Admiral Hyman Rickover, Founder of the Nuclear Navy
Admiral Hyman Rickover, Founder of the Nuclear Navy
Hyman Rickover went “Founder Mode,” and he built the nuclear Navy in record time.
When Soviet Russia shot Sputnik into orbit, America responded to this technological challenge with a feat of our own—in a completely different domain.
Within a year, the USS Nautilus became the first submarine to travel under the North Pole in a mission dubbed Operation Sunshine. Sputnik had shown that the Soviets could threaten America from above. Nautilus showed we could threaten Russia from below.
When they went high, we went low. We have Admiral Hyman Rickover to thank for the strategic coup of Nautilus and the nuclear Navy.
Rickover’s path to greatness was long and unlikely, as all his biographers emphasize. Short, introverted, and argumentative, Rickover was no one’s idea of a natural-born leader. Indeed, Rickover only commanded a rusty minesweeper for a brief period and was far from action during World War II.
However, Rickover demonstrated great skill as a manager of technically complex systems. Assigned to an engineering role aboard a battleship before the war, Rickover improved its fuel-oil consumption through a ruthless program of maintenance and energy conservation, turning the ship into one of the fleet’s most efficient. During the war, he oversaw a blitz of small improvements to the fleet’s electrical systems that made them safer to operate and more resistant to battle damage. Rickover’s tireless attention to detail saved lives, even if it won him little glory.
Recognizing his strengths and weaknesses, Rickover elected to become an engineering officer, foreclosing the possibility of future command of ships afloat. It turned out to be the wisest career decision he could’ve made.
After the war, Rickover was selected as one of a handful of officers to learn about the mysterious new technology of nuclear fission at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. He was quick to see the technology’s potential for naval propulsion.
The diesel-electric submarines then in service were impressive for their day, but primitive in comparison to what could be. They were primarily surface vessels that could submerge only for brief periods at very slow speeds. Once detected, submariners could do little more than wait in silence and terror to see if their ship could ride out the inevitable onslaught of depth charges. Nuclear propulsion could create a “true” submarine—a vessel that could live, deep underwater, as long as her crew could withstand and evade all but the fastest surface vessels.
As the head of a brand-new organization called Naval Reactors, Rickover devoted the rest of his life to building these submarines for America. He accomplished this feat through immense hard work, unswerving attention to detail, and ruthless leadership. (He was often compared to a tyrant, a czar, or the chieftain of a village… and was known to make such comparisons himself).
In short, Hyman Rickover went “Founder Mode,” and he built the nuclear Navy in record time.
One of the most important things that Hyman Rickover brought to Naval Reactors was a sense of urgency. He felt the Need for Speed, and he made sure those under his command felt it, too. The first challenge was USS Nautilus, which Rickover decreed would begin sea trials by the start of 1955.
Meeting this self-imposed deadline required extraordinary procedures and risk. Rickover hoped to use two shipyards to build the first nuclear submarines: one navy yard and one private yard. But when the navy yard proved incapable of scrambling manpower quickly enough, Rickover decided the private yard would do it all—and he rode the company hard to get the project done on his schedule, not theirs.
Rickover also decided to build the prototype reactor, “Mark I”—the world’s first nuclear propulsion system—at the same time as the “Mark II” reactor, which would go into the Nautilus, and the submarine itself. This concurrent, rather than sequential, activity shaved a year or more from the delivery schedule for the Nautilus. (Danny Gold did something similar when he illegally built Iron Dome half-a-century later, as we have written.) But it came at great risk. If the reactor design was later found to be fundamentally flawed, the entire project would be a write-off. Rickover was pushing all his chips to the middle of the table.
