DEFENSE: Polaris Goes to Work

“Have you plenty of cigars, Jim?” asked Rear Admiral Kenmore McManes, commandant of the Sixth Naval District. Replied Commander James B. Osborn, between puffs on his stogie: “I’ve got 15 boxes. Admiral.” Moments later, as a Navy band whomped up a rousing Sousa march on a closely guarded pier at the Charleston (S.C.) Navy Yard dock. Osborn, 42, stepped aboard the nuclear Polaris submarine George Washington, in whose vast holds huge quantities of provisions—from missile-shaped cigars to cigar-shaped missiles—had been stored. Then Skipper Osborn bellowed a time-honored order: “Cast off all lines!” Soon the sub pointed her bulbous nose down the Cooper River and headed for sea to inaugurate a new era in the arcane cold-war art of keeping the peace.

Hidden from enemy eyes, safe from enemy attack, her nuclear-tipped priority cargo of 16 Polaris missiles constantly at the ready, George Washington was bound on history’s first underwater missile patrol. Skipper Osborn’s orders were secret, but best guesses were that he would take station beneath the subarctic waters of the Norwegian and Barents seas. Cruising within 1,200-mile range of Soviet targets from Moscow to Omsk (see map), George Washington will be joined by her sister ship, Patrick Henry, within two months. With their total of 32 missiles, the two ships will of themselves fill any known present-day missile gap—a pair of mobile weapons adding devastating power to U.S. defensive force.

Nurses in the Forest. Each submarine will remain submerged for 60 days at a time (George Washington will spend Christmas and New Year’s at sea), and effectiveness will depend on precise maintenance. In order to launch missiles on target with accuracy, the ship must know its exact location. The complicated celestial-periscope system has 80,000 components and must be kept working to perfection. The periscope runs a constant double check on the Cadillac-sized SINS (ship’s inertial navigation system), which tracks the sub’s underwater course with pinpoint accuracy. The missiles are housed gently in their tubes in the compartment that the submen call “Sherwood Forest.” They must be wet-nursed hour by hour, their computers prepared to receive fire-control data, their gyros kept warmed and ready, their switches checked and rechecked so that they can be fired on 15 minutes’ notice. The main atomic power plants must be tended by technicians with a highly specialized training that was never needed at sea before the age of nuclear ships.

Despite the unending technical and mechanical complications, Polaris subs are built to stay at sea up to three years. They are untethered by the standard submarine’s fuel and oxygen limitations. They can manufacture their own atmosphere without surfacing. Only the limitations of human endurance will require that they make port every two months. In home port for Washington and Henry will be the Polaris sub tender Proteus, stationed at Holy Loch, an anchorage in Scotland’s River Clyde. Each ship will have a second, fully trained crew waiting to take her back to sea. With fresh “Blue” and “Gold” crews alternating on duty, Polaris subs will be able to stay on station almost twice as long as their World War II predecessors.

The Navy harbors little doubt about the ability of Polaris crews to stand the gaff. The ten officers and 90 enlisted men on each ship are all products of a probing, prying selection system modeled after the officer-procurement methods set up by the uncompromising perfectionist who is the most influential man in the U.S. nuclear Navy: Vice Admiral Hyman Rickover.

So high is the morale of Polaris submariners that most of them have withstood not only the temptations of private industry (almost every Polarisman has been offered civilian work at higher-than-service pay) but also the strains on family life. After each 60-day patrol, crews will be flown home for 30 days of leave; then they will get 30 days of refresher training before they take up their underseas stations once more. “What difference does it make if you’re away half the year?” says one resigned submariner. “Whether you get along with your wife or not. you’re bound to be happy half the time.”

Fail-Safe. At sea all hands take exquisite pains to keep the encapsuled atmosphere habitable. Navy chemists know that animal fats break down during cooking and give off eye-irritating chemicals, so ship’s cooks use vegetable fats instead of lard. Bleaches are forbidden in the ships’ laundries; they release chlorine that would contaminate the atmosphere. Aerosol shaving creams are prohibited because of their Freon gas. Ship’s doctors must guard their clinical thermometers carefully; if broken, their mercury might evaporate into deadly fumes. But as important as the air itself is the attention to the inner man: Patrick Henry’s Gold crew is happier than its Blue crew simply because it has a better cook.

Even when underwater. Polaris submarines keep constant contact with the Navy’s new. long-wave (very low frequency) transmitting stations. But since the ships are on their own, the Navy has an elaborate, secret “Fail-Safe” countdown system that would prevent any captain, or any other officer who has cracked under the tension of his job, from declaring war on his own. One key provision: no missile can be fired without the joint order of the skipper and his executive officer.*

If the Navy has its way, 45 Polaris subs will eventually be available for ocean patrol by 1965, with 30 on station at a time. This means constant coverage of 480 Soviet targets—from cities to airfields. In those 30 subs will be some 3,000 of the most highly trained members of the U.S. armed forces, whose dangerous business will be to keep the peace. Their faith in their job is spelled out in the Polaris submariner’s variation on a theme by Oliver Cromwell: “Put your trust in the Lord and keep your deterrent mobile.”

*Noting the inherent risks, the Manchester Guardian Weekly observed last week that the skipper-executive officer team at sea thus becomes “as effectively a nuclear power as, say, Britain or France. The choice of these men, and their discipline and training, must be far more exacting than anything which has gone before.”