Keeping Up with the Soviets

For an entire generation of Americans, the Cold War is a history lesson rather than personal memory. Basement fallout shelters were standard features of some new home developments, and cocktail party conversations often revolved around the latest front-page stories about atrocities committed by the “Reds” and the “Commies” in China and the Soviet Union. For Americans who still had fresh memories of Senator Joseph McCarthy's witch hunts and the executions of “atomic spies” Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the news that the Russians had successfully placed the first artificial satellite, named Sputnik, in orbit on October 4, 1957, only seemed to confirm that the United States was losing the political and scientific battles for the hearts and minds of the world.

"[I]n those days ... we didn't believe [the Soviet Union] could build a refrigerator. And we were very stunned that they had done this," recalls space journalist Jay Barbee.

Caption: Fallout shelters were no joke in the 1950s, and Civil Defense pamphlets detailed how to stock them with food, water, and lanterns. National Archives, ca. 1957.

Now Who's Playing Catch-Up?

The Soviets had been caught flatfooted in the game of international one-up-manship that characterized the Cold War years. It would be four years before they matched the Nautilus's feat, and the Arctic Ocean would become a major area of confrontation in an undersea arms race. For the next thirty years American and Soviet submarines would play cat and mouse under the ice cap, shadowing each other's vessels, tapping underwater communications cables, and mapping the coldest, darkest ocean in the world to prepare for a war that never came.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990, and especially in the past ten years as resource competition in the Arctic has intensified, once-secret geographical information gathered during the Cold War has dribbled into the public domain. Ironically, the data has become the foundation for renewed international confrontations in the race to discover and lock up new sources of oil and natural gas.

The Nautilus never returned to the Pole, although she continued on active service until 1979. Today she is preserved as floating museum ship at the Submarine Force Library and Museum in Groton, Connecticut. Commander William R. Anderson retired from the Navy several years after his historic voyage and went on to serve four terms in Congress as a Democrat from the Sixth District of Tennessee. He was defeated in 1972 after speaking out against the Vietnam War and FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. He died February 25, 2007, at age 85.

Caption: Soviet missile submarines, such as the Delta III shown in this declassified Defense Intelligence Agency painting from 1987, routinely ran patrols under the Arctic ice cap, and just as routinely were shadowed by American hunter-killer submarines determined to stop them from launching. DIA Military Art Collection: The threat in the 1980s.