Going Nuclear

Built at the Electric Boat Shipyard in Groton, Connecticut, Nautilus was launched January 21, 1954, after years of lobbying by Admiral Hyman Rickover, today known as the father of the nuclear navy. Rickover saw the Nautilus, named for the fictional submarine in Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, as the test bed for a fleet of undersea boats that could stay submerged for weeks at a time and loiter undetected off hostile shorelines.

Over the next several years the Nautilus set numerous speed and endurance records. In August and September 1957 she traveled some 1,200 nautical miles under polar pack ice and came within 200 miles of the North Pole as part of a research expedition to investigate the possibility of an undersea Northwest Passage. Word of the journey reached the White House through an offhand Pentagon conversation between the Nautilus's captain, Commander William R. Anderson, and Eisenhower's naval aide, Captain Evan Peter Aurand. Eisenhower and his staff immediately saw the implications.

Caption: Nautilus, shown here during her initial sea trial on January 20, 1955, normally carried a crew of twelve officers and ninety enlisted personnel and had a publicly acknowledged submerged speed of "at least" twenty-three knots. Her official crush depth remains secret, although she routinely operated at 700 feet and deeper. General Photographic File of the Department of the Navy, 1943-1958; General Records of the Department of the Navy, 1804-1958; Record Group 80; National Archives.

Top of the World

At 11:15 p.m. Eastern Daylight Savings Time on August 3, 1958, the Nautilus reached the Pole with more than 14,000 feet of water under her keel. Anderson announced the achievement with a countdown from ten and a moment of silence. The crew celebrated with a dinner of steak and French fries. "And just that swiftly, we were no longer headed north," Anderson would later write. "The bow of USS Nautilus was now heading away from the Pole, pointed due south." It was Anderson's little joke — from the Pole, everything is due south.


Caption: Anderson, conscious of the dangers inherent in the Nautilus's mission, didn't sleep much on the run to the Pole. Photo ca. 1958, Submarine Force Library and Museum.

Happy Days ... And a Warning

Thirty-six hours later, the Nautilus surfaced off Iceland, and her radio flashed news of the accomplishment to the United States. A helicopter picked up Anderson at sea and flew him to Iceland for the first leg of the trip to Washington, D.C., where President Eisenhower decorated him with the Legion of Merit and gave his crew the first ever Presidential Unit Citation in a White House ceremony. Anderson lingered long enough for a packed press conference, then he flew the Atlantic again to rejoin the Nautilus before she docked in London.

At the time, official comment made much of the commercial possibilities of trans-Polar travel, such as cargo submarines hauling goods from New York City to Japan. But the unstated message was clear. As Nautilus sonar supervisor Al Charette noted: "Knowing that we could operate it [Nautilus] safely under the ice, it was known that a Polaris submarine could operate safely under the ice. Without an equivalent submarine, there was no way [for the Soviets] to go in and find that guy ... So we could be right in their back yard and there was nothing they could do about it."

Caption: President Eisenhower may have looked dour at the August 8, 1958, press conference with Anderson, but he knew he had just sent a message to the Soviets that meant a lot more than a satellite. Life magazine archives.

Now Who's Playing Catch-Up?

The Soviets had been caught flatfooted in the game of international one-up-manship that characterized the Cold War years. It would be four years before they matched the Nautilus's feat, and the Arctic Ocean would become a major area of confrontation in an undersea arms race. For the next thirty years American and Soviet submarines would play cat and mouse under the ice cap, shadowing each other's vessels, tapping underwater communications cables, and mapping the coldest, darkest ocean in the world to prepare for a war that never came.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990, and especially in the past ten years as resource competition in the Arctic has intensified, once-secret geographical information gathered during the Cold War has dribbled into the public domain. Ironically, the data has become the foundation for renewed international confrontations in the race to discover and lock up new sources of oil and natural gas.

The Nautilus never returned to the Pole, although she continued on active service until 1979. Today she is preserved as floating museum ship at the Submarine Force Library and Museum in Groton, Connecticut. Commander William R. Anderson retired from the Navy several years after his historic voyage and went on to serve four terms in Congress as a Democrat from the Sixth District of Tennessee. He was defeated in 1972 after speaking out against the Vietnam War and FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. He died February 25, 2007, at age 85.

Caption: Soviet missile submarines, such as the Delta III shown in this declassified Defense Intelligence Agency painting from 1987, routinely ran patrols under the Arctic ice cap, and just as routinely were shadowed by American hunter-killer submarines determined to stop them from launching. DIA Military Art Collection: The threat in the 1980s.