Dust jacket is in poor condition; book itself is in excellent condition. From Wikipedia: 1963 novel influenced by the heightened atmosphere of the Cold War, with its escalating series of international crises in the late 1950s and early 1960s, such as the U-2 incident; West Berlin; unrest in Hungary, Indochina, Congo, and Latin America; and the Cuban Missile Crisis. The novel exploits contemporary fascination with the under-the-ice exploits of such American nuclear-powered submarines as Nautilus (first to pass under the North Pole), Skate, Sargo and Seadragon. MacLean may have been anticipating the excitement of his British readers regarding the upcoming commissioning of HMS Dreadnought, the Royal Navy's first nuclear submarine. Also, MacLean may have been influenced by press reports about the nuclear-powered submarine USS Skate visiting Ice Station Alpha, located on Ice Island T-3 in the Arctic, on 14 August 1958, as part of the International Geophysical Year (IGY). At the time that the novel was published, under-the-ice operations by US Navy nuclear-powered submarines were prohibited until SUBSAFE measures had been implemented following the loss of USS Thresher. Ice Station Zebra also uses the accelerating Space Race between the United States and the Soviet Union as the backdrop for the novel, and may have been directly inspired by news accounts from 17 April 1959, about a missing experimental Corona satellite capsule (Discoverer 2) that inadvertently landed near Spitzbergen on 13 April and may have been recovered by Soviet agents.[4][5]In 2006 the National Reconnaissance Officedeclassified information stating that "an individual formerly possessing CORONA access was the technical adviser to the movie" and admitted "the resemblance of the loss of the DISCOVERER II capsule, and its probable recovery by the Soviets" on Spitsbergen Island, to the book by Alistair MacLean.[2] The story has parallels with CIA Operation Cold Feet, which took place in May/June 1962. In this operation, two American officers parachuted from a CIA-operated Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress to an abandoned Soviet ice station. After searching the station, they were picked up three days later by the B-17 using the Fulton Sky hooksystem.