ARMED FORCES: The Fastest Submarine

At 5:20 one recent morning, a naval officer in civilian dress stepped off a train at a fog-shrouded New England seaport and climbed into a waiting limousine. The car sped through the quiet streets and out into the misty countryside. A short while later, in a well-guarded brick building, the Navy man was speaking in harshly urgent tones to a handful of scientists and shipbuilders gathered around a conference table. The officer’s name: Captain Hyman George Rickover. His job: to direct the building of the U.S. Navy’s first atomic submarine.

By last week, Captain Rickover’s task was a lot nearer completion than either the Navy or the tight-lipped Atomic Energy Commission would admit officially. The Pentagon released a curt, one-sentence statement saying that it had awarded a contract for an atomic sub to the Electric Boat Co. of Groton, Conn. “From now on,” said an AEC director, “you can gauge our progress by the increase in vagueness of our reports.”

The work was, in fact, well along. Day & night for the past five years, 51-year-old Captain Rickover, an engineering officer since he graduated from Annapolis in 1922, had been working with single-minded concentration on the atomic submarine.

Up Through Channels. The battle was frequently bitter, always uphill. At first, the Navy was coolly indifferent, more interested in relaxing from the last war than preparing for a new one. Rickover badgered his superiors until they began to listen, slowly working his way up through Pentagon channels. By 1947, Rickover had convinced Admiral Chester Nimitz; the Navy declared an atomic submarine “militarily desirable.”

Rickover next took his plans to the

Atomic Energy Commission. Since the publication of the Smyth report in 1945, the world has known that controlled fission reaction is possible in an atomic pile, releasing heat slowly over a long period of time. If a safe and economical way to harness this heat to a steam turbine could be devised, it would be an ideal propulsion unit for a submarine. Rickover persuaded the AEC to begin work on a pilot model.

Armed with a top priority, Rickover gathered a staff of bright young officers with a mathematical bent, went with them to the AEC’s giant Oak Ridge plant for an atomic refresher course. His engineers and sub men pored over old Annapolis manuals and textbooks on steam turbines, rigged one up, and started figuring ways to hitch it to an atomic boiler. In Washington, the Bureau of Ships began designing a thick new hull to hold the new engine.

Word of Captain Rickover’s project started buzzing discreetly through the fleet. Here & there, carefully screened sub officers were called to Washington for an interview with Rickover. A hand-picked few were sent up to Massachusetts Institute of Technology for a three-year course in subjects relevant to atomic engines.

The Final Go-Ahead. From M.I.T., Rickover’s students went to an AEC testing station at Arco, Idaho, to study the new engine. Then, a few days before the Korean war broke out last year, Rickover got a final go-ahead from Admiral Forrest Sherman and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In

Groton, the Electric Boat Co. sealed off a special section of their yard and nicknamed it “Siberia.” There, in guarded isolation, the Navy’s shipbuilders and scientists started putting together a wooden mock-up of the atomic sub.

A fortnight ago, it became known that the old submarine Ulua was being towed to a New England port for use in underwater explosion tests. The Ulua is a vital part of Captain Rickover’s project. She was to be fitted with a dummy atomic engine, sent underwater without crew, and depth-charged to see how much shock an atomic engine can stand. The information will be used to modify and correct the full-scale atomic submarine that the Electric Boat Co. has been ordered to build.

Shark’s Fins & Joysticks. In appearance, the Navy’s first SSN (Submarine Nuclear) will look much like an ordinary Tang-class sub (TIME, July 9), only bigger and chubbier. It will have the same streamlined gun-free deck, the same sharklike fin rising in the center to house its radar, periscope and snorkel (which is a convenience, not a necessity, on an atomic submarine). Inside, the SSN will open up an entirely new world to sailormen accustomed to the smelly, cramped interiors of standard subs. It will have its own oxygen supply and a special carbon dioxide removing room to freshen the air its crew breathes. There will be vast space for the complex array of dials and electronic gadgets, huge torpedo rooms to hold a school of homing torpedos. The familiar throbbing diesel engines will be gone. Instead, a single atom-powered steam turbine will drive it swiftly and silently at great depth.

Underwater, in its natural element, the atomic sub will have a destroyer’s speed: 25 knots for steady cruising, 30 or 35 knots in emergencies. Her skipper will have an airplane’s joystick to maneuver his craft in steep turns and dives, “fly” it like a fighter pilot in fast attack runs. Since the SSN’s atomic engine needs no telltale snorkel to suck down air, it can travel deep underwater indefinitely. Its cruising range will be limited only by the ability of its crew to stand the tedium of days or weeks underwater.

“The atomic sub,” said one high-ranking Navy officer, “would make all surface craft obsolete.” In war, a fleet of them could sweep the seas clean of enemy shipping, lie off enemy coastlines lobbing guided atomic missiles into his ports and industrial centers. The new sub also has an important defensive mission; nothing frightens a submarine commander more than the thought of another sub _ silently stalking him underwater. With its high speed and unlimited endurance, the atomic sub, say Navy submariners, can track down and kill enemy subs more efficiently than any other weapons in the Navy’s arsenal.

In Tokyo early this summer, Admiral Sherman announced that the atomic sub will be ready for war within “two or three years.” Last week, after five years of work, the word from Captain Rickover’s scientists was that it may be ready a lot sooner than that.

The news that the U.S. was building an atomic submarine had implications far greater than the single addition of another powerful weapon to the nation’s arsenal. It meant that the stocks of rare fissionable material, long in short supply, had reached the point where some could be diverted to uses other than the production of huge bombs. Through chinks in the security wall, the armed forces could be heard talking of smaller atomic bombs for tactical use, and of atomic aircraft carriers. The aircraft industry knows that one company already has a contract for a plane to be powered by an atomic reactor. General Electric has the contract to build the reactor and is now at work on it. And an atomic power plant in a submarine was further proof that atomic energy for industrial use was no pipe dream.