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Hostile Waters | 
 enlarge | Authors: Peter Huchthuasen, Igor Kurdin, R. Alan White
Publisher: St. Martin's Paperbacks
Category: Book
List Price: $6.99
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Rating:  35 reviews
Sales Rank: 387245
Media: Mass Market Paperback
Pages: 336
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.4
Dimensions (in): 6.7 x 4.1 x 0.9
ISBN: 0312966121
Dewey Decimal Number: 359
EAN: 9780312966126
ASIN: 0312966121
Publication Date: August 15, 1998
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Amazon.com Review
During the Cold War, Soviet nuclear submarines tirelessly patrolled the Atlantic. Their missiles took aim at Washington, New York, and other major American cities. But they were also fairly low-tech contraptions, at least in comparison to the sophisticated U.S. subs that quietly tracked them. In 1986, one of these Soviet vessels nearly suffered a meltdown not far from Bermuda in what might have been a worse-than-Chernobyl accident. Hostile Waters tells this story more like a novel than a textbook, but also makes good use of declassified material and personal interviews. In his brief foreword, Tom Clancy calls it "one of the most fascinating true submarine stores I have ever encountered"--high praise from the man who brought us The Hunt for Red October.
Product Description
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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| Customer Reviews: Read 10 more reviews...
 Reads like a novel...unfortunately April 23, 2007
Rottenberg's rotten book review (nyc)
2 out of 6 found this review helpful
The Russian nuclear powered, missile carrying (SSBN) submarine K-219 was about 15 years old when it nearly triggered either WWIII or a 2nd Chernobyl. In 1986, with Chernobyl still in minds of the public, and the Reagan/Gorbachev summit in Reykjavik imminent, the navies of both sides of the cold war sail SSBN's off each other's shore. Floating platforms loaded with numerous missiles - some with multiple warheads - these subs are almost as dangerous to their crews as they are to the enemy. In the case of K-219, the balance shifted firmly against the crew. Poor design, construction and shipyard maintenance had prematurely aged the sub launched only a few years earlier than the first 688-class American subs. Near Bermuda, K-219 was nearly sunk by a missile explosion caused by leaking seawater. With one tube already deactivated because of seawater problems on a prior cruise, this was not a new problem. In this case however, the explosion nearly sinks the then submerged boat, then floods it with toxic and corrosive gas. Problems increase when the ships two reactors suffer a loss-of-coolant accident and nearly meltdown. Echoing the experience of K-19, some brave crewmen sacrifice themselves to shut the reactors down. Complications ensue when superiors in Moscow order the crew (once safely evacuated to a nearby freighter) to re-board the poisoned ship. An American sub with a maverick commander adds to the danger when he runs his ship too near the stricken sub, apparently ordered to keep K-219 from being recovered. Eventually, the ship will sink, and Captain Britanov will have to return home and answer to his superiors for the loss of the sub.
The loss of K-219 is a fascinating story, but unfortunately this book doesn't do it justice. The most crucial of the book's flaws is the author's determination to write it as if it were a novel, with a single, linear narrative explaining the events surrounding K-219, complete with stilted, cold-war standard dialog and sub-standard characterization. Incidents that occur in the real world will be remembered through the perspectives of those who witnessed it - and those perspectives will vary depending on the position of the witness and any numerous other factors which may affect personal bias. The fact that people will have distinct memories or opinions about past occurrences is neither wrong nor right, good or bad - it's just the way that things are. What people saw, or remember (or are willing to say) is only part of the story - we still need to know why people people acted the way they did, and how that colors their recollection, and most importantly, we need to know whose recollections are being used by the author at any one time. Instead, "Hostile waters" offers a single, linear perspective, one with easily identifiable heroes and villains (the political officer is singled out for unpopularity even before he grabs the first lifeboat off K-219 - since he does nothing throughout the story he's an easy target). This is not only a monumental cheat, but also robs the reader of critical facts - such as what really caused the ship to sink as it did; also the circumstances surrounding the apparently feckless captain of the American sub, and whether any blame should attach to K-219's skipper for not knowing of the leaking missile tube or the painful domestic situation of the officer directly responsible for monitoring it. "Hostile Waters" reads like a novel - a very unrealistic one.
 innacurate research? January 26, 2007
R. A. White (Pacific Grove, CA)
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
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?
 Hostile Waters November 17, 2006
D.E. (CA United States)
3 out of 9 found this review helpful
Very poorly researched and technically inaccurate. I read this book several years ago and was astounded by the technical impossibilities which were treated as fact. Here are two. 1)The USS Agusta is allegeded to have suffered flooding in several equipment bays and compartments after the collision with the K-219.Fact: US submarines are all single-hulled and there are no spaces to flood other than the few major compartments, and if one compartment floods the affected crew will drown or be crushed and the submarine will likely be lost as well (killing the rest of the crew). Simply put there are no tiny little spaces to flood. Leaks can occur but either they are patched or the submarine fills with water. 2)As the K-219 sank she hit bottom without imploding. The Captain of the USS Agusta is alleged to have said "They build them well in Russia". This is pure garbage. The reason K-219 didn't implode is that she was already filled with water before she reached crush depth, which for an American submarine would be no deeper than about 2,000 feet (and probably much less- Los Angeles class boats had thinner hulls than earlier American SSNs, to save weight, and were allegedly limited to 900 feet for operational purposes, and "crush depth"- where simple physics says the submarine will implode from pressure- is certainly less than 2X operational depth limits) and perhaps for a Soviet submarine maybe a few hundred feet deeper- they were thicker hulled than US submarines as a rule. Only a very thickly-hulled purpose-designed research submarine can dive so deeply without collapsing. These are just two extremely glaring technical defficiencies of this book which suggest that the book is more fabricated than researched. Someone, *please*. tell me how a missile boat experiencing a *convential* explosion breaching her hull, and then possibly suffering a reactor failure could have come close to precipitating World War III?????
 Intense! November 10, 2006
Elizabeth Ann Sinkey
An explosion on a Russian nuclear submarine carrying fifteen rockets with thirty thermonuclear warheads too close to the shores of the United States could have the worst of consequences despite the valiant struggles of the sub's captain and crew. The action in this true story is nonstop as the book keeps the reader on a razor's edge between the nearly unsolvable problem that must be fixed even at the cost of lives and careers and the unthinkable option of a global catastrophe. First find a comfortable chair then kick back because you aren't going to be able to put this one down until the very end.
"The Hunt for Red October" only true November 20, 2003
Patrick Loughlin (Atlanta, GA USA)
5 out of 7 found this review helpful
The parallels between this book and "The Hunt for Red October" are rather spooky considering "Hunt for Red October" was written first and is fictional while this book is non-fiction. Makes me wonder if some of the key players in this story were acting out "The Hunt for Red October" for real.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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