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Editor’s note: This is the eighth article in a limited series celebrating American defense technologies born from wartime and their effects on broader national security, politics, and society. This series will run for several weeks to commemorate America’s 250th anniversary, and winners will be selected by a reader vote undertaken through our newsletter later this summer. Prior installments can be found at the Arsenal of Innovation page.
For more than 70 years, nuclear power has propelled America’s silent service — attack submarines stalking their prey from below, and the “boomers” that lurk undetected, ballistic missiles on alert, forming the most survivable leg of the U.S. nuclear triad. For nearly as long, nuclear aircraft carriers have spearheaded U.S. forward operations in peace and war.
But nuclear power’s benefits are not limited to the naval realm. Civil reactors provide roughly 10 percent of the world’s electricity, powering everything from household appliances to desalination plants. America’s nuclear plants generate roughly 20 percent of its electricity, and France’s nuclear plants account for a whopping 65 percent of its power needs. Nuclear power has helped humanity avoid more than 70 gigatons of carbon emissions. By one estimate, the annual emissions prevented by nuclear power are equivalent to almost twice the amount released by the entire global aviation industry in a year. Scientists have estimated that nuclear power has prevented at least 1.8 million deaths from air pollution, and perhaps as many as 7.5 million.
Remarkably, both revolutionary technologies — naval nuclear propulsion and civil nuclear power — can be attributed largely to one American naval officer: Adm. Hyman G. Rickover, arguably the greatest innovator the Department of Defense has ever produced.
Rarely has one individual had such a pervasive impact on both military and civil technology. Just as J. Robert Oppenheimer was the singular figure in the invention of the atomic bomb, Rickover was the singular figure for nuclear power. But whereas Einstein’s 1939 letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt provided the impetus for the Manhattan Project, it was Rickover himself — then just a Navy captain — who generated the first push for a nuclear power program. The story of Rickover and nuclear power is therefore not just a matter of technical interest. Rather, it shows us that one person can make a difference in defense innovation — and more importantly, it shows us how.
Born in Poland in 1900, Rickover emigrated with his family to America and graduated from the United States Naval Academy in 1922. After completing initial tours of sea duty, he earned a master’s degree in electrical engineering. He then transitioned from the line to become an engineering duty officer. As head of the Electrical Section of the Bureau of Ships during World War II, he demonstrated tremendous competence and energy, playing a key role in keeping the fleet in fighting form. Astute bosses, especially Rear Adm. Earle W. Mills, recognized that Rickover’s famously difficult personality masked a remarkable intellect and unrelenting tenacity, and provided him the top cover he needed to succeed in the Navy despite leaving countless ruffled feathers in his wake.
After Japan’s surrender, the Navy (in the person of Adm. Mills) — recognizing Rickover’s superior wartime leadership and engineering acumen — sent him to the Manhattan Project’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory to investigate potential naval applications of nuclear fission. Rickover quickly identified the game-changing potential of nuclear submarines: higher speed, greater stealth, nearly unlimited endurance. But amid declining postwar defense budgets, this was merely one of many projects competing for scarce resources. In any case, the Navy was far more interested in nuclear weapons than nuclear engines.
The prospects for nuclear propulsion seemed grim. When, however, President Harry S. Truman signed legislation in 1946 establishing the Atomic Energy Commission, Rickover sensed an opportunity. He quickly drafted a memo to Commission leaders, arguing that a nuclear warship could be produced within five to eight years. He then backchanneled the memo to the chief of naval operations, Fleet Adm. Chester Nimitz. Rickover’s bosses chastised him for this insubordination, but the memo impressed Nimitz and cracked open the door to nuclear power.
It remained unclear whether a nuclear power plant could be shoehorned into a submarine, for the simple fact that no one had ever built a nuclear plant at all — much less on a ship. Enrico Fermi had demonstrated in 1942 that a controlled, self-sustaining fission chain reaction was possible. If its energy were captured, it could serve as a nearly inexhaustible source of heat with which to generate electrical power. But Fermi’s Chicago Pile 1 required more than 430 tons of graphite, uranium, and uranium oxide carefully stacked inside a university squash court: an astonishing technological breakthrough, but hardly an operational reactor. It was held together by wooden scaffolding and gravity, and critically, it lacked a way to capture the heat of fission and turn it into usable power.
On top of the technical challenges, there was no formal requirement and no budget. Rickover again took matters into his own hands, preparing a letter for Nimitz’s signature stating that the Navy should pursue a nuclear submarine by the mid-1950s. Nimitz signed the letter on Dec. 5, 1947, directing the Bureau of Ships to liaise with the Commission. Rickover convinced his bosses to make him the Navy liaison.
He continued his loyal coup in August 1948 when the Navy (at his urging) established a Nuclear Power Branch in the Bureau of Ships. This forced the Commission’s hand — it quickly established a corresponding Division of Reactor Development. At Rickover’s prompting, the Navy then ordered him to “report for duty with the Division of Reactor Development in the Atomic Energy Commission and to the chief of the Bureau of Ships for additional duty.” With one foot in the Navy and one in the Commission, Rickover was now the government’s central authority for nuclear power. From this perch, he drafted a requirement for a nuclear submarine. Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Louis Denfeld signed it on Aug. 19, 1949. The Navy duly added a nuclear submarine to its 1950 budget request.
Rickover had hurdled the bureaucratic obstacles to nuclear power, but daunting technical challenges remained. He would need to corral a chain reaction inside a reactor robust enough to operate safely and reliably amid the rigors of combat — such as depth-charge attacks — and then use the heat of fission to boil water into steam, which in turn would drive the turbines that generated electrical power for the engines (and every other electrical system on the boat). All the while, he had to ensure that the reactor did not kill its operators — an unfortunate occupational hazard of the Manhattan Project — whether quickly, due to an uncontained reaction, or slowly, through radiation exposure.
