Craven theorizes, was a rogue that sank from a catastrophic accident while launching a nuclear missile at Hawaii--a sensational claim that exemplifies the now-it-can-be-told aspect of Craven's reminiscences. A cinch to grab readers' and journalists' attention. Gilbert Taylor Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved John Piña Craven holds a Ph.D. from the University of Iowa and a J.D. from George Washington University. He was awarded two Distinguished Civil-ian Service Awards, the Navy's highest honor for civilians, among many other honors. After leaving the Navy, he was marine affairs coordinator for the state of Hawaii and dean of marine programs at the University of Hawaii. In 1976 he was appointed director of the Law of the Sea Institute. Currently the president of the Common Heritage Corporation, he lives in Honolulu, Hawaii. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. 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. Wilkinson'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. A Read more
Features & Highlights
- 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 program (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. Some of Craven's highly classified activities have been mentioned in such books as Blind Man's Bluff, but now he gives us his own insights into the deadly cat-and-mouse game that U.S. and Soviet forces played deep in the world's oceans. Craven tells riveting stories about the most treacherous years of the Cold War. In 1956 Nautilus, the world's first nuclear-powered submarine and the backbone of the Polaris ballistic missile system, was only days or even hours from sinking due to structural damage of unknown origin. Craven led a team of experts to diagnose the structural flaw that could have sent the sub to the bottom of the ocean, taking the Navy's missile program with it. Craven offers insight into the rivalry between the advocates of deterrence (with whom he sided) and those military men and scientists, such as Edward Teller, who believed that the United States had to prepare to fight and win a nuclear conflict with the Soviet Union. He describes the argument that raged in the Navy over the reasons for the tragic loss of the submarine Thresher, and tells the astonishing story of the hunt for the rogue Soviet sub that became the model for The Hunt for Red October -- including the amazing discovery the Navy made when it eventually found the sunken sub. Craven takes readers inside the highly secret DSSP and DSRV programs, both of which offered crucial cover for sophisticated intelligence operations. Both programs performed important salvage operations in addition to their secret espionage activities, notably the recovery of a nuclear bomb off Palomares, Spain. He describes how the Navy's success at deep-sea recovery operations led to the takeover of the entire program by the CIA during the Nixon administration. A compelling tale of intrigue, both within our own government and between the U.S. and Soviet navies, The Silent War is an enthralling insider's account of how the submarine service kept the peace during the dangerous days of the Cold War.
