Admiral Rickover Built the Navy That Made Nuclear Deterrence Survivable

Government rarely produces anything that works the first time, never mind for seven decades. When it does, the explanation is almost always one stubborn person who refused to sign off on anything less than right. For the American nuclear navy, that person was a short, sharp-tongued officer from a Polish village who was twice passed over for promotion and who ended up shaping more of the nation's security than most secretaries of defense.

His name was Hyman George Rickover. He was not a charming man, and he did not try to be. He was a demanding one, and the demand is the lesson.

From Poland to Annapolis

Rickover was born on January 27, 1900, in Maków Mazowiecki, in the part of Poland then ruled by the Russian Empire. His family was Jewish, and in 1906, when he was six, they came to the United States, first to New York and then to Chicago. His father worked as a tailor. The boy grew up in a neighborhood where a family's rise depended on discipline, schooling and the willingness to work longer than anyone else.

He won an appointment to the United States Naval Academy, and he graduated in 1922. Notice the path. A child of immigrants arrived with nothing, and in less than two decades was commissioned an officer in the Navy of the country that had taken him in. That is not a footnote to the story. It is one of the reasons the country could produce him. A system that is open to talent from anywhere gets some of its best officers from places the Founders never saw.

He served on surface ships and submarines, earned a master's degree in electrical engineering at Columbia, and spent the Second World War in the Bureau of Ships, running the electrical section, where he learned how the Navy bought equipment and how often it bought equipment that failed. He learned, in short, that most of the Navy's problems were problems of standards.

The assignment that changed the Navy

In 1946 the Navy sent Rickover with a small team to Oak Ridge, Tennessee, to study the new field of nuclear power. Most of the officers treated it as a temporary posting. He saw something else. A reactor that could power a ship for years without refueling would free a submarine from the surface, since diesel boats had to come up for air, and would give the fleet range and speed that no conventional engine could match.

He was not the only person who saw the potential, but he was the one who understood how to turn it into a machine. By 1949 he held two jobs at once, one in the Navy and one in the Atomic Energy Commission, which together gave him control of both the work and the money. This dual arrangement became the Naval Reactors program, which he led for about three decades. It was an unusual bureaucratic design, and it worked because it put authority and accountability in the same hands. A single man was responsible for everything, and everyone knew whom to blame.

His first great prize was the USS Nautilus. President Truman laid its keel on June 14, 1952, and it was launched on January 21, 1954. On January 17, 1955, her commanding officer sent the signal "Underway on nuclear power." It was the first time a vessel had gone to sea with an atomic engine. In 1958 she became the first ship to reach the North Pole, passing beneath the ice on August 3.

The Navy's own conventional wisdom had said nuclear propulsion would take decades and might not be practical. Rickover built it in under a decade from a standing start.

Standards as a philosophy

What made the program remarkable was not the first success but the culture that Rickover insisted on. He held to a handful of principles, and they read as well in a corporate boardroom as in a wardroom.

1. Responsibility cannot be shared. In his world, a name was attached to every weld, every valve and every decision. A committee could not be blamed because no committee was permitted to decide.
2. Facing the facts is a duty. He demanded that engineers report bad news at once and in plain words, and he did not tolerate optimism that outran the data.
3. Technical competence is the basis of authority. Officers who ran his reactors had to understand them, and they were examined on the details.
4. Standards are not negotiable for the sake of schedule. He would delay a ship rather than accept a part that did not meet the specification.
5. Training never ends. Reactor operators were retrained and re-examined throughout their careers.

The result was a safety record that put civilian bureaucracies to shame. The Navy has operated reactors at sea for decades, and it has long cited the program's safety record as exceptional, a record that the commercial nuclear industry and the wider government have often envied. I will not give you a figure for the number of reactor-years, because the number grows and you should read the current one from the Navy rather than from me. The point is the contrast with the way government usually works, where a program that goes wrong acquires a task force, a study and a new office, and everyone retires with a pension. Compare that to a plan under which one man's name is on every weld. Nothing concentrates the mind like a signature.

Not every disaster could be foreseen. When the submarine USS Thresher was lost with all hands on April 10, 1963, during deep-diving tests, the cause was investigated and the Navy responded with a rigorous program, known as SUBSAFE, to ensure the integrity of the hull and sea-water systems of submarines. Rickover's culture was part of the Navy's response, though the loss was not a reactor failure. The lesson was that a standard, once learned, can be applied to the next problem.

The interviews

He interviewed every officer who wanted to serve in the nuclear program, personally, for years. The interviews have become legend. The stories, which come from the memoirs of those who sat through them, say that he would put candidates in uncomfortable settings, ask unexpected questions, and press them until they admitted what they did not know. The stories are many, and some may have grown in the telling, so treat the details as reported and not as record. What is well attested is the purpose. He wanted to find out whether a man would tell the truth under pressure, because in a reactor compartment the truth is a safety system.

One question became famous because a future president recounted it. Jimmy Carter, who interviewed with Rickover as a young naval officer, later titled his campaign autobiography Why Not the Best? after a question the admiral asked him about whether he had done his best at the Naval Academy. Whatever one thinks of Carter's presidency, the story is a tribute to what the question did to a young man who had expected praise.

Here is the Rickover method, boiled down: the right question, asked directly, by someone who had the authority to follow it up. It is a method that many bureaucracies have forgotten. The common substitute is a form that asks a person to rate his own performance and a supervisor who has never seen the work.