A single element, zirconium, proved to be a common factor in solving all of these problems. The uranium fuel rods would have to be encased in zirconium cladding to prevent the fuel from coming into direct contact with the coolant (water), which would contaminate the water and vastly increase the risk of radiation leaks. (Among several candidate metals, zirconium provided the optimum mix of thermal conductivity, which made the heating process more efficient, and a resistance to neutron absorption, which would impede the chain reaction.) The problem was that naturally occurring zirconium was intermixed with the element hafnium, which did absorb neutrons. The purification process had only been demonstrated experimentally, and would itself require significant advances in materials science to produce pure zirconium and related alloys at scale.
Rickover therefore made a decision that appeared risky, but in fact reflected his commitment to minimizing controllable engineering and production risks. The obvious choice was to produce just enough zirconium to build the first reactors, meanwhile informing his superiors of the need for an industrial-scale program to outfit later units. Rickover did not choose this path. Instead, he insisted that his industry partners delve into the zirconium production process as a primary objective, so that there would be a reliable source of zirconium for the rapidly growing nuclear fleet he envisioned.
Reactor cooling was another key engineering challenge. Two approaches appeared feasible: Rickover therefore decided to pursue both. Nautilus’s plant would be cooled by pressurized water, and the second submarine’s by liquid sodium. If the first one failed, the second might succeed. (Both succeeded, though due to economies of scale and technical challenges associated with the sodium plant, the Navy opted for pressurized water reactors as the fleet mainstay.)
Rickover controlled schedule risk by integrating production, testing, training, and other development processes. For instance, he insisted on building the shore-based prototype reactor to shipboard specifications, in a mocked-up submarine hull operated by the same fleet sailors who would crew Nautilus. Meanwhile, Nautilus’s reactor was built in parallel, with just enough lag to incorporate lessons from the prototype. Rickover’s decision to build a realistic prototype helped avoid surprises when installing Nautilus’s reactor. Indeed, his team’s speedy progress allowed Rickover to push Electric Boat to accelerate hull construction.
On Jan. 17, 1955, the USS Nautilus got underway on nuclear power. By the end of Rickover’s 34-year tenure as head of the nuclear Navy, the United States had produced 140 nuclear warships. And in seven-plus decades of continuous operations, the Navy has never suffered a major reactor accident — a direct result of Rickover’s coequal focus on safety and performance.
But that was not all. Amid the sprint to build a nuclear submarine, the Atomic Energy Commission gave Rickover a side job: building the world’s first civilian reactor.
On Dec. 8, 1953, President Dwight D. Eisenhower gave his “Atoms for Peace” speech at the United Nations General Assembly. The atom, he said, “must be put into the hands of those who will know how to strip its military casing and adapt it to the arts of peace.”
The Atomic Energy Commission was already working to fulfill Ike’s promise. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania — known as the “Smoky City,” or less kindly as “hell with the lid off,” due to suffocating smog from its steel mills and factories — had embarked on an environmental cleanup. Atomic energy would represent a leap forward in emissions reduction. Thus, in October 1953, the Commission contracted with the Duquesne Light Company to build a reactor near Pittsburgh, at Shippingport, Pennsylvania.
Building Shippingport was not a simple matter of scaling up the Nautilus reactor. To generate electricity on an industrial scale, the reactor core would be far larger than a submarine plant, and with different operating parameters, creating new engineering challenges. Rickover’s approach was the same combination of meticulous attention to detail and relentless drive. Establishing the motto “full Power in Fifty-Seven,” he devoted attention to the civilian reactor’s unique challenges in metallurgy, large-scale fabrication, cooling, and so on, even as he shepherded Nautilus through the final months leading to its first sailing.
True to his promise, the Shippingport reactor began producing electricity on Dec. 18, 1957 (by which point the Navy had already launched five nuclear submarines). It continued supplying electricity to Pennsylvania’s power grid until 1989.
Rickover revolutionized naval warfare. A world in which the United States never built a nuclear fleet — or in which the Soviet Union acquired one first — might be a very different world indeed.
So would a world in which nuclear reactors never replaced any of the combustion plants pumping gigatons of greenhouse gases into Earth’s atmosphere. By the time Rickover retired, 78 nuclear plants were operating in the United States alone. Not only did Rickover build America’s nuclear Navy, but he is responsible for saving millions of lives — and maybe more, thanks to the submarine’s role in nuclear deterrence.
What can we learn from his story?
For nearly 70 years, U.S. leaders have tried to speed military innovation by reforming the defense acquisition system, with disappointing results. Acquisition overhaul might reduce barriers to defense innovation, but it will not solve the fundamental problem: diffusion of responsibility. Rickover pinpointed the problem in characteristically pithy language: “Unless you can point your finger at the one person who is responsible when something goes wrong, then you have never had anyone really responsible.” Innovation is about people, not process. There may be no I in team, but innovation begins with “I am responsible.”
Military innovation, by definition, entails things that are new: new ways of thinking, designing, building, and operating. It places demands on the defense ecosystem that do not correspond neatly to organization charts and regulations. Successful innovation calls for fluid movement across organizational boundaries that may trespass on the usual lines of authority. In short, successful innovation requires a self-motivated leader who holds him or herself accountable for total success, not just progress, and refuses to pin failure on “systemic failures.” In a rules-driven organization like the Defense Department, real innovation is likely to look a lot like insurgency.
Rickover, and the wise leaders like Mills who agreed to support him, showed that it is possible to harness that insurgent spirit and put it to work, to the benefit of all.
Thane C. Clare is a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.
Image: National Museum of the U.S. Navy via Wikimedia Commons.
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