K-19 THE WIDOWMAKER: The Secret Story of The Soviet Nuclear Submarine [Paperback]

Peter Capt Ret Huchthausen (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 1, 2002

An account of one of the Cold War era's most harrowing nuclear accidents documents the maiden voyage of the Soviet nuclear submarine, during which a serious reactor leak spurred a perilous race against time.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

A companion to the feature film of the same name, K-19: The Widowmaker tells the hair-raising story of the Soviet submarine that nearly caused a nuclear meltdown in 1961. The sub developed a leak as it was heading toward the North Atlantic, and only the ingenious efforts of the crew eight of whom died within days from radiation poisoning staved off a global disaster. Author Peter Huchthausen, a retired U.S. Navy captain and former naval attach‚ in Moscow (as well as a technical adviser on the film), recounts the fateful events and also describes the making of the film.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

This book recaps the near-meltdown of a nuclear reactor in 1961 aboard the first Soviet ballistic missile boat, the K-19. The captain, Nikolai Zateyev, wrote a memoir of his career, which is extensively excerpted here and gives a glimpse into the Soviet nuclear navy and the shoddily constructed ships that Zateyev was given to command; a defective seal nearly sank the K-19 on a shakedown cruise. Worse was to come, with sufficient radioactive drama to inspire a forthcoming film (with the same title) starring Zateyev look-alike Harrison Ford. After the accident was contained by the certain-death heroics of men who repaired the reactor, Zateyev found the culprit in the near cataclysm: incompetent welding. Not that the knowledge improved safety: author Huchthausen, a retired U.S. Navy expert on submarines, embeds Zateyev's tale of woe within the context of a series of submarine accidents culminating in the kursk sinking of 2000. A likely lure for maritime mavens. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Product Details

• Paperback: 243 pages
• Publisher: National Geographic; 1ST edition (July 1, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 079226472X
• ISBN-13: 978-0792264729
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.9 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,514,370 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

27 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The stars are definitely for the book alone..., July 29, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: K-19 THE WIDOWMAKER: The Secret Story of The Soviet Nuclear Submarine (Paperback)

The book does a very good and credible job of portraying the disaster and the events and circumstances surrounding it with good historical context. It is indeed a good and accurate read. But imagine my shock when I saw the movie! Not even close, and an insult to heroic brave men, who, while the "enemy," were doing their duty, even at the cost of their health and life.

The needless mangling of the historical account with regard to numerous significant details is one thing, but the outlandish portrayal of the K-19 captain, the crew, the supposed "mutiny" and so on and so forth was way over the top. I could not help but imagine the feelings of the still-living crew members and the widow of Captain Zateyev, who in essence entrusted their accounts and experiences, so long silenced, with the film's director. And for this? I'm ashamed.

Was not the actual account compelling enough? The struggle of ordinary men against the sea, against an unseaworthy boat, against the unmigitable danger of a shoddily-designed nuclear reactor, and against an oppressive yet clumsy government regime which was certainly willing for them to give their lives needlessly, unwilling to protect them, and quick to cast undeserved blame on them. Suddenly, the real enemy is all to clear. Is this story not good enough to tell without slanderous revisionism?

I come from a Cold War submariner's family. My father served as an officer on the USS Gato, which, incidentally, collided with K-19 in the Barents in 1969 while he was on patrol as part of her crew. As a result of this, K-19 has an unwitting bit part in my family history, for a father who could have never come home from the Barents as a result of his encounter with this ill-fated Soviet SSBN.

Peter Huchthausen has given a wonderful, balanced account of the ordeal of K-19 and of the men who served in the Soviet Navy, struggling against forces and circumstances much more threatening to them than NATO or the US Navy. It's a shame that most of the American public will never read the book, instead basing their knowledge of the event on the woefully inaccurate movie. Which is a disservice to Captain Zateyev and his crew, whose true, heroic, and tragic story, for so many, will remain unheard.

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Cold War Submarines, July 18, 2002

By 

Atwell I. Suman (North Port, FL United States) - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: K-19 THE WIDOWMAKER: The Secret Story of The Soviet Nuclear Submarine (Paperback)

As a retired cold war submariner I was shocked by the atrocities that my enemy (but brother) submariners were subjected to in the Soviet Navy. We always heard rumors of the conditions these young men were subjected to but, due to their closed society, they remained rumors. This book is a must read for any US Navy submariner. We can only thank the almighty that we lived in an open society and sailed on ships where safety was the prime concern. Say what you might about Hyman Rickover and his tyrant ways, he did his job well and we were relatively safe from radiation and fairly sure we would return from the depths.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars K-19 - Another Appalling Soviet Naval Disaster, August 5, 2003

By 

Gilberto Villahermosa - See all my reviews
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This review is from: K-19 THE WIDOWMAKER: The Secret Story of The Soviet Nuclear Submarine (Paperback)

On 4 July 1961, the K-19, the Soviet Union's first nuclear powered ballistic missile submarine, suffered a nuclear reactor cooling malfunction 1,500 miles from home and 150 feet below the ocean's surface. Only the commander's quick reaction and the sacrifices of the submarine's crew prevented that failure from turning into a nuclear catastrophe. "An explosion on the surface," writes author Peter Huchthausen, a retired U.S. Navy Captain, "would have released a massive cloud of nuclear contamination, dwarfing the released radiation of the Chernobyl explosion." Although the bulk of the crew were saved, nine died from severe radiation poisoning. A violation of safety procedures during the installation of the primary cooling system was the cause of the accident.

