The Man in Tempo 3

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On a bleak Idaho desert, a wayfaring man, if wayfarers were permitted, might stumble on what looks like a scene of mis placed industrialism. A great cloud of steam rises from a pond of hot water, and near by stands a forbidding building of blank-walled concrete. It looks like a powerhouse, but no smoke comes from the six short stacks sticking out of its roof (they are emergency ventilators). The building, nevertheless, is a powerhouse--the first nuclear powerhouse of the Atomic Age.

Inside is a strange, ungainly object: the central half of a submarine. Its afterpart stands clear and showing its skin, like a dissected whale, but its forward part is enclosed in a big tank of water. The building is filled with a rushing sound. Men come and go, consulting complicated instruments. A crew of engine-room men work inside the submarine, checking and nursing its machinery just as if it were cruising under the sea.

This is no ordinary submarine. Its fuel is uranium; its engine needs no air. Theoretically, it could cruise around the earth without coming once to the surface. It could make an attack across the Pacific without poking more than a periscope into the atmosphere. It could sail the dark and secret sea under the Arctic ice.

Since last March this ship of the Idaho desert has been "cruising" intermittently toward the North Pole.* Having no bow or stern, or water to float in, it has not moved an inch, but the long, rigorous tests of its nuclear power system have been brilliantly successful. Naval designers, tacticians and strategists are aware (some with regret) that a revolution in sea power is sweeping out of Idaho.

Human Tornado. The Navymen and civilian scientists in the blank-walled building know this too, but they dare not sit back to mull over the implications of their handiwork. Too often for their peace of mind, and generally on a weekend, the chill word spreads among them that "the admiral is here." All hands tense and quicken as a slight, spare human tornado whirls through the shop. Few jobs are done fast enough or well enough to suit Admiral Hyman George Rickover, topflight Navy engineer and leader of this strange new development program. His passage leaves a boiling wake of lacerated egos, but it also leaves a feeling, even among the lacerated, that something special has happened.

Annapolisman Rickover, a man who knows what he wants and wants it done to perfection, has long warred with the Navy --and he still loves his service. He has wooed, bullied and won the Atomic Energy Commission in its secret strongholds. He has made great industrial corporations jump and like it when he cracks the whip. Some high Navy officers still deplore intense, single-minded Admiral Rickover, but when the first atomic submarine, the Nautilus, slides down the ways at Groton, Conn, on Jan. 21, the U.S. Navy will never be the same again.

Hyman George Rickover was born in 1900 in the small, predominantly Jewish village of Makowa, Russian Poland, where his father, Abraham Rickover, was a tailor. By 1904 father Abraham had saved 100 rubles (then $50) and managed to reach New York. In another two years of hard work, he saved enough to send for his family. Ruchal (Rose) Rickover and her two children, Fanny, 8, and Hyman, 6, made their way across Germany, sleeping in bleak dormitories provided by German Jews. When they saw their first ships at Antwerp, the future admiral, Hyman, burst into tears. "The boats were so big," his sister recalls, "they frightened him."

Up from the East Side. The U.S. was good to the family of thankful refugees. A third child, Gitel (Augusta), was born in 1908. Two years later the Rickovers left Manhattan's seething East Side and moved to Chicago. Prosperous enough to avoid the slums, they settled in respectable Lawndale. They never went hungry again. Father Abraham always had work as a tailor. In 1919 he started a small garment factory, which he sold in 1946. Now he owns an apartment house on Chicago's North Side. Though 79 and comfortably fixed, he still plugs away as a tailor "to provide for his old age."

Hyman went to high school, but he always worked too, first as a delivery boy, later as a Western Union messenger. Though small, frail and sickly looking, he bicycled solemnly around the streets from 3 p.m. to 11, dutifully turning over his earnings to the family. Hyman was an earnest, bookish student, but his eight-hour job with Western Union did not help him get the best marks.

Young Hyman knew that his father would not pay for college. Thus tuition-free Annapolis seemed the best bet, and his friend Leonard Rosenblatt, son of a local politician, wangled appointments for both of them from Chicago's Congressman Adolph Sabath.

In Rickover's time (class of '22), life for a Jewish midshipman at Annapolis was marked by some unpleasantness. But Rickover's temperament also caused some of his troubles. Rebellious, secluded, intellectual, determined to make high marks, he did not fit the conformism of the Academy. He took little part in athletics; he preferred study to bull sessions; he did not "drag" (date).

Peacetime Navy. When Rickover graduated (in the top quarter of his class), he might have resigned from the Navy. World War I was over, and in the peacetime Navy, with no enemy in sight, the ships seemed good enough for their purpose, and the "book" contained instructions to deal with every situation. Rickover was not spectacularly successful in that Navy. He disdained cocktail parties and other social occasions, passed up shore leave for his books, made no effort to attract the attention of rising senior officers who might help his career.

