Sixty Feet Down

The Thrilling Story of the Submarine That Rose From the Deep to Change the Cold War Forever

On October 4, 1957, a beeping Soviet satellite shattered American confidence and set off a race against time. Within three years, a half-finished attack submarine hull—hastily reordered, redesigned, and rechristened—would answer Sputnik in the most dramatic fashion imaginable.

Sixty Feet Down tells the story of the USS George Washington, the vessel that transformed nuclear strategy forever. Built in barely two years through an improvised engineering effort that broke every convention of naval procurement, she carried a missile system that had never been tested from underwater, guided by navigation technology invented almost as fast as it could be installed. On July 20, 1960, thirty miles off Cape Canaveral, her crew fired a Polaris missile from beneath the waves—the first submerged ballistic missile launch in history—and sent home four words that would echo through Cold War legend: "Polaris from out of the deep to target. Perfect."

Drawing on original patrol logs, contractor records, and the recollections of the men who served aboard her, Daniel Hardy traces George Washington's extraordinary twenty-five-year career: the grueling Blue-Gold patrol rotations that invented an entirely new form of naval service, the Cold War's tensest years spent silently on station in the North Atlantic and Pacific, a tragic collision in the fog off Japan, and a decommissioning that closed the book on the vessel that had made continuous nuclear deterrence a demonstrated reality rather than a theory.

This is the story of the ship that came from beneath the sea to hold the peace of the world in its hands.