We Come Unseen

We Come Unseen, first published in 2001, follows the careers of six Royal Navy submariners from their graduation from Dartmouth's Britannia Royal Naval College in 1963, just after the Cuban Missile Crisis, to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Between these dates, it seemed that nuclear war was never far away - and Jim Ring explains not only the nuclear threat and its beginnings in the last days of the Second World War, but why the Polaris and Trident submarines ('capable of inflicting the damage of the bombs that fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki many times over'), and their accompanying attack submarines, were critical to avoiding war. Alongside a gripping narrative of the Cold War game of hide-and-seek played out under the waves of the northern seas, Ring gives an account of the history of submarine warfare from its earliest, pre-nuclear days to the 1982 combat in the Falklands. 'A welcome acknowledgement of one of the Cold War's little-known aspects.' Alan Judd, Sunday Telegraph 'An extraordinary story . . . one of the most significant naval books of the year.' Ship's Telegraph 'A remarkable story.' Navy News

Jim Ring is an author and film-maker. Four of his titles are being reissued in Faber Finds: Erskine Childers; How the English Made the Alps; We Come Unseen: The Untold Story of Britain's Cold WarSubmariners; Riviera: The Rise and Rise of the Côte d'Azur., Jim Ring's 1996 début, Erskine Childers, won the Marsh Prize for biography. It was followed by How the English Made the Alps which was described as 'fascinating' by the Daily Telegraph and 'evocative and entertaining' by the Financial Times. His collective biography of Britain's leading Cold War submariners, We Come Unseen, won the Mountbatten Prize and was called 'a welcome acknowledgement of one of the Cold War's little-known aspects' by the Sunday Telegraph.