But he did work--ferociously--when inany good officers were relaxing in the interwar illusion of peace. He specialized on electrical equipment, after five years of sea duty went back to the Naval Academy for postgraduate work in electrical engineering. When on the battleship Nevada as a lieutenant j.g., he and his men installed a 500-unit battle telephone system. When on the submarine S-48, he redesigned its defective motors. He fought against waste and slipshod ways. These activities earned him commendation, but they won few friends and no preferment.

Rickover's real progress was made by strenuous study, partly at Columbia University, where at Navy expense he earned a master's degree in electrical engineering. At Columbia he also met Ruth D. Masters, a student of international law, whom he married in 1931. Still, his advance in the Navy was slow, and when he got his first and only seagoing command, it was the minesweeper Finch, a decrepit rust bucket operating in China waters. Called back to Washington from Cavite Navy Yard in the Philippines (where his hard-driving efficiency had made whole shiploads of enemies), he was assigned to the Electrical Section of the Bureau of Ships. By the time he got command of the section in 1940, the war was just ahead, and hardworking, nonsocial officers were in sudden demand.

Rickover worked day & night revamping outmoded equipment to win the battles to come. His section grew prodigiously as the Navy's ships grew fuller of electrical and electronic gear. Sharp-tongued Hyman Rickover spurred his men to exhaustion, ripped through red tape, drove contractors into rages. He went on making enemies, but by the end of the war he had won the rank of captain. He had also won a reputation as a man "who gets things done."

With war's end, Rickover's prospects seemed to have dimmed, and his personal life was none too happy. The Rickover family in Chicago had never been outwardly affectionate. Violent conflicts and bitter resentments were an integral part of its life, but it was close-knit and loyal. Captain Rickover had drifted out of this clannish environment. He did not follow Jewish customs; he did not go to a synagogue; he had married a gentile. At last he wrote a letter to his parents, telling them that he no longer considered himself exclusively Jewish in religion. A later generation might not have taken this too hard; he is still earnestly religious in a nonsectarian sense. But Rickover's parents did not forgive him for many years.

Oak Ridge. In 1946, Captain Rickover, still a sharp, square peg confronted by polished, rounded holes, learned that the Bureau of Ships had decided to send a captain and four junior officers to Oak Ridge to study nuclear energy. He got the job. (No other qualified captain applied.) Nuclear physics in those days was something to scare even brilliant officers.

Since his decision to go to Oak Ridge, Rickover's life has been a battle to get the Navy and the atom together. It was a battle of a type that has been fought before--between the necessary conservatism of a military organization and the equally urgent necessity to keep it up to date.

During World War II, many new devices (e.g., radar) were adopted and developed to great refinement by the Navy. After the war, the Navy tended to settle in the just-established pattern. Rulers of the roost in the doctrine of the Navy were the carrier-borne airmen, who had fought spectacularly in the war in the Pacific. Far down in the list of the Navy's seagoing establishment were the submarines. They had played a vital part in the Pacific war, but they seemed to have little purpose against a potential enemy without much ocean commerce.

The pattern did not include the most revolutionary novelty; nuclear propulsion. It was still untried; indeed, it seemed far in the future, and the peacetime promotion system did not favor the quick rise of brilliant men with vision enough to prepare for the battles of the distant future.

Villainous Battery. Rickover had a vision. At Oak Ridge, he and his little command of four eager young officers painfully fought their way through mathematical entanglements to the strongholds where dwelt the atom. They came to the conclusion that the Navy, to remain a vital fighting force, must have nuclear propulsion, and that the logical place to apply it first was in submarines.

Rickover had graduated from the Submarine School at New London, Conn., and spent three of his seagoing years as a peacetime submarine officer. Well he knew the "pigboats" and well he knew that hated villain, the storage battery, that each submarine carries in its belly. When a submarine dives (as it must in action), all it has for propulsion is electric motors turned by the limited energy stored in the battery.

During peacetime maneuvers, a submarine swimming deep in the sea is at peace with the world. Though a storm may be roaring overhead, the ship does not roll or pitch. But during a wartime attack, the battery is a weak resource. Even when "fat" (fully charged), it is good for less than an hour at full speed.

The attack is made; the torpedoes hiss toward their victims. Then comes the bad moment. Down the white torpedo wakes race the enemy destroyers, the sharp pings of their sonars searching for the submarine. It dives for the depths, and then come the crashing depth charges.

If the submarine survives, there is a desperate, quiet cat & mouse game of search and evasion. If the submarine tries to escape at full speed, it will soon exhaust its battery. If it tries to save its battery by drifting slowly through the depths, the destroyers above may find it by sonar. Usually it compromises, moving at moderate speed as it twists and turns.

