Test Run of a Stealthy Picket

By Hugh Sidey

The Presidency

Prowling a deep Atlantic Ocean trench, Captain Robin White tamps some stray wisps of tobacco into his squat pipe, looking more like a professor than the skipper of an attack submarine. He calculates that he and his men are about as far distant in the presidential command network as one could get. But he holds the lethal stings, and his crew are essential players in the military power game. Captain White knows that.

His young officers circle White at a lunch of steak, corn on the cob and strawberry shortcake. They have an intense curiosity about the White House and Presidents, about the center of a power structure that binds them and shapes their lives but that most will never personally hear or see. As nuclear engines throb quietly below the waves, they ask questions about the actions of Kennedy, Nixon and Carter. Perhaps they are too polite, or too young, to wonder out loud if Ronald Reagan knows what he is doing in this dangerous world.

To a visitor from Washington who has been swallowed up for a few hours in this cobalt fantasy world, the 14 officers and 115 men of the U.S.S. Atlanta--also known as SSN 712--seem to be the only collection of Americans not complaining, or demanding some thing from their Government. They are serving their country, and serving it well.

Dive. Dive. The klaxon sounds. Periscopes go down. The Atlanta, commissioned a month ago, is on a test run, honing ship and crew for duty, before they go on station as a stealthy picket in the outer rim of U.S. defense. Vice Admiral Steven White, Commander Submarine Force U.S. Atlantic Fleet, inspects his newest ward-- The U.S.S. Atlanta on a sea trial in the Atlantic one of 81 submarines under

his command--listening to the language of men and machine that he knows so well. After 19 years of undersea duty, he can automatically feel and gauge a ship's rhythm.

The Atlanta plunges and rises hundreds of feet, tilts and corners, its sonar banks collecting the undersea sounds and translating them into pictures on dozens of oscilloscopes in darkened crevices of the hull. The torpedoes lie silent in their racks, waiting to be loaded and fired.

The mission is routine, uneventful. Nonetheless, in the back of every crewman's mind is the knowledge that submarines like theirs in the British navy are deployed in icy waters around the Falkland Islands. They are outriders of the British task force that has been dispatched to uphold the rule of law and a nation's honor. Those submarines may have to quit playing games and go into early combat. That thought is everywhere inside the Atlanta.

The prospect that a naval war could actually break out somewhere in the South Atlantic has changed the lives of the men aboard this submarine. They do not mention it, but they sense the sudden difference. So, in a less direct way, do the rest of us in the U.S. We also sense the impotence of too much power. The nuclear weapons that were trotted out of the military closet for symbolic effect by Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower and John Kennedy are less and less serviceable for the globe's trouble spots. Nuclear weapons can no longer intimidate the Soviets, who have as many of them as we do; in the masses now assembled by both superpowers, those weapons threaten, if unleashed, a hideous end to civilization.

There is a growing consensus in the U.S. that we must meet our problems with more precise and less destructive technology; the nuclear-powered Atlanta, armed with conventional weapons, is a superb example. Captain White believes that if one day the U.S. is forced into combat along the valleys and mountains of the ocean's floor, there is only one way to win it--attack. He has no doubts about his determination, his men or his submarine. In that confidence now lies much of the security of this nation.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.