The Last Ship is a 1988 post-apocalyptic fiction novel by American writer William Brinkley. The Last Ship tells the story of a United States Navy guided missile destroyer, the fictional USS Nathan James (DDG-80), on patrol in the Barents Sea during a brief, full-scale nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union. It details the ship's ensuing search for a new home for her crew. An eponymous television series loosely based on the novel aired from 2014 to 2018 on the TNT network. Background The story is told in a first-person point of view by the ship's commanding officer, "Thomas", whose full name is never revealed. Thomas is writing this account several months after the war in order to describe the odyssey of his Norwegian-homeported ship, USS Nathan James (DDG-80), in the aftermath of the conflict. Thomas begins by describing his ship to the reader. He discusses the ethics of commanding a warship, the capabilities of nuclear strike forces, daily life aboard a U.S. Navy ship in the Arctic Circle, and the nature of his ship's mission. Captain Thomas remarks that, despite the reduction in the land-based ICBM arsenal, there is still considerable power in the SLBMs and Tomahawks; his ship alone has more power than several missile silos combined. Plot On December 21 (year unknown), without prior warning, Thomas, the captain of the U.S. Navy destroyer, USS Nathan James (DDG-80), receives authenticated orders to carry out a nuclear strike on the Soviet city of Orel and its nearby silos. The nuclear-tipped Tomahawks are fired off in an emotionless, automated manner. Over a period of hours the crew watches them make landfall on radar and listens as the radio stations from Orel go off the air. With the mission completed, they report back to their superiors, and a reply from the U.S. Navy comes through, ordering them to break with general orders in this situation (operating under which they would proceed to the North Sea), but the message garbles to gibberish towards the end without relating their new orders. With one exception later in the book, this is the last official communication from the U.S. Navy that Nathan James ever receives. While they can later surmise there must have been a series of major exchanges, as a simple, single exchange of 'counter-force' strikes would not account for the sheer scale of the fallout they later find, and they