Ships Underseas

Nuclear Navy, third volume of the official history of the Atomic Energy Commission, is an account of the development of nuclear propulsion, an achievement uniquely attributed to the driving energy and engineering talents of one man, Admiral Hyman G. Rickover. But the volume is also an effort to explain and analyze the complex organization he created to develop a nuclear reactor. This organization, really a way of managing technological innovation, may perhaps stand as Admiral Rickover's greatest accomplishment.

The possibility of using nuclear power as a method of propulsion for naval vessels, and especially submarines, dates from the first successful experiment in splitting the atom in 1939. A submarine powered by a nuclear reactor, if one could be built, would be a "true sub-marine," able to operate entirely independent of the atmosphere and therefore to remain underwater indefinitely, limited only by the endurance of its crew. But it was only after the war that the Navy began to think seriously about the development of nuclear propulsion. In June 1946, Rickover, then a captain in the Bureau of Ships, was assigned to head a small group of officers sent to Oak Ridge to learn about nuclear energy. Largely at his prodding and under his leadership, the Navy, jointly with the Atomic Energy Commission, began to create an organization and to train the personnel required to develop a nuclear reactor and to lay the foundations for a nuclear navy. By 1949 the organization and the men to realize the dream of nuclear propulsion were ready.

The realization of the dream took only five years. In January 1955 the first nuclear-powered naval vessel, the submarine Nautilus, was launched. This accomplishment, achieved in so brief a period of time on a schedule set by Rickover himself and over the opposition of the bureaucracy, was little short of miraculous. The Nautilus performed better than expected on its trial runs, and within a short time work was begun on additional nuclear vessels.

Rickover's next task was in a way more challenging and perhaps more significant. At the behest of the AEC, he and his group applied their methods and engineering know-how to the construction of a nuclear power station driven by a water-cooled reactor at Shippingport, Pennsylvania. This achievement, in effect, launched the development of civilian nuclear power as an alternate source of energy.

Before the end of 1962 Rickover and his organization had virtually completed their work, including the production of facilities that made possible construction of the 30 nuclear-powered ships that joined the fleet that year. In the process, they had produced important new materials such as zirconium, laid the basis of a new technology, and made possible the reaction of a new industry.

Nuclear Navy is not a book for the general reader, but it is an important book that can be read with profit by those concerned with naval matters and national security, by students of technology, administration, and organization, and perhaps most importantly by the managers of large enterprises, public and private.

NUCLEAR NA VY. By Richard G.Hewlett '45 and Francis Duncan.University of Chicago Press, 1974.447 pp. $12.50.

Daniel Webster Professor of History, Mr. Mortonteaches American Military History andPolicy to 1900, Recent United States History,and War and Peace in the Twentieth Century.