The Barents Sea was gray and angry on November 15, 1969. Beneath those frigid waves, two nuclear submarines—one American, one Soviet—found themselves in a dance of shadows that neither captain intended to finish with a crash. The USS Gato, an American attack submarine built for silent hunting, and the Soviet K-19, a ballistic missile boat already infamous among sailors as “the Widowmaker,” collided 200 feet below the surface. No lives were lost, no missiles fired, but for a few long seconds, the Cold War trembled on the edge of disaster. What followed was a cover-up so complete that even the men who served aboard Gato rarely spoke of it for decades. The “Barents Bump,” as it’s come to be called, was one of the closest peacetime encounters between nuclear powers that could have turned catastrophic.

In the film The Caine Mutiny, we are told that there has never been a mutiny aboard a United States Navy ship. That is true, at least by the letter of the law. But there have been moments that tested the courage, discipline, and endurance of those who serve beneath the waves.

This is the story of one such moment. In November 1943, deep in the Makassar Strait, the crew of the submarine USS Billfish found themselves fighting not only the enemy above but fear within. Their commanding officer lost his nerve during a relentless sixteen-hour depth charge attack, leaving his men to face the unthinkable.

For sixty years, the truth of what happened aboard Billfish remained buried in silence. Only decades later would the full story come to light, revealing not rebellion, but a different kind of bravery, born in the darkest depths of war.

In the years after World War II, the U.S. Navy faced a new kind of threat. The kamikazes were gone, but the sky itself had become the enemy. Long before satellites and airborne warning planes, the Navy turned to an unlikely solution. It pulled its old fleet submarines out of mothballs and refitted them with radar, turning hunters of the deep into sentinels of the sky.

These were the radar picket submarines, known by the mysterious designation SSR. They formed a short but fascinating chapter in Cold War history, watching for danger from beneath the waves. In this episode, we’ll explore how the program called Project Migraine transformed boats like USS Requin and USS Burrfish into the Navy’s earliest early-warning systems. It’s the story of ingenuity, frustration, and adaptation in an age when America’s eyes had to look not just across the seas, but far above them.