When the North Korean dictator sent his ships to intercept the American vessel and capture its American crew of over eighty sailors, headlines were made and the small, dilapidated spy ship found its way into the history books.

“Act of War: Lyndon Johnson, North Korea, And the Capture of the Spy Ship Pueblo” by Jack Cheevers tells the story of this military action and the resulting stand-off that left the Pueblo crew in a North Korean prison for a year.

Based on meticulous research, including interviews with the ship’s crew and Captain Pete Bucher, naval officers, and former members of the Johnson administration, Cheevers takes the reader step-by-step through this Cold War crisis.

With military forces preparing in South Korea for a possible answer to the North Korean’s action, President Johnson worked behind the scenes to save the American sailors from possible execution. Such an event would have certainly sparked another major armed conflict in this region of Asia, with consequences for not just the Korean peninsula but all of the major powers that backed either North or South Korea.

As the author explains, subsequent investigations of the USS Pueblo incident by both the Navy and Congress “revealed appalling complacency and shortsightedness in the planning and execution of the Pueblo’s mission”. These errors are addressed in the book, as well as the horrendous experiences the captured Americans had to endure in North Korean prisons.

Forty-five years after this event North Korea remains a dangerous threat to peace and stability in Northeast Asia. The country’s new, twenty-eight-year-old leader, Kim Jong-un, as he has shown over the past year, is just as irrational and unpredictable as his grandfather and father.

Since intelligence information about North Korea continues to be gathered by the U.S. and other nations to keep tabs on what the present regime is doing, there’s always the chance of another misstep like what occurred over four decades ago.