Launch Code

EIGHT

August 1983, Groton, Connecticut

I loved the Navy. I loved serving in submarines.

I loved the Alexander Hamilton.

She was a Lafayette-class submarine, built in 1962. For three years she had operated out of Holy Loch on the west coast of Scotland. An alternating series of Blue and Gold crews had flown back and forth from the submarine base at Groton in Connecticut to take her out into the depths of the North Atlantic Ocean and wait for the order to blow up the world.

You have to be kind of weird to enjoy working on submarines, especially on ballistic missile submarines which are designed, essentially, to do nothing for long periods of time. For ever, really. Ideally, boomers should never do anything at all.

Patrols last about seventy days. Seventy days of never seeing the sun, never seeing a cloud, never feeling a breath of wind on your face. Seventy days of being crammed in a fat metal tube with a hundred and thirty-nine other men, with no privacy, a bunk that is little more than a coffin, occasional showers that last seconds, food that has been stored for weeks and reheated in minutes. Seventy days where the days of the week and the hours of the day become disjointed and blurred and where the crew toil to keep the sub puttering quietly along at three knots, with its missile hatches firmly shut, slaves to the giant machine.

So why did I love it?

The physics fascinated me, still do. The power of nuclear fission has held me in awe since high school. The idea that all that energy could be contained in a reactor core the size of a small car and manoeuvred around the world’s oceans amazed me. I wanted to be one of the guys taming that power, controlling it, manipulating it, directing it, its master not its slave.

The power of the dozens of nuclear warheads inspired awe in me also, but in an entirely different way. My father had been in the Navy in the Pacific, and had done his bit to make the world safe for democracy. I believed that the Cold War was a real struggle for the future of the world. I couldn’t deny there was a chance that humanity might blow itself up, but I wanted to be one of those people capable of taking the responsibility to ensure nuclear weapons preserved peace, not destroyed everything. My country needed sensible, rational, reliable men to steward its nuclear arsenal, and I was proud to be one of those men.

The Navy encouraged the sense of an elite that went with serving on ballistic submarines, and I responded well to that. They were the great capital ships of the late-twentieth century, and I was glad to serve on them. I was proud of the insignia pinned to my chest: the golden pair of dolphins, the silver submarine with a gold star for each deterrence patrol. As befitted an elite service, discipline was a little more relaxed under the sea than above. And the crew were much smarter.

A submarine was stuffed full of physics and engineering nerds. Sonarmen who could rewire a recording studio, missile techs who were actual rocket scientists, engineers who could design a nuclear reactor. There were probably more men who could solve a differential equation on one submarine than on a fleet of surface ships or, for that matter, in the whole Marine Corps.

That might not have been strictly true, but I believed it was.

The crew of a submarine was a family, who worked together, slept together, kidded together, quarrelled together, and kept the world safe. Together.

My father owned and edited the newspaper in a small town in southern Pennsylvania. I knew he wanted me to take over from him eventually, but it became clear to both of us as I grew up that I was more interested in science than journalism. When I told him I wanted to go to the US Naval Academy at Annapolis, he hadn’t argued. The Vietnam War was just coming to an end, joining the military was a far from fashionable thing for an eighteen year old to do, but he understood that I believed I was serving my country against a real enemy. He believed I was too.

I had graduated from the Academy, majoring in Physics rather than the more common Engineering, spent six months at the nuclear propulsion school in Florida, six months training on the prototype reactor in Idaho and then three months on the Submarine Officers Basic Course at Groton. After all that, I had joined the Alexander Hamilton as an ensign. I got my nuclear qualifications, had been promoted to lieutenant and completed my fourth patrol on the boat.

I had made friends, good friends. One of these was Lars da Silva, who had graduated in the same class as me from the Academy, and had also joined the Hamilton as an ensign. His olive skin, green eyes and thick blonde moustache testified to his heritage: his mother came from Midwestern Swedish stock and his father was Brazilian. We shared a stateroom with a third junior officer, Matt Curtis: it was known as the ‘JO Jungle’.

Another was Craig Naylor. Craig was a couple of years older than Lars and me. Broad-chested with a round face and winning smile, he was serving his second tour on patrol, his first having been on a fast-attack submarine in the Pacific. He was one of the four ‘department heads’ on the boat. In his case he was weapons officer, which meant he was in charge of the missile command centre, and of actually launching the submarine’s nuclear weapons.

Craig was married. Kind of. Two weeks after he had returned to his married quarters in Groton from his last patrol, his wife Maria had announced she was leaving him. She said it wasn’t for anyone else; it was just that to be a submariner’s spouse was to be a wife for only half the year, a half wife. It was no way for a woman to live her life, no way for a couple to coexist, no way to bring up children. She was going to end it before it drove her any crazier than she already was.

Craig was bewildered. Such separations were a common enough event in the submarine service; Maria did have logic on her side. But she had never mentioned any of this before. There had been no ‘me or the Navy’ ultimatum.

Then it had all become clear. There was a guy called Tony Opizzi; an insurance salesman based in nearby New London.

Craig had needed company, fast, and Lars and I were happy to provide it. No one could deny that Craig was an all-round good guy. He was a straightforward, upbeat man who just made you feel good about yourself. He was great to be with on a submarine. He was great to be with in a bar.

Lars and I were not the only people who felt sorry for Craig. His younger sister, Vicky, who had just started working for a bank on Wall Street, invited Craig and a couple of his friends to stay with her in the city over the Labor Day weekend.

Would Lars and I like to come?

You bet we would.