After completing this novel, whose plot line parallels real-life events during the Cold War, MacLean retired from writing for three years.

Carpenter's background is unknown, but he claims that he is an expert in dealing with frostbite and other deep-cold medical conditions, and he carries orders from the Chief of Naval Operations of the United States Navy.

Under duress, Carpenter finally reveals that the ice station is actually a highly equipped listening post, keeping watch for nuclear missile launches from the Soviet Union, a statement which convinces the commander and the admiral.

Carpenter, Executive Officer Hansen, and two crewmen are put above on the icepack and make the journey to the station through an Arctic storm on foot, taking with them as many supplies as they can.

The film had been ejected from the satellite so that Soviet agents operating under cover at Zebra could retrieve it; Carpenter's brother had been sent to the station to prevent this.

The film they successfully sent to the Soviet surface ships is actually photographs of cartoon characters on the walls of the submarine's sick bay.

The novel was 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.

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.

[2] 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.

[4][5] In 2006 the National Reconnaissance Office declassified 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.

In this operation, two American officers parachuted from a CIA-operated Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress to an abandoned Soviet ice station.

Finally, MacLean even mentions the newly-operational Soviet nuclear-powered icebreaker Lenin by involving the ship in an aborted attempt to reach the survivors at Drift Ice Station Zebra.

The film's climax involves a superpower confrontation between Soviet paratroopers and the US Marines at Ice Station Zebra itself, but concludes on a much more ambiguous note than the novel, reflecting the perceived thaw in the Cold War following the Cuban Missile Crisis.

While the scientists immediately turn to cannibalism, the Sealab sub – led by a German crew resembling that from Das Boot – predictably fumbles the rescue.

Howard Hughes's obsession[10][11] with the movie adaptation of the novel is referenced in "I Wanna Be a Boss", a 1991 song by American singer-songwriter Stan Ridgway.