As the deadly game goes on, the chant of the battery man makes the crew's blood run cold. Every time he speaks, he reports a lower reading. Lights and fans are turned off to save trickles of current. The air grows hot and foul. When the battery's last charge is gone, the submarine must rise to the surface, perhaps to destruction.

A nuclear sub will be entirely different. It could swim submerged at full speed as long as desired. No destroyer could catch it. Rising quickly from the depths, it might even destroy destroyers.

Ladies' Room. The more Rickover studied the atomic submarine, the better it looked to him, but he soon found that few Navy bigwigs were even slightly interested. He had a few influential friends, but he had to fight constantly to keep a narrow foothold in the Navy's development affairs. As the postwar Navy settled down, his stock went down, too. Called back from Oak Ridge, he was reduced to vague "advisory duties" in an office that was once a ladies' room.

Having failed to interest the Navy, he tried the Atomic Energy Commission, but in 1947 the AEC was preoccupied with the urgent job of building up the nation's stockpile of atom bombs. It regarded nuclear power as a project for the future.

At last Rickover risked a step that was brash by Navy standards. After long preparatory politicking, he asked Admiral Chester Nimitz, an old submariner who was then Chief of Naval Operations, to back the atomic submarine. Nimitz saw the point at once and signed a letter (prepared by Rickover) to the Secretary of the Navy, recommending work on an atomic sub. Secretary John L. Sullivan approved the project, and Rickover became chief of the Navy's newly created Nuclear Power Division in the Bureau of Ships.

Then he renewed his attack on the AEC, which, as lord of the atomic empire, would have to take part in the project. At first, the AEC showed no official interest, but Rickover's new Navy backing took gradual effect. One of the AEC's worries was a lack of both public and congressional enthusiasm for anything nuclear except bombs. This ruled out civilian power reactors as too peaceable, but the nuclear submarine was a weapon and had a weapon's immediacy.

At last, in 1949, the AEC made a deal with the Navy, creating a Reactor Development Division headed by Dr. Lawrence R. Hafstad. At Rickover's suggestion, Hafstad agreed that the new division should include a "Naval Reactors Branch." The man in charge: Captain Rickover.

Tempo 3. This bureaucratic tour de force made Rickover boss of both the Navy and the AEC ends of his project. He could, and did, write letters to himself, answer them right off, and so get Navy-AEC "agreement" for the record. He assembled the bright young officers of his Oak Ridge days, told them not to wear uniforms, mixed them with civilian scientists. He moved them into an AEC building called Tempo 3, on Constitution Avenue, stripped the carpets from the floors to work at wartime pressure amid wartime austerity.

Rickover's high-level wangling operation is regarded by Washington connoisseurs as a classic, but it was not wholly admired by his Navy superiors. Captains are big men on ships, but in Washington "Navy country," where gold, braid glitters like Christmas trees, they do not amount to as much. And here was a captain with power that few admirals dreamed of.

Rickover has little tolerance for mediocrity, none for stupidity. "If a man is dumb," says a Chicago friend, "Rickover thinks he ought to be dead." Rickover did not conceal his opinions, and many of the officers he regarded as dumb had grown into admirals, cruising the Pentagon. They had not forgotten or forgiven. One of his opponents remarked recently: "We thought we had him fixed, but now he's out of control."

Wildcat. Rickover's working schedule is hard and relentless. He arrives at Tempo 3 in mufti at 8 a.m. and sets to work at top speed. The telephone rings often, but conversations are brief. "Yes," he'll snap. "Send that guy over, but I won't sign on the dotted line." He starts to hang up, then, "No, no. You hear me? No!" and the conversation is suddenly ended. Subordinates come and go in streams. Carbons of every letter are read critically by Rickover and generally scrawled with comments.

About 4 p.m., Rickover usually hurries out of Tempo 3. He is not going home, but to the airport. He flies to Schenectady, Pittsburgh or New York and holds night conferences with government contractors. Then he takes a sleeper for Washington and shows up at Tempo 3 at 8 the next morning. On weekends he sometimes gets as far as California. Somehow, in his tightly packed schedule, he also manages to turn up occasionally for an evening at home with his wife (who holds a doctorate in international law and has written two books on the subject) and his son Robert (who at 13 designs electrical circuits of television sets).

Nautilus. By Rickover's hard-driving methods and the work of his equally hard-working staff, the nuclear submarine (named Nautilus* almost by necessity) made spectacular progress. The hull and the radical propulsion system were designed simultaneously. Most iffy item, of course, was the nuclear reactor itself.

Engineer Rickover freely concedes that the reactor of the Nautilus will not be the best conceivable. "Sure," he says, "the scientists can think up thousands of reactors. But the Navy wanted a nuclear submarine, and it wanted one fast. We picked a simple type of reactor that we knew a lot about already. If we'd waited for the scientists, we'd still be fooling around."

