The USS Nautilus under the Polar ice cap.
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On August 3, 1958 the USS
Nautilus, the U.S. Navy’s
first nuclear powered submarine,
crossed the North Pole under the Polar icecap. Under the command of Captain William R. Anderson, 111 officers and crew plus four civilian scientists were on board when
the ship submerged off of Point Barrow,
Alaska and sailed without surfacing
over 1,000 miles before passing under the Pole.
She then continued submerged until she finally surfaced between Greenland and Spitzbergen on August 5.
Within days the achievement was
touted to the press as a scientific
breakthrough as part of the widely hyped International Geophysical Year.
President Dwight D.
Eisenhower awarded Anderson the Legion
of Merit.
But there was more—much more—than
science afoot in the Arctic. The real reason for the mission was the strategic game of cat and mouse being
played between the U.S. and the Soviet
Union over control of Arctic waters.
Submarines of both nations prowled the water there for decades during
the Cold War often resulting in
dangerous, but highly classified, confrontations. The films Bedford Incident and Ice
Station Zebra were based on this perilous game.
The USS Nautilus was built in
Groton, Connecticut by General Dynamics Electric Boat Division under
the personal supervision of Admiral
Hyman G. Rickover, the Father of the
Nuclear Navy. Her power plant was the S2W
naval reactor, a pressurized water
reactor by Westinghouse Electric
Corporation and is the basis for the design of nuclear propulsion still
used by navies around the world.
Mamie Eisenhower did the honors at the launch of the Nautilus in 1954.
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She was christened by Mamie Eisenhower on January 21, 1954, ran under nuclear power on
the morning of January 17, 1955, and was commissioned
on September 30, 1954, under the command of Commander Eugene P. Wilkinson. She
almost immediately began to smash records
for endurance—total time submerged,
and distance traveled. In the mid-‘50’s
she was the most publicized ship in the Navy, her very existence a cautionary
shot over the bow of Soviet naval ambitions.
Jules Verne's mad captain on the deck of his submarine The Nautilus in and illustration from an early English edition of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.
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She was named for the famous
submarine build and sailed by mad Captain
Nemo in Jules Verne’s pioneering
science fiction novel Twenty Leagues Years Under the Sea first
published in France in 1870. As you may recall Nemo wanted to
build a super weapon that would
enforce world peace by making war
too terrible to contemplate—just the supposed mission of American nuclear arms.
The ship remained in service until decommissioned in 1980. Since 1986 the USS Nautilus has been on
display at the Submarine Force Museum
in Groton.
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