From the Nautilus to the missile boats

A nuclear-powered submarine could stay submerged for weeks, move fast and avoid detection. Now add a ballistic missile. A submarine that carries missiles and can disappear under the ocean is the survivable leg of the nuclear deterrent. A missile in a silo has a known location, and an enemy can plan to destroy it. A missile on a bomber is vulnerable on the ground. A missile on a submarine hidden in the vast ocean cannot easily be found, which means an enemy cannot be sure of destroying it in a first strike. That uncertainty is the heart of deterrence: it guarantees that an attacker would face retaliation.

The first ballistic missile submarine, USS George Washington, was commissioned on December 30, 1959, and began her first deterrent patrol in late 1960 carrying Polaris missiles. By designing her around a Rickover-style reactor and plant, the Navy built a platform that could stay at sea for patrols of months. Successive classes followed, and the ballistic missile submarine has been the most survivable element of the nation's nuclear forces for generations.

I want to underline the logic, because it is easy to take for granted. The strategy of deterrence, as described in Deterrence Fails When an Enemy Thinks You Will Not Pay the Price, depends on an adversary believing that you can retaliate. The belief depends on the force surviving a first strike. And the force survives because it is hidden, and it can remain hidden for months because it is powered by an engine that does not need air or fuel. The chain from a Polish-born engineer's insistence on quality to the stability of the nuclear balance is short and direct.

Rickover also led the development of the reactor for the power station at Shippingport, Pennsylvania, an early civilian nuclear plant in the United States. His influence on civilian nuclear power ran through the people he trained as much as through any single reactor.

The fights

Rickover was not loved by the Navy's leadership, and the dislike was mutual. He disliked what he regarded as the bureaucratic habits of the service: the promotions by seniority, the reports that praised everything, the rotation of officers through jobs just as they began to learn them. He fought them in his own way, by going to Congress.

Twice the Navy's promotion boards passed him over for rear admiral. The usual consequence was retirement. Instead, he had friends in Congress and in the press who objected that the Navy was about to discard the man who was building its nuclear submarine. Congress balked at the promotion list, the Navy convened a special board, and he was promoted in 1953. That episode is a reminder that the legislature has a role in the military, and that the constitutional power to "make Rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and naval Forces" in Article I, Section 8 is not an abstraction. It sometimes protects an officer the service would prefer to be rid of.

Reasonable people may criticize aspects of his style. His methods could be harsh, his temper formidable and his tolerance for dissent limited. He had a habit of gathering power into his own hands that would alarm anyone who values checks and balances, and the very structure of the Naval Reactors office, where one man had decades of control, was a risk as well as a strength. A conservative should be honest about that. A system that depends on one irreplaceable person is fragile, and Rickover's power was justified by results that did not always endure beyond him. The test of an institution is whether it keeps its standards after the founder leaves, and to its credit, the Navy's nuclear program has largely done so.

The retirement

On January 31, 1982, after sixty-three years of active duty by the Navy's count, including his service as a midshipman, Rickover was forced to retire at the age of eighty-two. The decision was taken under President Reagan and driven by Navy Secretary John Lehman, who had clashed with the admiral. Rickover had already been awarded the Congressional Gold Medal and other honors, and he left the service with a reputation that his critics could not erase.

It is a fair question whether the end was handled well. An officer who had given his life to the service was pushed out, and the Navy's civilian leadership had the authority to do it. Civilian control of the military is a constitutional principle, and in the Founders' design it is the correct arrangement. But it is also true that a Navy without Rickover began to see more problems of cost and quality in its programs, a reminder that standards need defenders after the man who set them is gone. The debate about procurement failures that followed, covered in Zumwalt, the Littoral Combat Ship and the Lessons of Procurement Failure, is a long sequel to his retirement.

What the record teaches

There are several lessons from this life that apply well beyond the Navy.

• One person with clear authority and clear accountability can accomplish what a committee cannot. The Founders designed the presidency on a similar principle, in Federalist 70, where Hamilton argued that "energy in the executive" required unity. The same applies to a program.
• Standards are a form of respect. A demanding standard says that the work matters and that the people doing it can meet it. The mushy alternative, a standard that is really a suggestion with a logo on it, tells them that the product is not important enough to get right.
• Talent comes from everywhere. A boy from a Polish village built the Navy's nuclear fleet. A country that wants more of that should look at who it is excluding by its educational and bureaucratic habits.
• Deterrence is a product of engineering, not just of declarations. The credibility discussed in the arguments about missile defense, such as Mutual Assured Destruction Versus Missile Defense, the Debate Never Ended, depends on machines that work and crews that are trained.
• Institutions must outlive their founders. The measure of success is whether the standards remain after the genius departs.

For the shipbuilding base on which all of this ultimately rests, see How America Built 2,710 Liberty Ships and Why It Could Not Do So Today. For the broader case for sea power, see Six Arguments Against a Strong Navy, and Why Each One Sinks.

The case in brief

1. Hyman Rickover, born in Poland in 1900 and brought to America at six, rose from the Naval Academy class of 1922 to lead the Navy's nuclear propulsion program for about thirty years.
2. His principles of personal responsibility, plain reporting of bad news, technical competence and refusal to bend standards produced USS Nautilus, launched in 1954, and a reactor safety record that civilian bureaucracies envy.
3. Nuclear power made the ballistic missile submarine possible, beginning with USS George Washington in 1959, and a hidden, long-endurance force is the survivable leg of deterrence.
4. His methods and concentration of power had real costs, and the Navy forced him to retire in January 1982, but the standards he set have largely outlived him.
5. The lesson is that deterrence rests on engineering discipline, which in turn rests on accountable people.

What you can do: read your own representative's record on shipbuilding and nuclear modernization at the oversight page, and ask whether the programs he or she funds have a named person who answers for the results.