The Barents Sea was gray and angry on November 15, 1969. Beneath those frigid waves, two nuclear submarines—one American, one Soviet—found themselves in a dance of shadows that neither captain intended to finish with a crash. The USS Gato, an American attack submarine built for silent hunting, and the Soviet K-19, a ballistic missile boat already infamous among sailors as “the Widowmaker,” collided 200 feet below the surface. No lives were lost, no missiles fired, but for a few long seconds, the Cold War trembled on the edge of disaster. What followed was a cover-up so complete that even the men who served aboard Gato rarely spoke of it for decades. The “Barents Bump,” as it’s come to be called, was one of the closest peacetime encounters between nuclear powers that could have turned catastrophic.

Ver todos los episodios