David Fairhall obituary (opens in new tab)

Guardian defence, aviation, shipping and nuclear specialist with a lifelong love of sailingEarly in his career as a Guardian journalist, David Fairhall, who has died aged 91, received a surprise personal invitation to a high-level meeting in Washington hosted by the US state department. Senior officials asked him to brief them on the US edition of his first book, Russian Sea Power, published in the early 1970s when there was great alarm over the prospect of the Soviet navy developing into a w...