Given the radical, yet-to-be-proven technology incorporated into the ship's design, initially, it was to be unarmed. On another note of presidential history, Lieutenant Jimmy Carter, U.S.N., of Georgia, was one of the officers assigned to the Oak Ridge team that developed the reactor for the Nautilus. First Lady Mamie Eisenhower “christened “the ship by breaking the traditional bottle of champagne across the bow. Truman at the Electric Boat Shipyard in Groton, Connecticut on June 14, 1952, and the Nautilus was launched in January 1954. In July 1951, Congress authorized funding for the world’s first nuclear-powered submarine. Without the need to conserve fuel, such a submarine could operate at higher speeds. A nuclear sub did not need a large bank of heavy, caustic batteries it did not need to be refueled at sea (or hardly ever, period) and it did not need to surface, except for crew morale. US Navy Photograph.Ī submarine powered by a nuclear reactor provided a multi-level solution to submarine propulsion, operations, and tactics. As methods of detection became more sophisticated, using the cover of night was becoming less effective in avoiding detection. To avoid detection in wartime, submarines had to surface during the hours of darkness to recharge their batteries. While ensuring an adequate fuel supply has long been a critical logistical consideration in naval operations, submarine capability and survivability vitally depended on a cumbersome system of using diesel engines on the surface to charge the electric batteries needed to drive the ship submerged. Admiral Rickover would later become known to the world as the “father of the nuclear navy”. The program caught the attention of then Captain Hyman Rickover, who got himself assigned to lead the team of scientists and engineers of the branch. Navy to set up a Naval Reactors Branch, under the Atomic Energy Commission, located at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. The possibility of using a nuclear reactor as propulsion for warships caused the U.S. As part of the Manhattan Project, which produced the world’s first atomic bombs, the development of a nuclear-generating plant was achieving results by 1945. The “nuclear” Nautilus was the sixth ship of the U.S. Nautilus sent a memorable and historic message, “Underway On Nuclear Power.” Wilkinson, first captain of the new U.S.S. On the morning of January 17, 1955, Commander Eugene P.
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