Cold War Command: The Dramatic Story of a Nuclear Submariner

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As the Cold War unfolded after the end of the Second World War, the Soviet Union commenced building up a large submarine force which posed a serious potential threat to the vital sea lines of communication of the Western alliances. The nations of the West, and in particular those comprising the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), aware of the devastating effects of submarine attacks upon shipping in both the Atlantic and Pacific during the Second World War, accordingly moved to counter this threat. As a part of this high-priority response, most of its member nations’ submarines were modified or designed to fulfill a prime role in anti-submarine warfare (ASW), making them capable of seeking out and destroying Soviet submarines. The advent of the nuclear submarine in 1955, marked by the commissioning of the USS Nautilus, with its superior equipment and much greater endurance, range and mobility, enabled submarine operations against submarines to reach a new level of success. Meanwhile, covert intelligence gathering upon Soviet naval forces, which had been hitherto the province of diesel submarines, was to become an important peacetime task of nuclear attack submarines, colloquially known as ‘hunter-killers’. Indeed, these vessels were routinely deployed to seek out and secretly follow Soviet submarines — particularly those capable of launching intercontinental ballistic missile attacks on Western cities — in order to be in a position pre-emptively to destroy them should hostilities break out. Such was the underwater confrontation of the Cold War.

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