The Rickover Way

This cartoon actually makes light of the fact that Admiral Hyman G. Rickover was the visionary who almost single-handedly pushed, prodded, manipulated and cajoled the Navy's engineering wing, allies in Congress, national political leaders, and innovative industrial forward thinkers against very powerful Admirals who wanted to shape the Navy of the future to conform to what had won WWII. Admiral Rickover had learned from a very painful lesson from the early Pacific War: The Navy suffered devastating losses because it was designed and shaped to fight the previous war instead of the future war. In a time when we only knew the power and disruption of nuclear weapons on the outcome of wars, Rickover's vision was to replace fossil fuels with nuclear propulsion so that submarines and the surface fleet could steam independently and quickly to where needed. The ships would then be ready to fight immediately upon arriving at a hotspot rather than waiting for the supply chain to catch up — a problem that has plagued military forces for much of history.

He had the idea that if submarines could stay submerged and only come up near the surface to deliver weaponry (including ballistic missiles with nuclear bombs), this would be a force multiplier and a deterrent to future world wars with nuclear weapons. This became a concept called mutually assured destruction (or MAD for short). His greatest idea was to create the first fully stealthy submarine powered by and propelled by a nuclear reactor, that could generate its own oxygen and distill water from the sea thus enabling it to remain submerged for months and undetected until its mission was complete. Unlike diesel powered submarines, nuclear powered submarines with a tear drop shaped hull travel much faster submerged than when on the surface. The greatest external hazard to a submerged submarine traveling fast underwater is uncharted sea mounts, and not the enemy. United States technology also outpaced the rest of the world in making submarines so quiet when submerged that they make less noise than the surrounding ocean, and almost impossible to find by submarine detection systems and other submarines. When they go on a mission, the amount of time a modern nuclear propelled submarine can remain submerged is now only limited by the amount of food it can carry and crew fatigue from constant vigilance. Rickover worked diligently and tirelessly from 1945 through the early 1950s until the USS Nautilus, the first nuclear propelled submarine, was finally launched. He even invented positions for himself within the naval bureaucracy and influenced allies in Congress to force those changes on the Navy. He is rightfully called the father of the nuclear navy.

He faced so much resistance to putting nuclear propulsion on surface combatants and aircraft carriers that he devised the idea of a proof-of-concept test platform to prove that more than one nuclear reactor could be placed on the same ship. He had carte blanche to build submarines, so he designed and built the USS Triton with two reactors and convinced President Eisenhower to authorize a secret mission to transit the globe submerged following the course of Magellan, the leader of the first expedition to circumnavigate the globe. The fanfare of the successful mission finally overcame resistance from the hidebound surface fleet Admirals who had been sabotaging his agenda and vision. After this mission, the Triton still had some utility as a radar picket because, unlike WWII picket destroyers, it could submerge if detected while quickly and unexpectedly transitioning to new locations. However, by circumnavigating the globe submerged along the same route as Magellan, it profoundly demonstrated what nuclear propulsion could do for the surface Navy. Soon after, the USS Enterprise was being designed with eight nuclear reactors, and all modern aircraft carriers only two much more powerful reactors for redundancy. The name Enterprise became famous as a certain fictional starship, which Gene Roddenberry named after this first revolutionary ship that projected sea power around the globe much swifter than ever before. Star Trek is the first science fiction that used naval rank instead of air force rank for its space sailors.

Rickover's career was rife with examples of his boldness, political stunts, pettiness, and outright skullduggery to push the fleet into nuclear propulsion. In testifying before Congress one time, to alleviate the concern that nuclear reactors were unsafe, he drank a beaker of decontaminated reactor coolant water. He promised Congress that any officer serving on a nuclear-propelled naval ship would have to pass a personal interview with him before being accepted into the program. This legacy continues to this day, with his successors doing the exact same thing.

Just as he promised Congress, he never relented on that promise, and I was interviewed by Adm. Rickover before being accepted into the nuclear propulsion officer training pipeline during my senior year of college and NROTC in 1978. I was ushered into his presence by what I later learned was a higher ranked officer there as a candidate and trainee to eventually command a nuclear ship (if he passed the rigorous training program he was immersed in). I entered a very non-descript and humble office furnished with regulation navy grey steel furniture. This office was very humble and totally unlike other 4-star Admiral offices in the Pentagon and elsewhere. Rickover was unimpressed by trappings of power and hyper-focused on the mission. Before this last step in the acceptance process, we young midshipmen were thoroughly coached for over an hour on what to do and what not to do when meeting ‘the Admiral.’ Many stories were shared with us of arrogant young midshipmen who did not follow the advice given them during this ‘prep time.’ For several days before our final yes or no with him, we had undergone difficult written tests and oral examinations by his staff. They reviewed every college course we had taken, comparing our grades received for each course of instruction to those grades received by others from other colleges and universities in the country. Rickover's staff had an extensive database of how previous accepted applicants with similar grades had performed during the six-month comprehensive nuclear propulsion classroom training. It was an extremely fine-tuned predictive hiring process, likely the first of its kind to be documented and regularized. The interview was brief but memorable and in tune with his known eccentricities. Every person who had ever been through a Rickover interview could recount the session almost word for word decades later. I was only in his presence for about 3 minutes, and my wits were quickly tested to keep up with his rapid-fire questions. He led me to a point where I grinned at him and gave a flippant answer to his last somewhat sardonic question, followed by a curt “that's all” by him to my escort. Outside the door, I collapsed against the wall, turned to my escort, and said, “I just gave a sarcastic answer to the Admiral.” He said, “That's OK, you're in.” The Admiral was famous for detecting and exposing arrogance or hypocrisy during those brief interviews. They had coached us to be brutally honest, prepared to back up any declarative statement with facts, and to answer only the question asked with no elaboration or backstory. (which is a good summary of ‘the Rickover way’)

