Gilad commands an Israeli submarine equipped with nuclear-tipped cruise missiles. Nuclear detonations in Israel and attacks against Israeli embassies leave him with no way to receive orders from civilian or military authorities. A letter written by the prime minister before the mission provides his only instruction. The submarine crew dodges attacks from foreign navies, replenishes food and fuel far from home, and faces a deadly fire.
As tensions rise, Gilad must persuade his own officers and crew, as well as the vengeful commander of a second Israeli submarine, of his decisions. A feisty female intelligence officer onboard helps, but provides unexpected challenges.
Now, with millions of lives at stake, Gilad has difficult choices-ones that may decide the fate of the free world.
The review by Slate.com columnist Ron Rosenbaum dated May 08, 2009 is reproduced below following its url.
slate.com/id/2217899/
I want to return to Cormac McCarthy and the mystery he leaves us with at the end of his novel. But before I do I want to point out that not all of the new nuclear novels deserve the nuke porn label. I want to recommend one nuclear war novel that rises above nuke porn and takes an all-too-sober look at the way nuclear war could consume us.
Depth of Revenge by Richard Golden came to my attention in an unusual way. It's not an airport bookstore production but comes from a small self-publishing company called iUniverse. After my recent column on "The Letter of Last Resort" about the safe within the safe on British subs that contains the prime minister's handwritten instructions on what the captain should do in terms of retaliation should the sub be cut off from a potentially incinerated United Kingdom by a "decapitating strike."
Mr. Golden told me he'd written a novel about-or involving-a similar "Letter of Last Resort" aboard an Israeli nuclear-armed sub in the aftermath of the nuclear destruction of the state of Israel, a second Holocaust.
I was skeptical, but when the novel arrived, I was impressed by its low-key nonsensational treatment of ineradicably sensational events-and by the highly detailed, convincing verisimilitude of the submarine interior, the procedures in wartime, the letter itself.
I wrote Golden that his book was done with such vividness that anyone would suspect the author was, in fact, an Israeli submarine officer, but no, he said, he got most of his information from the Internet, although he mentioned one former Israel submariner source.
It's a book that brings the theological and metaphysical ramifications of nuclear warfare down to earth, actually far beneath the surface of the earth if you want to get technical. It illustrates another hallmark of the new nuclear fiction: its awareness of the ways regional nuclear wars can escalate to world wars. The first age of nuke lit was strictly bipolar. Red or Dead. U.S. vs. USSR. Now there are many paths to the worldwide cataclysm that awaits us. Golden's book deserves at least the attention the airport best-sellers get, since its scenarios are so carefully thought out and it makes apparent the difficulties of decisions about retaliation and deterrence, the urgency of thinking about them ahead of time.
