46 Million Square Kilometers and the Soviet Hunt for Polaris

By Eleanor Voss · September 23, 2026

A 1974 memorandum, kept secret for decades, details the Soviet plan to preemptively destroy US missile submarines—and the internal brawl over who got to do it.

The survival of the American city depended on a few hundred miles of cold saltwater and the silence of a reactor. If the Soviet Union could find the Polaris submarines before they launched, the entire logic of the nuclear triad collapsed into a massacre of those left on shore.

This was the calculus in 1966, and it remained the preoccupation of the Kremlin well into the seventies. A memorandum dated 25 February 1974, signed by William E. Nelson, the Deputy Director for Operations at the CIA, brings a Soviet internal dispute into the light. The memo is an analysis of a secret publication from the USSR Ministry of Defense—the government body that supervised the Soviet Armed Forces—specifically an issue of the journal Military Thought. The document is a translation and summary of a theoretical piece written by General-Mayor of Aviation P. Nevzorov, a naval aviation officer who died in February 1967.

The Brawl Over the Boomer

War-planning is rarely just about the enemy; it is usually about who gets the budget and the glory. In the pages of Military Thought, General-Mayor P. Nevzorov used his platform to dismantle the pretensions of a colleague. The record shows that Nevzorov was writing a direct rebuttal to an earlier piece by Colonel G. Lebedev, an officer who had argued in 1965 that long-range aviation could play a primary role in hunting submarines.

Nevzorov did not mince words. He stated that Colonel Lebedev "does not assess quite correctly the possible degree to which the various forces, and first of all, long-range aviation, can participate in combatting missile-carrying submarines." The core of the dispute was technical and absolute: long-range bombers cannot see through water. Nevzorov pointed out that "long-range aviation aircraft do not have any technical means of underwater detection." To suggest that a strategic bomber could independently hunt a submerged submarine was, in Nevzorov's reading, a fantasy.

This was not a polite academic disagreement. This was an institutional fight over the definition of antisubmarine warfare (ASW). Nevzorov argued that while long-range aviation could hit the shore installations that supported the submarines, it was useless for "thwarting the submarine enemy's nuclear attack during the initial period of a war." He insisted that only specialized ASW aviation, equipped with "radiohydroacoustic, magnetometric, thermal direction-finding," and optical sensors, could actually kill a boomer at sea.

46 Million Square Kilometers

Beyond the bickering of generals, the record exposes the sheer scale of the Soviet anxiety. Nevzorov’s calculations for the search area are staggering. He estimated that the overall scope of the waters from which Polaris missiles could be launched against Soviet territory amounted to "approximately 46 million square kilometers."

Even after narrowing the focus to the most likely launching zones, Nevzorov concluded the Soviets still had to monitor 20 million square kilometers. The public record establishes that the United States had built 37 missile submarines by the mid-sixties, with 29 in active service. To the Soviet high command, these were not just ships; they were invisible ghosts capable of launching 16 missiles in 15 minutes.

Nevzorov’s solution was a doctrine of aggression. He argued that the only way to ensure survival was the "preemptive destruction of missile submarines." The record is explicit: the Soviet goal was to destroy the boats "before the enemy launches his missiles, by the procedure of preemptive actions taken on orders of the Supreme High Command." This was the cold math of the era: kill the submarines in their holes, or lose the cities.

The Eight-Year Gap

There is a glaring discrepancy in the timeline of this file. The intelligence information was dated "Late 1966," yet the memorandum from William E. Nelson to the Director of Central Intelligence was written in February 1974. The CIA was circulating a translation of a dead man's article eight years after it was written.

Connecting the dates suggests a specific utility for this old text. By 1974, the US Navy had evolved its patrol patterns and expanded the Polaris fleet. The desk's reading is that this memorandum was not intended to provide current intelligence, but was a retrospective doctrinal audit. Langley was likely using the 1966 theory to validate observed Soviet naval behavior in the early seventies. If the Soviets were suddenly intensifying their ASW patrols in specific corridors, the CIA looked back at the Military Thought archives to see if the behavior matched the theory. They weren't reading the news; they were reading the blueprint to see if the building was being constructed as planned.

Furthermore, the memorandum contains a stark warning: "Because the source of this report is extremely sensitive, this document should be handled on a strict need-to-know basis." This is the most telling gap in the record. The Military Thought journal, as the record notes, was "distributed down to the level of division commander."

If a document is distributed to every division commander in the Soviet military, it is not "extremely sensitive" in the sense of being a closely guarded secret. The sensitivity lies not in the content, but in the acquisition. The pattern suggests that the "extremely sensitive source" was not a human asset—a mole in the Ministry of Defense—but a compromised technical pipeline. The CIA likely had a way to intercept the printing or distribution chain of the Ministry's journals, effectively stealing the mail of the entire Soviet officer corps. The strict need-to-know was not to protect the theory of ASW, but to protect the pipe.

The Shadow of the Top Secret

There is one final detail that defines the shape of this intelligence effort. The CIA notes that Military Thought was published in three versions: RESTRICTED, SECRET, and TOP SECRET. The record they possess is the SECRET version. The memo explicitly admits, "There is no information as to whether or not the TOP SECRET version continues to be published."

This admission reveals the actual objective of the analysis. By meticulously studying the SECRET version and the theoretical disputes between men like Nevzorov and Lebedev, the CIA was attempting to reverse-engineer the TOP SECRET version. They were looking for the holes—the things Nevzorov didn't say, the gaps in the search area, the capabilities he claimed were missing—to deduce what the Kremlin's highest-level planners actually knew.

If this file is shaped the way it looks, it is a record of an intelligence agency trying to find the ceiling of Soviet capability by measuring the floor. The desk's reading is that the CIA was tracking the internal rivalry between Soviet Long Range Aviation and Naval Aviation not because they cared about the bureaucracy, but because the winner of that fight decided how the Soviets would actually hunt our submarines.

In the end, the struggle was over the 20 million square kilometers of ocean. The Soviets wanted to turn the sea into a trap; we wanted it to remain a sanctuary. The fact that the CIA spent years auditing the arguments of a dead general proves that in the nuclear age, a theoretical dispute in a secret journal is as critical as a radar ping. The price of a mistake in that calculation was not a lost promotion, but the erasure of a map.

46 Million Square Kilometers and the Soviet Hunt for Polaris

The Brawl Over the Boomer

46 Million Square Kilometers

The Eight-Year Gap

The Shadow of the Top Secret

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