When I was the young Reactor Controls Division Officer on my submarine, which was taking our reactor critical for the first time in over a year after a shipyard overhaul, I was awakened at 2 in the morning to be summoned to the control room of the engineering spaces. The captain wanted to see me with a question. The reactor was already critical by this time and was raising power to the point of generating steam for our turbines when I arrived at the control room. My responsibility before this evolution was to review the paperwork used by technicians I supervised who would perform all the instrumentation checks that monitored the nuclear reactions taking place as control rods were raised for the first time in a long time. This ‘pre-critical checkoff’ document was about 50 pages long and had numerous handwritten numbers on the form specific to our reactor and the state it was in, as well as other specifics related to the instruments being tested. The captain pointed to a plus and minus specification on a reading recorded by my technicians. The number recorded was actually out of the allowed % range from nominal, but no one who had reviewed the document prior to authorizing the reactor being taken critical had noticed an out-of-spec reading; including my technicians, their direct enlisted supervisor, the Engineering Officer of the Watch, and finally the Engineering Department Head. The captain was reviewing the document post-operation and was the first and only one to have noticed this rather obscure recorded number being outside the calculated range from nominal numbers. This would mean that we should not have proceeded with the reactor criticality evolution until the anomaly was evaluated. We had violated reactor safety, and no one had noticed the anomaly in the reading! He asked me if I had reviewed the document prior to its use, which of course I had done so. We had practiced this evolution five times over the course of the previous week and half, and pre-completing this document had become almost routine. THEN, the captain pointed out to me that the calculation for the range was wrong, and the recorded number was actually within spec for what the calculated allowable range should have been. So we had not violated reactor safety standards after all… What a relief! BUT, now the Captain wanted to know how this incorrect document had been prepared by my technicians, reviewed by me prior to use, and then the completed document had been reviewed by more than one supervisor prior to authorizing the operation with the reactor? I of course was very embarrassed, and admitted to the captain that the one number on the entire document I had not used a calculator to verify correctness was that one allowable range mid-way through the document and no others. I was under pressure to do it in a hurry, and had skimped on one crucial step. I began apologizing profusely to the captain even though I was also super relieved that we were ‘legal.’ The captain, who was the best leader of men I had ever served under said to me, “Dave, don't apologize, just don't do it again.” He then almost gleefully went on to perform that same embarrassing questioning of everyone else who had missed the ‘out of spec’ that was not really out of spec. We all learned a very valuable lesson that day to pay attention to critical details. But I also learned another even more valuable lesson when something appears to be wrong that others have missed, to investigate fully prior to jumping to a conclusion that might be wrong. Because the captain did that prior to confronting anyone, he did not lose credibility, but gained even more with all of us involved due to his calm and measured reaction to what on the surface appeared to be an egregious error that would have had to be reported to Adm. Rickover's staff in Washington DC after shutting down the reactor and conducting a thorough investigation. If found to be negligent, this would have resulted in everyone in the chain of command receiving official reprimands and possibly being fired for violating reactor safety. Because two errors cancelled each other out, there was no need to report it externally.

From the very beginning, operations of the US Navy nuclear propulsion plants set very high standards for safety and reliability with officers and enlisted conducting themselves in the ‘Rickover way.’ As these personnel trained by this program retired or finished their active-duty obligation, his influence spread, dominating the civilian nuclear electricity generation industry and then spilling over into many other industrial processes and sectors. All because one man had a strong vision and conviction that discipline and superior technology were the path to peace. All his disciples following in the path modeled for them by this innovator and very driven man, without some of the more outrageous Rickover eccentricities, adhering to the principles drilled into them by the ones who had gone before them, have achieved great success in whatever endeavor they pursue. You too can change the world (or the part of it you influence) by following his example. If you have a BHAG (big hairy audacious goal) that you are convinced is the right path for you and others to follow, be relentless by pressing forward with grit and determination. If it means you must invent new positions or recruit powerful allies to get there, then do it. If it means you must invent new processes or tools or new ways of attacking problems that are outside conventional wisdom, then do it. Choose your battles wisely, but do not shrink from stepping on toes if you must. Rickover was so convinced of his vision of the future, that he was willing to create powerful enemies to accomplish his mission. He was finally forced to retire long past a normal retirement age when the number of those enemies had grown overwhelming, but by then, he had so many disciples of the “Rickover way,” that his legacy survived and thrived, and has spread in diluted form throughout the rest of our nation's industries and military.