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Red Star Rogue: The Untold Story of a Soviet Submarine's Nuclear Strike Attempt on the U.S. Kenneth Sewell with Clint Richmond. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005. 226 pp. Illus. Notes. Index. $25.00.
Red Star Rogue is yet another conspiracy theory in the same vein as the "who really shot JFK" or "what did FDR really know before Pearl Harbor" books that continue to circulate. Americans love conspiracy theories and good ones sell books-even if far-fetched and straining credulity.
The book's focus is the March 1968 loss of K-129, a Soviet Golf-11 class diesel-powered ballistic-missile submarine (SSB), in the mid-Pacific. This story has been well publicized by the many books written about the partial recovery of her wreckage by the Hughes Glomar Explorer.
In the authors' words: "What occurred aboard K-129 in its final days... will not likely ever be known." In the safety of this likelihood, they construct a "reasonable hypothesis." An interesting hypothesis it is, but reasonable it is not.
The authors contend that K-129 was a rogue assigned to launch a nuclear missile strike on Pearl Harbor. It would do this while surfaced, so as to look to American intelligence like a Chinese Golf-1 SSB. This would cause us to launch a nuclear retaliatory strike on China, with the ensuing nuclear exchanges greatly weakening the Soviet Union's primary adversaries while they sat back and watched. As a result, the Soviets could reduce defense spending and...