Book Description

“Fascinating . . . a distinctively well-crafted intelligence-community memoir” by a leader of the US Navy’s clandestine undersea projects (Publishers Weekly). 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 undersea espionage, 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), he was intimately involved with planning and executing America’s submarine-based nuclear deterrence and espionage activities—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 in this memoir, 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, including: the near-disaster that almost sent Nautilus, the world’s first nuclear-powered sub, to the bottom of the ocean, taking the Navy’s missile program with it the rivalry between advocates of deterrence and military men and scientists such as Edward Teller, who believed the US had to prepare to win a nuclear conflict with the Soviets the argument that raged in the Navy over the reasons for the tragic loss of Thresher the search for the rogue Soviet sub that became the model for The Hunt for Red October—and what the Navy discovered when it eventually found the sunken boat Craven takes readers inside highly secret programs, sophisticated intelligence operations, salvage operations, and the program’s takeover by the CIA during the Nixon administration. A compelling tale of intrigue, both within our own government and between the US and Soviet navies, The Silent War is a “compelling” account of how the submarine service kept the peace during those dangerous days (Chicago Tribune). “A must-read for those interested in the technology, management, and intelligence-gathering challenges triggered by tense Cold War competition beneath the seas.” —Proceedings of the US Naval Institute