A cold war mission, deep in the arctic

Atop the globe, the icy surface of the Arctic Zone Ocean has remained relatively peaceful. But its depths have boiled with machination, no more so than in the Cold War.

though the superpowers planned to turn those depths into an hell of exploding torpedoes and rise missiles, the brotherhood of submariners - the silent service, both Russian and American - has worked hard over the decennary to keep the specific of those plans hush-hush.

Now, a few secrets are spilling through a crack in the wall of silence, revealing some of the scientific discipline and spying that went into the Judgment Day preparations.

A new book, "unknown region Waters," recounts the 1970 ocean trip of a pigboat, the white croaker, on a pioneering dive below the ice pack to map the Siberian continental shelf. The United States did so as part of a clandestine effort to prepare for Arctic Zone submarine operations and to win any armed forces showdown with the Soviet Union.

In great secretiveness, moving as softly as possible below treacherous ice, the white croaker, under the bid of Captain Alfred McLaren, mapped one thousand of miles of antecedently uncharted ocean floor in hunt of safe pigboat routes. It often had to manoeuvre between shoal bottoms and ice keels extending down from the surface more than 100 feet, or 30 metre, threatening the sub and the crew of 117 men with ruin.

Another danger was that the sub might merely be frozen in place with no way out and no way to call for help as food and other supplies dwindled.

The white croaker at one point became stuck in a dead end. The deliverance took an hour and tense backtracking out of what had threatened to become an icy tomb.

"I still dream about it every other week," McLaren, 75, the book's writer, recalled in an interview. "It was hairy." The University of Alabama Press is publishing his recollections of the voyage.

Sylvia Earle, an oceanographer and the former chief scientist of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said such feats in perilous waters made McLaren a genuine hero. "The sub could have disappeared, and nobody would have known anything about it," she said. "But they came through. That's exploration at its most exquisite."

After McLaren's mission, the Arctic became a theater of military operations in which the Soviets tried to hide their missile-carrying subs under the fringes of the ice pack while American attack subs tried relentlessly to track them. The goal was to destroy the Soviet subs if the Cold War turned hot, doing so quickly enough to keep them from launching their missiles and nuclear warheads at the United States.

Norman Polmar, an author and analyst on U.S. Navy operations, called the polar environment "very, very difficult" for subs. He said ice dangling from the surface in endless shapes and sizes made the sub's main eyes - sonar beams that bounce sound off the bottom and surrounding objects - work poorly.

McLaren commanded one of the navy's most advanced warships, a jet-black monster nearly 300 feet long. It was the first of a large class of submarines specially designed for year-round operations in polar regions. As such, it boasted an array of special acoustic gear meant to help it visualize the complex world beneath the pack ice.

For instance, the sub had a special sensor to detect icebergs jutting downward with threatening spikes. From bow to stern, it had a total of seven acoustic sensors pointing upward to help the crew judge the thickness of ice overhead.

As McLaren recounts in "Unknown Waters," the Queenfish, in preparation for its Arctic voyage, was stripped of all identifying marks and picked up a full load of torpedoes.

It arrived at the North Pole on Aug. 5, 1970, rising through open water. On the ice, an impromptu Santa Claus in a red suit frolicked with crew members. The submarine then sailed for the Siberian continental shelf, where it began its mission of secret reconnaissance.

Moscow claimed seas extending 230 miles, or 370 kilometers, from its shores, including most of the shelf, whose waters averaged a few hundred feet deep. But Washington recognized just a 12-mile territorial limit, and McLaren was instructed to play by those rules.

As the book recounts, the sub repeatedly ventured within periscope range of Soviet land. In the Severnaya Zemlya Archipelago, its crew examined the October Revolution and Bolshevik Islands.

The Queenfish also spotted a convoy. "I was able to see and identify all six ships as Soviet," McLaren writes. "They consisted of an icebreaker leading a tanker and four cargo ships on an easterly course that slowly weaved back and forth through the chaotic ice pack."