The ‘nuclear powered submarine‘ was the brainchild of the late US Navy Admiral Hyman G. Rickover, who was frustrated with submarines of the 1940s that had a limiting hybrid mix of diesel engines and battery/electric propulsion. Rickover wanted a submarine that could remain continuously powered as long as it remained at sea, so he sought to shrink a nuclear reactor from the size of a city block to fit inside the submarine.
Under Rickover’s leadership, a group of scientists and engineers from the Atomic Energy Commission’s Naval Reactor Division successfully developed a nuclear-powered power plant the size of a closet. The US Congress got involved in 1951 and gave approval to the first nuclear submarine program. Construction began in 1952 and the vessel was launched in January 1954 before finally being delivered to the Navy in 1955.
On the morning of January 17, 1955, at 11:00 a.m. EST, Nautilus’ first officer in command, Commander Eugene P. Wilkinson, ordered all lines dropped and signaled the memorable and historic message “Underway on Nuclear Power.” After subsequent sea trials and preliminary approval by the Navy, Nautilus departed New London, Connecticut on 10 May 1995 for a trip to San Juan, Puerto Rico, during which she remained submerged and traveled 1,381 miles in less than 90 hours, the longest voyage up to that time by a submarine below the surface and the highest sustained rate of submersion ever recorded for more than one hour.
The Nautilus was powered by a Submarine Thermal Reactor (STR), later redesignated the S2W reactor, a pressurized water nuclear reactor capable of generating up to 13,400 horsepower, giving the Nautilus a top speed of 23 knots. It was manufactured by the Westinghouse Electric Corporation.
The submarine was 320 feet long, 82 feet longer than the conventionally powered Tang class, and displaced 4,000 tons submerged, twice that of the Tangs. It had a crew of 105. While the Nautilus was powered exclusively by American nuclear power, the Nautilus hull was of German origin, as the US did not develop the teardrop hull design still used today.
The Nautilus resembled the German Type XXI submarine, the most advanced design during WWII and the basis for many immediate post-war submarine designs such as the Soviet Whiskey class and the UK Porpoise class. The use of nuclear propulsion gave the Nautilus a 5 knot advantage over the conventionally powered Tang class. However, the Type XXI-inspired hull was a compromise between surface and subsurface handling that prevented the Nautilus from achieving nuclear power’s promise of speeds in excess of 30 knots.
Nuclear propulsion put the Nautilus ahead of its time, making the anti-submarine warfare tactics developed during WWII irrelevant. During the war, radars would detect submarines at shallow depth to drop depth charges, or anti-submarine aircraft would wait for the submarines to surface to attack them, but this tactic proved ineffective against nuclear-powered vessels that could quickly get out of the ship. area, change depth quickly and stay submerged for a very long time. The Nautilus was originally intended to be a test submarine to demonstrate the safety and viability of nuclear power, and as such was planned to be unarmed. However, the decision was quickly reversed and she was given the standard armament of the time, which consisted of six 533 mm torpedo tubes on the bow along with room to store up to 26 torpedoes.
From 1955 to 1957, Nautilus continued to serve as a platform for investigating the effects of increased speed and endurance in submersion, and also as a “floating operational laboratory for a wide range of self-noise investigations”. By 1957, Nautilus had been in action for 60,000 nautical miles (110,000 km; 69,000 mi), matching the endurance of her namesake, the fictional Nautilus from Jules Verne’s novel “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.” In 1958, the US government thought. it was time to embark on a voyage to the North Pole that no diesel submarine could manage. This was important to demonstrate to the Soviet Union that an American nuclear submarine could travel under the ice and threaten the Russian homeland by transiting the Arctic.
The first attempt was made in June 1958, but had to be aborted due to heavy ice in the Chukchi Sea and a near-tragic collision with an ice keel. The Nautilus went to Pearl Harbor to await approval and try again later. Two months later, on August 1, 1958, the Nautilus re-submerged under the ice near Point Barrow, Alaska, and successfully passed under the geographic North Pole on August 3. Two days later, she surfaced in the Greenland Sea after steaming 1,830 miles under the ice in 96 hours.
Navigating the vessel in the Arctic and around the geographic North Pole presented unique challenges due to the proximity of the magnetic North Pole, as the needles on the magnetic compasses would begin to wobble erratically, and the gyrocompasses, which find true north using the Earth’s rotation, could lose their lock and “fall over” due to the change the speed of rotation of the Earth near the poles. So the Nautilus had a new device, an inertial navigation system that combined multiple inputs about the ship’s speed, course changes, and external conditions based on the ship’s steering instruments to plot its position.
This transpolar voyage was completed on August 12, 1958, with a port stop in Portland, UK, where the crew of the Nautilus received a hero’s welcome. The crew was awarded the Presidential Unit Citation for this feat. By 1961, the Navy had about a dozen nuclear-powered submarines in service. Nautilus continued to participate in various exercises with other nuclear submarines in the fleet and various NATO exercises in the Atlantic. It even participated in the quarantine of Soviet shipping during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The Nautilus was a truly exceptional feat at a time when technological progress was rapid thanks to the Cold War. Its last mission was through the Panama Canal and to the US West Coast, after which it was decommissioned in 1980.
