Rickover was a pragmatist and a self-centered one, as well. He had put a great deal of his own time and a commitment of his organization’s resources in the selection, training, and supervision of the captain of his nuclear-powered carrier, Enterprise.
Rickover personally had screened those officers recommended by the CNO and then had made his recommendation, which was tantamount to selection. For a year, the prospective commanding officers had been trained in his headquarters under his immediate supervision for a six-month period and then turned over to his staff in Washington and at the nuclear carrier land-based prototype in Arco, Idaho, for a rigorous hands-on course of nuclear-power engineering and reactor control.
Altogether, his organization had committed almost a year and a half of its time in selecting and training the officer to be the CO of the Enterprise. So Admiral Rickover had decreed that one year in command was not enough time to pay back the investment.
His theory was that if he found an officer whom he considered suitable for command of the Enterprise, he would be satisfied to leave him there indefinitely. But he knew of course that would never be acceptable to anyone in the Navy for many compelling reasons. So he settled on a two-year tour of duty for command of a nuclear carrier and prevailed upon his supporters in Congress to require the Navy to abide by this policy. These members of Congress were basically the congressmen on the Sea Power Subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee and Senator “Scoop” Jackson in the Senate, who carried an enormous amount of weight as far as the Navy was concerned and was a great believer in Rickover.
The chief of naval operations and the chief of naval personnel fussed with the extended tour, but only mildly. They did not want to take on Rickover and his allies, knowing it would be a defeat for them in the long run. And then, there was only one nuclear carrier in the fleet and the impact on the promotion opportunities for aviation captains would not be too severe. There were many senior people in the Navy who believed that more than a one-year tour was needed in command of all ships and aircraft squadrons. They felt it was unfortunate that for reasons of providing command opportunity for naval officers, pressure from the career management system at BuPers had forced reduction to only one year, to the detriment of stability in the fleet.
In any case, the CNO believed the two-year tour was warranted in view of the nuclear carrier’s radiological risk potential, which justified the policy that only the best and most experienced senior officers — commanding officer and executive officer — as well as those directly associated with the nuclear plant itself serve in these nuclear-powered ships.
10
The Enterprise
Admiral Rickover said, “Let’s see how fast she can really go.” This didn’t sound like Rickover, but it did sound like fun, pushing eighty-seven thousand tons of warship with new reactor cores and a clean bottom to its maximum speed. It was 2100, and we were both on the bridge of the Enterprise enjoying a cup of Navy coffee after a long day of drills and exercises and relishing the prospect of an equally active evening putting the power plant through a series of operational trials.
I had taken over the Enterprise the day before, 15 August 1965, at a change of command ceremony on the hangar deck with the carrier alongside the pier at Newport News Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Company. Both Admiral Rickover and Dabney had been in attendance, but my father, now a retired four-star admiral, was in the hospital, unable to see me take command of the world’s largest warship.
The next day, the Enterprise got underway at 0800, standing out the channel with me on the bridge for the first time in command. Engineering acceptance trials had been successfully completed under the former commanding officer and the Enterprise had completed a year-long refueling of the eight nuclear reactors, which now had longer-life nuclear cores of a new design. Now Rickover wanted to see how well the ship performed. We had been building up to full power over a six-hour period and had arrived in our assigned operating area about fifty miles off the coast. Rickover was personally monitoring all vital signs in the propulsion plant. At about midnight, the speed run began with me at the conn and Rickover giving advice. He said not to use the ship’s rudders — there were four of them — as any movement out of their fore and aft position would produce drag and reduce the ship’s speed. I complied with this guidance for about ten minutes, until the eighty-seven-thousand-ton vessel began to wander all over the sea on its own. I told Rickover I could not avoid using some rudder but would apply only the minimum amount of helm necessary to keep the carrier on a safe course.
Rickover was increasing the engines’ speed, revolution by revolution, until the Enterprise’s engines reached their maximum rpm. At this point the ship’s speed indicator, as well as the special test devices, indicated that the carrier had attained a speed of more than thirty-seven knots — more than forty miles an hour. We sustained this speed for an hour before reducing the engine rpms and the reactor power slowly to preclude shocking the engineering plant with sudden transients.
The Enterprise returned to Norfolk, but this time it went alongside one of the carrier piers at the Naval Operating Base (NOB) Norfolk, the Navy’s huge installation on the Hampton Roads waterfront. There the loadout began of the thousands of tons of supplies of all kinds, food, clothing, toiletries — everything needed to support more than six thousand sailors for six months without coming into port. Once deployed, the Enterprise would receive all of its resupply through replenishment vessels at sea.
In the 1950s Capt. Hyman G. Rickover and his Naval Reactors group in the Navy Department had developed a pressurized-water nuclear reactor that was sufficiently powerful and at the same time safe enough to be the propulsion plant in a U.S. submarine. Thus the USS Nautilus became the world’s first nuclear-powered vehicle and a true submarine. That same pressurized-water nuclear-reactor design was then scaled up under the initiatives of President Dwight D. Eisenhower in his “Atoms for Peace” program, to be used for the design of the first civilian nuclear power plant at Shippingport, Pennsylvania, providing electricity to the commercial grid supplying the Pittsburgh area.
With the success of the USS Nautilus, Adm. Arleigh Burke, the chief of naval operations, quickly saw the potential for nuclear power in surface ships, especially aircraft carriers, and gave Rickover the go-ahead. This first nuclear-powered carrier, the USS Enterprise (CVAN-65), was commissioned at Newport News in 1961. In order to achieve a nuclear aircraft carrier operational capability with minimum design and development time, Rickover had selected a ship design layout similar in size and configuration to the Forrestal class of conventionally powered carriers. The engineering placement remained essentially the same, with eight nuclear reactors replacing eight boilers. Similar to the Forrestal, the Enterprise had four main engines to turn four propeller shafts driven through conventional reduction gearing. The steam plant was actually a technical regression from 1,200 to 600 psi steam, and Rickover had to design a special flexibility into this plant to accommodate the thermal transients caused by the use of the steam catapults for the ship’s aircraft. The eight reactors were similar in design and capability to the pressurized-water reactors being used in the nuclear submarine program. In spite of the fact that virtually every component in the carrier’s propulsion plant and steam system had to be a new and technically unique design, it all worked properly from the day the first reactor was scheduled to go critical.