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.