I used to wonder why all of our capability, consisting of 896 Hiroshima equivalents, in the form of 56 Tomahawks, each carrying a 200-kiloton nuclear warhead, should be reserved for one target. A small part of it would have served the purpose. Or, alternatively, we could have been allocated a number of targets. Principally, I believe, the matter had to do with the all-ruling “mix” principle, in this case concentrating one ship on one target (for all I know even ourselves with some sort of backup, should anything prevent us from fulfilling our mission); a philosophy made possible by the aforementioned shortage of targets in comparison with the total capability. It had always been my judgment that in respect to that target, if it ever came to that, we would be ordered to send off but a small portion of our vertical capability, leaving us diminished scarcely at all, with the major portion of the missiles available for whatever undefined, indeed unforeseeable purpose they might be needed.
It had always been judged—a fact naturally known to the last hand aboard, reference never made to it—that once we fired our missiles, eliminated our target, our own ship was essentially not just at high risk but quite reasonably forfeit, one ship with a complement of 305 in exchange for a dozen SS-18 missile silos and parenthetically 311,656 of theirs, being considered not a bad trade-off. There was, however, one fortuitous circumstance that constituted, having launched, our chief chance of escape: the slowness of the Tomahawk itself, granting us four free hours from the time it left the ship until it hit target. And on all the high seas, than ours there was no faster ship.
The range of the Tomahawk missile was 2,500 miles. When the ice packed up in the Barents, we slid back down into the Norwegian Sea and when and if it packed up there, into the Baltic. Sometimes moving among them purely to reduce detection. Taken together with the Tomahawk range, the three bodies of water gave us a truly great amount of sea room over which to roam, immensely enhancing our own security. But whether in the Barents, Norwegian, or Baltic seas, our cruising patterns kept us at all times within a range not to exceed 1,500 miles from our city. Generally we were considerably nearer.