Press.

There are no monuments to the late engineer seaman Sergei Premenin of the former Soviet navy in the US or in Bermuda.

And it took nearly a decade for his own country to mark the 21-year-old's unbelievable courage in entering the hot reactor space of a rustbucket nuclear submarine to manually shut down the reactors -- averting a disaster between Bermuda and the east coast of the US which "would have made Chernobyl look like a traffic accident,'' according to the authors of Hostile Waters.

But Premenin's death, trapped inside the reactor compartment after his oxygen ran out, deserves a greater tribute.

And so does the courage of Captain Igor Britanov, who forfeited his career and almost his life to save his crew and millions of potential victims from certain death in the face of bureaucratic pressure to stick with his ship at all costs.

And the irony that all that effort and sacrifice by the then-sworn enemies of the west averted a nuclear meltdown which would have spewed deadly reactor fuel into the sea and air in the middle of the Gulf Stream -- which, depending on the wind and tides, could have caused havoc in the US or Bermuda, only 500 miles away from the accident scene.

The horror story of the disaster which struck Navaga-class K-219 -- Yankee-class to NATO -- in October 1986 is told in stark detail in Hostile Waters and goes some way to giving Premenin the epitaph he deserves, as does the film of the book, aired recently on HBO.

Written largely by Peter Huchthausen, the former US Navy officer and ex-naval attache, the book uses interviews with former crewmembers of the K-219, ships' logs, official reports and interviews with both Russian and US naval personnel caught up in the tragedy.

As a former seaman from the height of the Cold War, Huchthausen displays considerable sensitivity and fairness to his former opponents -- the front-line ones at least.

But he lays bare the political paranoia of the Soviet system at flag officer level, where everybody appears to be more worried about keeping out trouble than saving the lives of their sailors.

And he reveals the crippling schedule of submarine patrols imposed by political expediency.

With the terrifying inefficiency of the Soviet system in its dying days, it was a combination almost as lethal as the K-219's 15 nuclear missiles which turned a serious accident into a tragedy.

Huchthausen doesn't spare his own service either, pointing the finger at the cowboy captain of the USS Augusta -- and hinting at a collision between the US attack sub and K-219 over her missile compartment as the cause of the accident.

The Augusta certainly later collided with a modern Soviet Delta-class sub -- luckily not over the missile compartment.

And Augusta's skipper Jim Von Suskil's career was damaged by allegations of over-aggressive behaviour, which were buried until members of his own crew leaked tapes to the press.

The final report of the inquiry was classified -- but Von Suskil never commanded another ship.

And Huchthausen reveals the US submarine service as a navy within a navy, refusing even to share with intelligence colleagues early news of the disaster which hit K-219.

In the end, Huchthausen makes clear the only real heroes of the entire sorry tale were the crew of K-219.

Four died on board and more suffered permanent injury, dying years after the incident, while others linger on with the inadequate pensions and medical care of post-Soviet society.

But the story of the Cold War which suddenly turned hot, is, in the end, a cautionary tale of what can happen when countries play real-life war games with deadly weapons.

--by Raymond Hainey