books:

	• Hostile Waters Peter Huchthuasen, Igor Kurdin, ... St. Martin's Paperbacks, 1998 - 336 pages average customer review:based on 35 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

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As an ex US submarine officer, I found some to the facts here difficult to believe. It is possible that the Soviet navy was just very different from the US. Still it is difficult to believe that the Soviets did not know how to do an air drop at sea or design fail-safe reactors.

I found the characters: their lifestyle and politics interesting. The officers of a submarine must have been a very conservative sample of Soviet society yet, here in 1986, they were feed up with the Soviet regime and mocked its politics.

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innacurate research?

As one of the authors of Hostile Waters, I skim through now and again to read comments left by readers. I was very surprised to see D. Epstein's odd claim that the book was "technically inaccurate." This book was researched long, hard and very well, using both Russian and US sources, including first-person accounts and the testimony of survivors. Epstein alleges that we goofed by claiming the USS AUGUSTA collided with K-219 and yet, somehow, did not sink. Epstein says that US boats are single hulled (true) and have but one internal compartment (not true...there are two, or even three if you count the sonar sphere). He claims that a flooding casualty anywhere aboard the AUGUSTA woould have doomed her, thus, could not have happened.
Yet nowhere in the book do we claim, ever, that AUGUSTA collided with K-219. AUGUSTA did suffer a glancing collision with a second Soviet unit in the vicinity, and limped home to Groton for repairs. The angle, speed and energy state of the two boats dictated the results. The inherent toughness of US SSN design saved the day, as it did recently when the USS SAN FRANCISCO slammed head-on into a seamount, crushing the bow, Yet she did not go down; a testament to our design philosophy, and the training of our crews.
Epstein claims he found a second error: that when K-219 struck the bottom she did not implode "because she was already flooded." Actually, she was mostly filled with water, but two compartments retained their pressure to the very end and resisted the sea all the way down. One of them trapped a sailor, who could not overcome the pressure to make good his escape. The clanky old K-219 retained enough structural integrity to make a subsequent salavage visit quite difficult: the muzzle hatches on her silos were down and locked, and required a great deal of effort to pry open.
Soviet submarines were built to a high strength margin. But they were filled with second and third-rate systems, and contained designed-in traps that would, again and again, prove lethal to their crews.
Perhaps Epstein is remembering the movie, Hostile Waters, and not the book?

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As the Cold War drew to a close, a Soviet submarine armed with fifteen nuclear missiles suffered a crippling accident, coming within moments of an apocalyptic meltdown that could have devastated the eastern seaboard of the United States. Although our own government-all the way up to the White House-was fully aware of the potential for disaster, they buried the facts, deciding to protect the American public from the truth...but not from the danger. Now, for the first time, in the words of the survivors, the whole story is told-a minute-by-minute, heartbeat-by-heartbeat account of the underwater terror and top-secret, top-level intrigue. From the military command centers of both the U.S. and Soviet Union to the bridge of the stricken sub itself, you'll share in a riveting true chronicle of courage, deception, and senseless death.

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