The resulting submarine was a patchwork of off-the-shelf parts MacGyver’d to work for the novel propulsion system. Rear Admiral (Ret.) Dave Oliver, a nuclear submariner, records that Nautilus used the keel of “a diesel submarine already under construction, liquid-holding tanks from a bankrupt New Jersey dairy, emergency diesel engines salvaged from a minesweeper that had spent the last few years sunk on the bottom of a river, and a refurbished engine room appropriated from a pre-World War II destroyer.” The ship subsequently proved a nightmare to maintain. But the schedule held, and the price tag for the world’s first nuclear craft came in under $70 million (about $800 million in today’s dollar; nuclear submarines today start at around $3 billion). The Nautilus was ready when President Eisenhower called upon the Navy to answer Sputnik in 1957.
The construction of USS Nautilus could’ve been the crowning achievement of a naval career. For Rickover, it was just the beginning. His Naval Reactors “startup” was officially out of the seed stage. Now it was time to scale the nuclear Navy.
Rickover spent the next 30 years of his extraordinary career building and managing a world-class fleet of nuclear submarines, including the ballistic-missile submarines that function as the indispensable second-strike capability of our nuclear triad.
Rickover understood that nuclear was a unique technology that required a unique organization and culture to maintain. Well before the nuclear incidents at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, he realized that nuclear power’s reputation and viability hinged on its safety record; the public would not be willing to fund, much less send its sons and daughters to operate, technology they thought fundamentally unsafe. So he insisted on stringently high safety standards, for the crew and the environment. This included reactor shielding well beyond what most scientists at the time deemed necessary to protect the crew. The Soviet navy used far less shielding, which made its boats faster—but exposed its crew to dangerous levels of radiation and put them out of action far longer than American submariners.
Rickover also exerted unusual personal control over his organization. Famously, he interviewed each potential member of Naval Reactors and each potential submariner himself—thousands of meetings, all of which were blunt, personal, and intense. He required every engineering officer and commander of “his” submarines to write him semi-weekly about events and issues aboard ship. And he installed his people (“Rickover’s spies”) at every contractor and naval installation relevant to the nuclear Navy, to ensure he was never out of the loop about events in his fief.
Rickover’s micromanagement—that’s the only suitable word for it—created plenty of critics. Even his admirers noted his despotic tendencies. “[I]n business he had no kindness in him,” Francis Duncan wrote. “He would use all the psychological weapons at his command, all of them coercive, to ensure that things would continue to proceed as he wished them to.”
But Rickover believed that running an organization as technically complex as the nuclear Navy required no less. He, like all his people, had to be in the guts of the problem, which is why he favored engineers like himself—and derided dilettantes. “I take people who are good engineers and make them into managers,” Rickover said. “They do not manage by gimmicks but rather by knowledge, logic, common sense, and hard work and experience.”
Rickover tempered his controlling tendencies with a certain flexibility in dealing with individuals he trusted. He was willing to listen—and yield—when they could prove he was wrong. His dual mantras were “the devil is in the details” and “do what is right.” Precisely because he exerted so much control in deciding who made it into the elite corps of nuclear submariners, he could trust them to “do what is right” when it counted.
Oliver believes that Rickover struck a balance between the process and attention to detail that nuclear technology required, without stifling the innovation that was necessary to the technology’s future: “By insisting on strict process control for routine evolutions yet concurrently encouraging individuals to challenge his system and his processes, Rickover was able to institute a scheme in which individuals did not have to choose between process and innovation. The nuclear-submarine force would value both.”
And despite his heavy-handedness, Rickover inspired abiding loyalty in his subordinates. Many stayed at Naval Reactors for decades, because they were serving a founder and a mission they believed in.
President Nixon put it well, during the ceremony that gave Rickover four stars: “[T]his man, who is controversial, this man, who comes up with unorthodox ideas, did not become submerged by the bureaucracy, because once genius is submerged by bureaucracy, a nation is doomed to mediocrity.”
Rickover mastered the bureaucracy and made it his own. His creations mastered the deep.
Further Reading
Against the Tide: Rickover’s Leadership Principles and the Rise of the Nuclear Navy by Rear Adm. (Ret.) Dave Oliver
Nuclear Navy: 1946-1962 by Richard G. Hewlett and Francis Duncan
“Getting the Job Done Right” by Hyman Rickover