Rickover and the Nuclear Navy Rickover and the Nuclear Navy
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The Preface on pages xvii-xix has been altered to correct a typesetting error in the printed book. All of the text is unchanged, but sections of the text have been rearranged to place paragraphs in the proper order. Rickover and the Nuclear Navy Rickover and the Nuclear Navy THE DISCIPLINE OF TECHNOLOGY by Francis Duncan Naval Institute Press Annapolis, Maryland Published 1989 by the United States Naval Institute Annapolis, Maryland Copyright © 1989 on the foreword All rights reserved. Prepared by the Department of Energy; work made for hire. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Duncan, Francis, 1922- Rickover and the nuclear navy : the discipline of technology / by Francis Duncan. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0-87021-236-2 1. Rickover, Hyman George. 2. Nuclear submarines—United States— History. 3. Admirals—United States—Biography 4. United States. Navy—Biography. I. Title. V63.R54D86 1989 359.3'2574'0973—dc20 89-39097 CIP This edition is authorized for sale only in the United States, its territories and possessions, and Canada. Printed in the United States of America 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 First printing Contents Foreword vii Preface xvii Acknowledgments xxv 1. Common Denominators 1 2. Submarines 17 3. Thresher 52 4. Surface Ships—First Battles 99 5. Surface Ships—The Alliance with Congress 115 6. Surface Ships—Legislating Nuclear Power into the Fleet 147 7. Technology and Diplomacy: The Multilateral Force 170 8. Shippingport 190 9. The Devil Is in the Details 232 10. Independence and Control 252 11. Discipline of Technology 279 Appendix 1. Design and Engineering Principles 295 Appendix 2. Naval Reactors Organization 297 Appendix 3. Executive Branch Organization 299 Appendix 4. Reactor Pant Designations, Prototypes, and Shipboard Plants 302 Appendix 5. Nuclear-Powered Ships Authorized Construction by Yard as of June 1985 305 Abbreviations of Sources Cited in Notes 308 Notes 309 Sources 353 Index 358 Foreword No one in 1918, surveying that year's entering class at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, would have picked the diminutive Hyman George Rickover as the only one in that group of aspiring youths who would achieve the rank of full admiral (four stars), remain on active duty the longest (nearly 64 years), and attain international fame on an unprece- dented scale. All this would happen through his development of an entirely new discipline not yet thought of by man. He would never participate in combat, the navy's ostensible mission, and yet he would be in some sort of battle all his life, accomplishing everything through a species of infighting never before seen in navy annals. Those facts are almost mundane alongside all the other superlatives with which young Rickover's career was to be studded. Truth to tell, however, other than details such as the year he graduated from Annapolis (1922), his final retirement from the navy (1982), and the date of his death (1986), nearly everything else about the man has been surrounded by controversy. Even his birth date, officially January of 1900, is not fixed with certainty to everyone's satisfaction. He created, and remained in charge of, the most significant naval engineering program of all time, and yet even this tremendous advance in our navy's capabilities was, at least initially, accomplished against opposition from the U.S. Navy and virtu- ally all other authorities in the land as well. He gained success because his machinery worked superlatively well, with extraordinary dependabil- ity, and because Congress and the press would not accept the notion that the navy bureaucracy, geared as it was to rotation for the sake of combat effectiveness (and its own sake as well), could maintain the engineering drive he was demonstrating. In short, the navy was (and is) automatically opposed to the creation of any "empires" within its arena of concern, no matter how good the vii viii/ Foreword result. Thus, Rickover's methods were (and are still, and rightly so) anathema to it. But Congress did not care about this. It had faith in him and his brand of leadership where his peers and superiors in the navy did not. And his immediate subordinates, the relatively few in his inner circle, served him with a rare fanaticism. The press loved him, because his continual challenge to "the establishment" (much of it fully justified) was unfailing good copy. And he was adept at bringing forward, for the delectation of the media, the numerous instances of his unfair treatment at the hands of the navy hierarchy. On the other hand, civilian industry felt his difficult iconoclastic personality and domineering methods more than any other segment of the nation, and here as in the navy, with but few exceptions, he was