K-19 The Widowmaker is a well-researched, well-written, and highly informative book. The author served as the senior U.S. Naval attaché in Moscow from 1987 to 1990 and visited Russia between 1991 and 1996 collecting material for this book. The story, based on the memoirs of its commander, Captain Nikolai Zateyev, is a compelling one of extreme courage and heroism in the face of an unseen and terrifying adversary. Yet, the book is more than just the account of a single submarine and its crew. Only six of the its eleven chapters are devoted to the K-19. The rest of the book covers the history of the Soviet nuclear submarine force (which numbered almost 200 boats at its peak in 1989), the Navy's horrendously bad safety record, and its legacy of nuclear dumping and contamination. A final "Afterward" focuses on the inspiration for the movie.

Soviet naval history is replete with a long series of appalling disasters. In 1955 the Novorossysk, the 24,000-ton battleship and flagship of the Black Sea Fleet, exploded, capsized, and sank in the Black Sea port of Sevastopol with a loss of 608 seaman. Revealed for the first time to the Soviet public and the world in 1988, it was the largest peacetime naval calamity of the 20th century. Huchthausen lists fifty-five major Soviet and Russian naval accidents between 1952 and 2000 in an appendix at the end of the book. The first listed is the loss on 15 December 1952 of the Whiskey-class diesel attack submarine S-117, which sank in the Pacific Ocean with all 47 crewmembers. The most recent was the loss on 12 August 2000 of the Oscar II class K-141 Kursk, which sank in the Kola Gulf with all 118 crewmembers. The Kursk was salvaged in October 2001. Between 1958 and 1968 alone, the Soviet Navy lost seven submarines and 200 men, with another 400 men gravely irradiated. The author shows that these mishaps were the result of a Soviet leadership obsessed with the production of large numbers of nuclear submarines and other naval vessels at the cost of basic quality control, safety, and the lives of their own sailors. Recent newspapers stories of the cash-strapped and accident prone Russian Navy indicate this obsession continues to haunt Moscow.

Huchthausen also highlights the grave problem of nuclear dumping. Between the 1950s and 1993 the Russian Navy dumped liquid and solid radioactive waste and spent nuclear fuel at sea in designated sites throughout the Barents Sea and Pacific Ocean. In the Karen Sea dumping area alone, the largest of the Soviet nuclear graveyards, there were more than 3.5 million curies of nuclear waste recorded in 1992. This is the equivalent of one-tenth of the radiological contamination leaked to the atmosphere during the 1985 Chernobyl nuclear disaster. The contamination in the Karen Sea exists in the form of eight scuttled submarine hulls, sixteen discarded reactors (six with nuclear fuel still inside), and 9,000 additional tons of discarded fuel assemblies and liquid nuclear waste, all in water no deeper than 150 feet. Additionally, some 46 nuclear warheads are scattered throughout the world's seabeds, 44 of them in 18,000 feet of water 450 miles northeast of Bermuda, where they were lost inside the hull of the world's first nuclear powered submarine to sink at sea with ballistic missiles. The Yankee I class K-219 sank on 3 October 1986 with 32 nuclear missile warheads and eight nuclear-tipped torpedoes. According to Huchthausen, only a dramatic emergency manual shutdown by a young Soviet seaman prevented a nuclear disaster. The accident occurred just five days prior to the celebrated Reagan-Gorbachev summit in Reykjavik, Iceland. The threat posed by nuclear weapons lost at sea is a serious one. Plutonium from atomic warheads, although heavy enough to sink into the seabed, has the potential for remaining a threat to sea life and the food chain for its entire half life, or decay period, which is estimated as 200,000 years, a very grim prospect indeed.

The problem does not end there. Russia's Pacific Fleet currently stores 10,000 atomic fuel rods from dismantled nuclear submarines aboard two rusting ships in the Sea of Japan and at a storage facility southeast of Vladivostok. According to Huchthausen, the condition of the two storage ships is so bad that they are in danger of sinking alongside their piers. The combined level of radiation aboard the two ships is four million curies. The two ships and the Pacific Fleet land storage facility are already filled to capacity. And a plan to build a proper barge to treat nuclear waste is also more than five and a half years behind schedule, despite assistance from the United States and Japan. One hopes that America's and NATO's new War on Terrorism, with its imperative on keeping nuclear weapons and material out of the hands of extremists, will give much needed international momentum to cleaning up this mess.

Peter Huchthausen has not only chronicled the history of a brave group of Soviet submariners and the government that betrayed them, but has also highlighted the threat still posed to all by nuclear reactors and weapons littering our oceans and seas. Cleaning up this legacy of the Cold War will be a long-term international endeavor if we are to avoid a lethal inheritance of nuclear contamination for generations to come.