The USS Nautilus Was First Under the Ice and Across the Pole

 

The USS Nautilus under the Polar ice cap. 

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.  

 

The1968 action thriller Ice Station Zebra starring Rock Hudson and Ernest Borgnine, a U.S. nuclear submarine is sent on a mission to save the crew of a weather station on the ice near the North Pole but are confronted by Soviet paratroopers in a stand-off that could lead to nuclear war.  The film was based on the dangerous game played by both nations at the top of the world  

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.

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-‘50s she was the most publicized ship in the Navy, her very existence a cautionary shot over the bow of Soviet naval ambitions. 

She was named for the famous submarine build and sailed by mad Captain Nemo in Jules Verne’s pioneering science fiction novel Twenty Thousand 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.

 

Jules Verne's mad captain on the deck of his submarine The Nautilus in an illustration from an early English edition of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. 

Today the vast polar ice cap under which the Nautilus sailed has greatly shrunk under conditions of relentless climate change.  For summer months there is now open water completely around the sea ice, which is also thinning and apt to break up.  Polar bears, walrus, and fur seals are all endangered as are the livelihoods of indigenous peoples in the Arctic from Siberia, Alaska, Canada, and Greenland.  

 

A 2021 satellite image shows greatly reduced sea ice around the North Pole. 

Nuclear submarines from the U.S., Russia, and the United Kingdom have all surfaced through less than three feet of ice near the Pole.

 

 

Walter Cronkite Staged a News Coup at CBS

Walter Cronkite prided himself on not only being the anchor of The CBS Evening News but the program's Managing Editor broadcasting from a working newsroom in the mid-1960s.

He had only been on the job a little more than a year when Walter Cronkite finally got his wish. Over the fierce objections of local affiliates who resented losing profitable time for local or syndicated programming to the network, his program, re-named the CBS Evening News, expanded from 15 to 30 minutes every night on September 2, 1963.

A week later NBC’s Huntley-Brinkley Report, the ratings leader among the three network news programs by a wide margin, reluctantly followed suit.  ABC’s lightly regarded and little watched new program then anchored by the entirely forgotten Ron Cochran didn’t even bother.  It wasn’t until two years later during Peter Jennings’ rocky first tenure in the anchor chair that ABC joined the trend.

At first many critics and the public weren’t sure that there would “be enough news” to fill a half hour.  The early years were still dominated by the anchors reading the news.  Network correspondents in New York and Washington could get on the air easily.  But live feeds from other locations were difficult and expensive.  On-the-spot coverage was shot on film, which had to be rushed to network headquarters, developed, printed, and edited which could mean delays in seeing events from a few hours to days for stories filed by correspondents half a world away.

But Cronkite was right.  The Sixties were exploding with news.  Just a week before his premier the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom featuring Martin Luther King’s dramatic speech had captured the attention of the nation.  The Civil Rights Movement and grainy film footage of cops beating demonstrators would be a staple of the expanded broadcasts.  So would rising Cold War tensions symbolized by yet another Berlin Crisis.  In Washington a photogenic President and a glamorous First Lady drove news cycles, as they were coming be known.

It must have been a very hot news night when this show was aired on CBS's still un-air conditioned set in New York City.

In November the assassination of John F. Kennedy and its aftermath would more than fill the nightly broadcasts.  Still ahead were the great Space Race, a rapidly escalating War in Vietnam and the protest movement against it, a whole counter cultural movement, and, as always politics, politics, and more politics.

By the end of the decade, having vanquished NBC’s once insurmountable lead in viewers and having established himself as “The most trusted man in America” Cronkite would be clamoring to expand his program to a full hour.  The affiliates, preferring to expand their local news operations instead blocked his ambition.  

Nora O'Donnell, the only woman among the three network anchors will be replaced after the Election by a pair of men.

In its current configuration as The CBS Evening News With Nora O’Donnell it remains a 30 minute program. When she leaves the anchor chair after the November elections she will be replaced by a male tag-team of John Dickerson, political editor for CBS News and Maurice DuBois, a local news anchor on New York station WCBS.  Shades of Huntley and Brinkly that they hope will jump start ratings for the now perennial bottom dweller. The program will be moved back to its former home at the CBS Broadcast Center in New York.  David Muir at ABC leads the ratings competition among the Big Three heritage networks and Lester Holt still helms NBC Nightly news.

None have the influence of Cronkite to generations who get most of their news on the phones from a plethora of platforms, many of them driven by ideological bias.