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Khrushchev in 1964. Admiral Sergey G. Gorshkov, commander in chief of the Soviet navy, believed that nuclear submarines were best suited to lead the way in the development of the Soviets’ new blue-water navy.
    However, the naval construction program, along with rapid expansion of land-based intercontinental nuclear weapons, was crippling the economy of the Communist behemoth. The Kremlin was expending as much as 60 percent of the country’s gross national product on military and space budgets. The Soviet people knew only that their shoes were ill-fitting and the shelves were usually empty at the cooperative stores.
    Despite this huge military outlay, the Americans continued to outpace the Soviets in construction of nuclear weapons and the missiles, ships, and aircraft needed to deliver them. More important than numerical superiority was the quality of the weaponry. The United States was producing more technologically advanced, longer-range, multiwarhead missiles and a new generation of nuclear-powered submarines.
    The bellicose rhetoric of Kremlin politicians did not fool everyone. A few Moscow economists already knew the Communist system of centralized control had failed to live up to expectations and stood no chance of competing with modern Western economies. Many generals and admirals in the Soviet Union watched the rapid modernization of the U.S. Air Force and Navy with growing apprehension.
    To counter the widening nuclear weapons gap, Kremlin strategists pinned hopes on what they deemed to be America’s greatest weakness, the inability of Americans to sacrifice their people for the good of the collective. They knew Americans could never face the terrible prospect of losing even a single city to a nuclear attack. Soviet leaders based their beliefs on observations of American battle tactics during World War II. On the battlefield, U.S. commanders favored maneuver and firepower over frontal assault to achieve victory. The public outcry over casualty figures in Vietnam seemed to verify their assumptions. Some cynical leaders in the Soviet Union believed that as long as they could guarantee the incineration of just one U.S. city, it would be enough to hold the American hawks in check.
    The key to the success of this “have-not” strategy was the ballistic missile submarine. While the Americans held vast technological and numerical superiority in airborne nuclear missiles and intercontinental ballistic missiles, the Soviets believed their sea-launched ballistic missiles would be more than enough to deter a first strike. A crash program of naval construction also focused on launching a number of destroyers and cruisers armed with surface-to-surface missiles. But since these ships were vulnerable, too, the primary element in the short-term deterrence plan was the missile submarine.
    By 1967, the Soviet navy had launched a powerful and dangerous blue-water armada in the Atlantic Ocean and, for the first time, was a force to be reckoned with in the Mediterranean Sea. Soviet fleets began sailing missile cruisers and submarines into the ports of Third World countries, a strategy that won new converts to Communism. The increasingly powerful Red fleet served to further intimidate vassal Socialist Republics around the Baltic and Black seas, and to keep the always-restive Warsaw Pact countries of Eastern Europe in line.
    The Soviets boasted of their new sea power. Marshal Rodion Mali-novsky, the Soviet minister of defense, pronounced in a speech shortly before his death in 1967: “First priority is being given to the strategic missile forces and atomic missile-launching submarines—forces which are the principal means of deterring the aggressor and decisively defeating him in war.”
    In October 1967, Admiral Gorshkov clearly defined the new Soviet ambitions in a speech delivered on the fiftieth anniversary of the Soviet fleet. He warned, “In the past our ships and naval aviation units have operated primarily near our coast,