Despite his relative liberty in the United States, Stiefel was convinced that postwar America was on the same road to socialism which had strangled free enterprise in Europe and Asia.

To preserve his own liberty and that of other like-minded and capable people, Stiefel sought to "test the hypothesis that a free, capitalist society can exist and flourish in today's world" by physically building a libertarian nation in the Caribbean.

Operating out of the Sawyerkill Motel in Saugerties, New York, near one of his soap-making plants, Stiefel began assembling a team of enthusiastic young libertarians.

The book was a call to action for entrepreneurial libertarians to seek an exit from established states and build a polity based on liberty.

In his monthly bulletin, The Atlantis News, Stiefel announced a promising location known as the Prickly Pear Cays in the Leeward Islands.

Under a geodesic dome next to the motel to protect their construction site from the elements, building the 38 feet (12 m) ship occupied the members of Operation Atlantis for a full year.

Stiefel bought a new boat and moved the Operation to Tortuga Island, where the Atlanteans prepared to build Silver Shoals into dry land.

After dredging sand for a new island and even recovering silver coins from a nearby shipwreck,[7] they had high hopes that Stiefel's dream for a libertarian polity might soon be real.

Stiefel's final attempt to create a libertarian nation was to buy an island off the coast of Belize with the intention of gaining freeport status from the Belizean government.