Stealth at sea: the history of the submarine

An acclaimed military historian tells the story of a weapon that played crucial parts in both world wars and in the cold war: the submarine. This fresh and wide-ranging chronicle arrives as strategists rethink the role of these vessels in the new world order. In less than a century the submarine has matched or overtaken in military significance the battleship, the aircraft carrier, the strategic bomber, even the land-based missile in its silo. Dan van der Vat tells how the submersible man-of-war progressed from being a gleam in the eye of Fenian Irishmen intent on damaging the British Navy to becoming the most intricate technological system devised by man. Most important and fascinating of all are his accounts of the development of submarine strategy during the epochal naval campaigns of the twentieth century. At the close of the cold war, the world has more than seven hundred submarines, some three hundred of them nuclear-powered and scores still equipped with nuclear missiles.