The Silent Service
|
|
The Silent Service is a manga series by Kaiji Kawaguchi.
During the cold war, the Japanese secretly develop a nuclear submarine. On its maiden voyage, the captain of the submarine declares the submaring to be an independent state, "Yamato."
An anime OVA series was later produced, the first two episodes of which were spliced together and released in North America as a single volume, which sold poorly. The rest of the series remained untranslated.
Political Ramifications
The main point of the comics is something of a debate over the concept of nuclear proliferation, with Kawaguchi's own unique views on the subject coming to light. Kawaguchi's major argument is mostly an anti-hegomonic stance on the balance of power, with an aim at questioning the authority of American nuclear supremacy.
One of the most interesting late plot points is Captain Kaeda's "Silent Service" a non-state possessor of nuclear weapons, something of a forced pax atomica where no one power is capable of waging war as there exists a second-strike capability in the form of a submarine fleet armed with nuclear weapons that is impossible to track by any national armed forces.