How the Battleship Maine Was Destroyed

How the Battleship Maine Was Destroyed is the name of a 1976 monograph written by Hyman G. Rickover, an admiral in the United States Navy. In the work, Rickover discusses the 1898 destruction of the USS Maine—a calamitous event which precipitated the United States' involvement in the Spanish–American War (1898). How the Battleship Maine Was Destroyed was initially published by the Naval History Division, and in 1995, it was reissued with a new forward and additional supplemental material by the Naval Institute Press.

In this work, Rickover argues that both the initial inquiry into the ship's sinking and the 1911 investigation were erroneous in attributing the ship's destruction to a mine. This work also contains an appendix written by Ib S. Hansen and Robert S. Price (the former a structural engineer from the David W. Taylor Naval Ship Research and Development Center, and the latter a physicist from the Naval Surface Weapons Center), whose expert findings were used by Rickover to support his conclusions; while an appendix, many writers and reviewers have nevertheless called Hansen and Price's section the "heart of the book".