In the frozen silence of the Barents Sea, two submarines from rival nations crossed paths on November 15, 1969. One was the USS Gato, a sleek American attack sub built for stealth. The other was the Soviet K-19, a ballistic missile boat already haunted by disaster and known among sailors as “the Widowmaker.” When their steel hulls collided 200 feet below the surface, the world nearly brushed nuclear catastrophe.

This episode tells the story of that collision—the secret confrontation between the hunter and the hunted that almost ignited a Cold War inferno. We’ll explore the shadowy tactics of submarine espionage, the sheer nerve of the crews who lived through it, and how both sides quietly buried the truth for decades. What happened that day reminds us how perilously close the world once came to annihilation, not by intention, but by accident beneath the sea.