At this point in time, I believe that only a fraction of the history of submarines has been written. One thing that is not a Cold War secret by any means, however, is the fact that being a submariner is a dangerous job indeed. If something ever goes wrong, your odds of surviving the crisis are very low. The documentary Lost Subs: Disaster at Sea looks back on four such disasters, two American and two Russian/Soviet. Remarkably, a number of men lived to tell the tale of two of them.

The documentary opens and closes with the Kursk disaster, which was still a fairly recent event when this video was released in 2002. Most people are familiar with the Kursk, as it was a huge international story -- made even more memorable by the initial attempts by the Russian government to downplay the severity of the accident (and with it the embarrassment of losing the most prominent sub in their navy). All 118 men onboard died, 23 of whom could have been saved if Russia had accepted international offers of assistance in the immediate aftermath of the accident.

A second Russian (Soviet) sub also makes the list, and that would be APL K-19, also known as The Widowmaker. Having narrowly avoided a collision with an American sub weeks earlier, K-19 fell victim to a radioactive coolant link. Unable to send any distress signal due to a damaged antenna, many onboard survived thanks to eight heroic volunteers who exposed themselves to deadly radiation in order to rig up another cooling unit. This documentary states that these men knew they were accepting a suicide mission, but I have read other sources that say the men were not informed of the danger.

The other two submarine disasters chronicled here are American. One of them, the USS Thresher in 1963, remains the deadliest sub disaster in history. The Thresher was lost during deep-diving trials when a valve failure ultimately led to a nuclear reactor shutdown. There was never any hope of saving the 129 men onboard this sub because it literally imploded after sinking below its maximum depth. The story of the USS Squalus, which sank in 1939, is not so tragic a story, as 33 of its men were rescued (some 30 hours after the accident) by the new and untested McCann Submarine Rescue Chamber. All these decades later, it is still the greatest submarine rescue in history.

Lost Subs doesn't attempt to analyze what went wrong in these four submarine disasters, but it does offer a very good overview of the events themselves. It also makes you respect all the more those men and women who risk their lives for months on end inside these gigantic tin cans in service to their country. As the Cold War secrets of submarine warfare continue to be released, I believe we will have more and more reason to honor all of the men of the silent service -- but especially those who never got to come home.