feared and to a large degree hated by those who had to deal with him. Feared because he personally controlled huge sums of money in the shape of contracts for nuclear research, engineering, or construction, and through this he wielded tremendous power, destructively as well as construc- tively, upon individuals and institutions alike. Hated because his form of leadership, undeniably successful, was demeaning in the extreme to his subordinates, often forcing them to servility to help their company or themselves. To the membership of Congress, however, the real source of his power, he showed an entirely different side of his personality. To say he was obsequious might be too strong, but he was invariably deferential in ways the navy and industry never saw. He professed to delight in professional discussions based on intimate knowledge of fact or procedure, but there was only one ultimate author- ity, and anyone who did not quickly find this out was likely to find himself out of a job—as both naval officers and industry executives discovered. From the beginning he pictured himself as the butt of mean-spirited slights in the naval officer fraternity. He was not above hinting at anti- Semitism: true in some instances, but since there were some popular Jewish officers in the navy, there must have been other factors operating as well. But whatever the slights, Rickover had a way of turning them to his benefit, usually by making them widely known, as he did, for example, with the story of the ladies' room. For a time the space assigned to him, in the old Main Navy building on Constitution Avenue in Washington, D.C., was a former ladies' room, complete with tile walls and marks where the fixtures had been. I visited him there a number of times. Once, obeying a summons from him, I dashed down the wrong hall and three feet into a real ladies' room, with real ladies in it—but after that I was more careful. Had this temporary office been assigned to anyone else, no one would have noticed except, perhaps, with good-natured humor. When Rickover "happened" to be put there it was probably deliberate, and the Foreword /ix chuckles were not good-natured; but as usual he reveled in this "proof' of persecution. A far more serious slight, which he handled in a far more direct way, occurred when his peers in the navy's engineer branch thought to get rid of him through failure of promotion above captain. This would entail automatic retirement at the thirty-year mark. But someone made the case to the U.S. Senate, charged by the Constitution with formal confirmation of military promotions. In that year, 1953, two years before the Nautilus first went to sea, the Senate failed to give its usual perfunctory approval of the navy admiral promotion list, and the press was outraged because Rickover's name was not on it. The situation was at an impasse. Without Senate approval nobody could be promoted. Ultimately an enlightened secretary of the navy, Robert B. Anderson, ordered a special selection board to sit. With some shuffling of feet it did what it had been ordered to do, and neither Congress nor the press cared that the navy's carefully created promotion system had been violated. Ninety-five percent of navy captains must retire regardless of how highly qualified because there are only vacancies for 5 percent of them to become admirals, and although vindictiveness has sometimes played a part in determining who shall fail of selection for promotion (thus also violating the system), never before or since have pressures from outside the navy overturned this form of career-termination. Rickover personally interviewed every officer candidate for nuclear power training, and those interviews, numbering in the thousands, are legendary for their invective, unfairness, and personal destructiveness. He was one of the most senior officers in the navy, as much as sixty years older than some of the interviewees, who were usually midshipmen, ensigns, or junior grade lieutenants, all of them literally quaking at the thought of the career-determining confrontation ahead. Tales of these interviews are legion in the U.S. Navy. Some have been retold by the press, but in no other situation, except perhaps in court circles of the middle ages, has it been customary to condone, even to praise, such offensive performances by the autocrat in charge. In no other instance has the press of this country invariably portrayed an arrogant, overbearing superior (especially in one of the military services) as acting disinterestedly, with only the best interests of the country at heart, whereas the anxious applicant is depicted as supercilious, shallow, even arrogant. Portrayed as the admiral's means of personally ensuring selec- tion of the best candidates for nuclear power training, these interviews have long been known in the navy as his method of asserting personal dominance from the beginning.