Category: Cold War

41 Cold War Sentinels – USS Benjamin Franklin SSBN-640

She was built to disappear.

Not in the romantic sense, not like a magician’s flourish or a ship slipping into fog for the sake of poetry, but in the colder, more disciplined sense of Cold War necessity. USS Benjamin Franklin was designed to vanish into the acoustic shadows of the ocean, to become a rumor instead of a presence, a probability instead of a target. That was the deal struck between the Navy and history in the early 1960s. If the submarine could not be found, then war itself might be kept at bay.

Continue reading “41 Cold War Sentinels – USS Benjamin Franklin SSBN-640” →
0

41 Cold War Sentinels – USS Alexander Hamilton SSBN-617

The USS Alexander Hamilton entered the Cold War quietly, which was the only acceptable way to enter it. When her keel was laid at Electric Boat in Groton in June 1961, the United States was still learning how to live with nuclear weapons without letting them consume every waking thought. Strategy had moved beyond bombers and bravado. What mattered now was endurance. The Hamilton was conceived as a patient thing, meant to vanish beneath the surface and stay vanished, carrying consequences that no adversary could afford to ignore. She would become one of the Forty One for Freedom, a fleet built not to fight wars, but to prevent them by making certainty impossible.

Continue reading “41 Cold War Sentinels – USS Alexander Hamilton SSBN-617” →
0

41 Cold War Sentinels – USS Samuel Rayburn SSBN-635

The USS Samuel Rayburn SSBN-635 entered the world quietly, as most serious things do, laid down in December 1962 while the Cuban Missile Crisis was still a fresh bruise on the national psyche. The men who authorized her construction did not need speeches or slogans to understand what they were building. They were responding to a moment when the margin for error had narrowed to the width of a human heartbeat. Submarines like Rayburn were conceived as insurance policies written in steel and uranium, meant never to be cashed, only to exist. She was commissioned on December 2, 1964 at Newport News, carrying the name of a Texas congressman who believed deeply in institutional endurance and disliked theatrical gestures. It was an oddly fitting namesake for a boat designed to remain unseen, unheard, and uncelebrated while doing the most consequential job imaginable.

Continue reading “41 Cold War Sentinels – USS Samuel Rayburn SSBN-635” →
0

Blog at WordPress.com.

Up ↑