Dark Waters by Lee Vybrony & Don Davis tells the story of the design, construction and first few years of service of the NR-1, the US Navy’s smallest and most classified nuclear submarine. I think what really hooked me was that it has wheels for driving along the bottom of the sea.
Vybrony was a member of the NR-1’s commissioning crew, an elite group pulled from the Navy’s top submariners in 1966, and he recounts his experiences throughout the construction, shakedown cruises, and first missions in the late sixties.
The crew of the NR-1 faced difficulties throughout those first years including reactor failure during a hurricane, getting caught in a fishing net on the bottom of Narragansett Bay, driving off an undersea cliff, and accidentally driving into an old WWII-era undersea minefield.
Much of what the NR-1 did (and still does) is highly classified so there isn’t as much detail about some of its missions, but Vybrony does a good job bringing the reader on board for a glimpse of life onboard the tiny ship with wheels.
James Brush is a teacher and writer who lives in Austin, TX. He tries to get outside as much as possible.
[…] fascination with submarines led me to read about the NR-1 last summer, which in turn led me to Sherry Sontag and Christoper Drew’s thrilling 1998 […]