Top critical review
3.0 out of 5 starsA Ronald Reagan favorite
Reviewed in the United States on January 22, 2014
This novel started Tom Clancy on a successful career as a novelist. In his spare time, Clancy wrote a novel about a new type of Soviet ballistic missile submarine that was very hard to detect because of its unique propulsion system. Clancy submitted the novel to the Naval Institute Press, which gave him $5000 and published a limited edition. Somehow, Ronald Reagan read it and stated publicly that it was his kind of yarn. Then it sold 300,000 hard cover and 2 million paperback copies. It is an old favorite that is showing up on grocery store shelves since Clancy died. I had no time for novels when I was working as a sonar engineer; I only read it now that I am retired.
Tom Clancy apparently did some research on Soviet submarines while writing this novel. I have no quarrel with his description of submarines, or how Soviet subs navigated the passage between Iceland and the Faroe Islands. However, Clancy had absolutely no idea how sonar equipment worked. He did not understand how an array of hydrophones produced directionality and simultaneously increased the detection sensitivity of the sonar system. He described a SOSUS control facility; there was no such term. In that chapter, SOSUS operators use headphones to detect submarines. Laughable! Clancy described the equipment bays in a 688 class submarine sonar system fairly accurately, but he had no idea what the function of those pieces of equipment were. He described a top sonar operator detecting and classifying submarines and whales with earphones, without a hint of how the operator might locate the target in one direction instead of another. Again laughable!
The description of Jack Ryan briefing POTUS and the Joint Chiefs of Staff requires a wholesale suspension of disbelief. Women are described only the tertiary roles of ideal wives.
This is definitely not a literary novel, and not a naval engineer's novel either.
