Summary of Josh Dean's The Taking of K-129

By IRB Media

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.

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#1 The Soviet nuclear ballistic missile submarine K-129 left Petropavlovsk, on Russia’s remote, frigid Kamchatka peninsula, with a crew of ninety-eight after dark on February 24, 1968, for a routine but unexpected patrol. The captain and second-in-command were both experienced officers.

#2 The crew of the K-129 was split into two groups for the duration of the break. Half went on vacation, while the other half were assigned to routine maintenance. When they switched roles, the crew was surprised to find that they had only two weeks to get the sub ready for service.

#3 The K-129 was a Soviet ballistic missile sub that carried three R-21 missiles. Each R-21 had a white nose cone stuffed with a nuclear warhead and was loaded into one of the three vertical launch tubes behind the sub’s conning tower.

#4 The Soviet sub K-129 was ordered to patrol the Pacific Ocean and wait for the arrival of a large antisubmarine ship that would escort her as far as the booms. The sub then turned toward the US coast.

• Language: English
• Publisher: IRB Media
• Release date: Mar 22, 2022
• ISBN: 9781669365273

IRB Media

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Insights from Chapter 1

#1

The Soviet nuclear ballistic missile submarine K-129 left Petropavlovsk, on Russia’s remote, frigid Kamchatka peninsula, with a crew of ninety-eight after dark on February 24, 1968, for a routine but unexpected patrol. The captain and second-in-command were both experienced officers.

#2

The crew of the K-129 was split into two groups for the duration of the break. Half went on vacation, while the other half were assigned to routine maintenance. When they switched roles, the crew was surprised to find that they had only two weeks to get the sub ready for service.

#3

The K-129 was a Soviet ballistic missile sub that carried three R-21 missiles. Each R-21 had a white nose cone stuffed with a nuclear warhead and was loaded into one of the three vertical launch tubes behind the sub’s conning tower.

#4

The Soviet sub K-129 was ordered to patrol the Pacific Ocean and wait for the arrival of a large antisubmarine ship that would escort her as far as the booms. The sub then turned toward the US coast.

#5

The most important attribute of a submarine is stealth, and what made them so important during the Cold War was that they enabled both sides to move nuclear missiles from land to sea, where they would remain capable of striking and prolonging a war even if the homeland’s nuclear arsenal had been eliminated.

#6

The K-129 was a routine combat patrol, and nothing about it was unusual. However, on March 8, a watch officer at Soviet Navy Central Command noticed that the sub failed to transmit a radio message as scheduled, and he brought the matter to his superiors. An alert was declared.

#7

The Soviet Union had never lost a submarine with nuclear missiles on board, but the idea of it happening was a nightmare for command. They thought about all sorts of possibilities for the silence, from damage to the ship’s antennas to a collision with another vessel.

#8

The US Navy maintained a constant presence off the Kamchatka Coast, and the USS Barb was sitting quietly in radio silence near Vladivostok when the Soviet Navy’s mobilization began. The Barb’s captain, Bernard Bud Kauderer, was initially confused by the frantic reaction.

#9

The Soviets did not know where to look for the K-129, as they only knew where the sub had been last, in the Philippines, and where it was headed, Hawaii. They focused the search along those lines, looking for oil slicks, debris, or anything else on the surface that could indicate a disaster.

#10

The return of the K-129 was scheduled for May 5, but when that date came and went, the families back in Petropavlovsk began to accept that their husbands and sons weren’t coming home. They were given a single lump-sum payment of fifteen hundred rubles plus a partial pension.

Insights from Chapter 2

#1

In Washington, Captain Jim Bradley had an idea. He thought that if the United States could locate the sub’s precise location, it might be able to access the wreck and mine it for a host of valuable intelligence, including communication codes, code-breaking machinery, and most importantly, the nuclear warheads on the ballistic missiles.

#2

The US Navy installed a system of underwater hydrophones in the early 1950s, and by the 1960s, it was clear that the balance of power in the Cold War was likely to be tipped under the oceans.

#3

Bradley knew that the network of hydrophone arrays in the Pacific was especially vast, and he asked Captain Joseph P. Kelly, who oversaw SOSUS, to pull the acoustic data from the area of the Soviet search and have his analysts look it over closely for anomalous events.

#4

The Air Force began building a system that used seismography to detect abnormal signals in the earth that could indicate explosions. It was called the Atomic Energy Detection System, or AEDS.

#5

The American government believed that a Soviet Golf-class submarine had been on patrol in the area where the search had taken place, and had not been heard from since. The Soviets had called off the search, and the Americans went to find the submarine.

Insights from Chapter 3

#1

The idea of recovering key components of a Soviet ballistic missile submarine with a full arsenal of nuclear