The Soviet nuclear submarine K-19 was the pride of the Soviet Navy, but on July 4, 1961, during its maiden voyage to the North Atlantic for war games, it suddenly and unexpectedly developed a serious leak in one of the reactors. In a race against time, the officers and crew worked desperately and brilliantly, under intense exposure to radiation, to improvise a coolant system, averting a Chernobyl-like nuclear disaster. The toll for their efforts was certain and devastating: Eight men died painful deaths from acute radiation poisoning within days of the accident, and the surviving crew returned home to await their unknowable fate. Featuring a complete history of the actual events, with passages from the submarine captain’s memoir, and rarely published historic images, K-19 places readers at the apex of the Cold War’s brinkmanship between the USSR and the United States. It is the companion book to the upcoming National Geographic feature film about this gripping tragedy, K-19: The Widowmaker, starring Harrison Ford and Liam Neeson. Including information on the making of the film, with production stills, and cutaway drawings of the submarine, this powerful volume combines authoritative history and the magic of moviemaking to give the reader the real backstory to K-19.
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Summary
Overall K19 The Widowmaker by Peter Huchthausen Fascinating story about the former Soviet Union's Navy and one of it's worst disasters, a nuclear accident aboard one of it's submarines, the K19. The author's book is supplimented by using the memoirs of the Captain of the K19. In the midst of the cold war, in 1961, a fire breaks out in the reactor room of a nuclear powered Soviet submarine also carrying nuclear weapons. Huchthausen, a Captain USN(Ret)puts in some great research not by just talking about K19 but sharing more insights about the Soviet Navy that began to come out in and around 1991 under the administration of Gobachev. Their navy was a \"ticking timebomb\" with wrecks and other nuclear material on the ocean floor much more common than any of us should be comfortable with. If you've ever read the stories about how the Russian army handled their troops in World War II it won't suprise you to learn that that same lack of compassion and caring about human life remained in full force into the cold war. The conditions were horrible. A good history lesson to help remind you why we \"fought\" and won the Cold War against the \"Evil Empire\".