The simple reactor of the Nautilus is not simple by normal standards. Its official name is STR (Submarine Thermal Reactor), because the neutrons that are its "fire" are slowed down to the "thermal" speed of molecules in everyday matter. Basically, it is a "core" containing enriched uranium,/- cooled by ordinary water that is kept by high pressure from turning into steam. The water comes out of the reactor hot and radioactive. Tightly shielded against radiation, it goes through a "heat exchanger" (a kind of boiler), where it turns a second batch of water into high-pressure steam. The steam. which is not radioactive, runs a turbine that turns the propellers.

Zirconium. The STR, designed by Argonne National Laboratory and Westinghouse Electric Corp., was a staggering exercise in pioneer engineering. One enormous problem was the material for tubes and other structural parts in the reacting core. It must resist corrosion, and it must not absorb too many neutrons. The answer was the rare metal zirconium, then a laboratory curiosity. Its metallurgy was shockingly difficult, but Rickover pushed it so hard that he called himself "Mr. Zirconium."

Pumps to circulate the high-pressure, radioactive water had to have perfection never demanded before. The shield to enclose the radioactive parts was a formidable problem. So was the control system whose function is to keep the reactor from destroying itself and the submarine.

In 1951 the prototype STR began to take shape in the desert near Arco, Idaho. The designing and testing (with 50-ft models) of the submarine itself were well along in the Bureau of Ships.

By this time the word had spread that something extraordinary was centered in Tempo 3. As confidence in Rickover grew in the Navy, a second nuclear submarine, the Sea Wolf, was scheduled, and General Electric was commissioned to build a different reactor for it. Named SIR (Submarine Intermediate Reactor), it will use neutrons of "intermediate" speed and molten sodium as a working fluid. It is now taking shape near Schenectady.

Time Bomb. But even though official Washington was growing enthusiastic, a time bomb was ticking under Tempo 3. Over the years the Navy has developed a kind of supreme court called selection boards to pass on promotions. The boards keep no records and need give no reasons for their decisions. Theoretically, they can be overruled, but they hardly ever are. If they "pass over" a captain, i.e., select his junior to be an admiral, there is normally no appeal.

In July 1951 Rickover was passed over by a selection board consisting, in this case, of nine admirals. This was bad for but not fatal to his career. He went on with his work. In June 1952 the keel of the Nautilus was laid in the yard of the Electric Boat Co., Groton, Conn. President Truman presided over the ceremonies, along with the Secretaries and Chiefs of Staff of the Army, Navy and Air Force, and the chairman of the AEC. Captain Rickover, in civilian clothes even for this occasion, kept in the background, but his work and vision had not gone unappreciated. Secretary of the Navy Dan Kimball awarded him the Legion of Merit for what he called "the most important piece of development work in the history of the Navy."

No Confidence. The very next day another selection board met to consider more captains for promotion to flag rank. It had received pleas for Rickover's promotion to rear admiral from the Secretary of the Navy, from the chairman of the AEC and from Rickover's own superiors in the Bureau of Ships. But the board passed him over for the second time.

A Navy officer who has been passed over twice for a promotion is normally scheduled to retire. He can be kept on as a special case or put to work as a retired officer, but his prestige is gone. He has suffered a vote of no confidence. Happily, the U.S. Navy does not exist in a vacuum. At news of the rejection of Rickover, both press and Congress protested the decision of the board. At last, Navy Secretary Robert Anderson and the White House took a hand.

To preserve decorum, the board was not ordered to change its decision, but the next selection board, in spite of the "twice passed-over" rule, selected Captain Rickover to be a rear admiral.*

In spite of all the uproar, he had not spent much of his thinking time on the selection board. Too much was happening. The Nautilus was growing fast. So was the Sea Wolf. In the blank-walled building on the Idaho desert, a crucial moment was approaching. The prototype reactor was almost complete; preliminary tests had been encouraging. On March 31 the AEC announced that the reactor had "gone critical." In AEC language, this means that it was producing power.

Since then there have been few announcements of progress on STR, but its undercover success has been phenomenal. It produces more power than it was designed for. It has given little trouble and has proved compatible with the mock-up submarine that was built around it. So much has been learned by its frequent operation that the second model, which will actually go into the Nautilus, is an even better reactor.

Dominant Pigboats. There are still some skeptics in the Navy, but as the Nautilus approaches her launching date, a fever of excitement is spreading in naval circles. The submariners, who have long grimly called themselves "the submerged service," now look forward to a time when their new boats will be the dominant ships of the Navy. The Nautilus will be the first "true" submarine, wholly independent of the atmosphere.

The Nautilus will certainly make 25 knots, and there is good reason to hope that she will make 30 knots (35 m.p.h.). The best destroyers steam only slightly faster (when the sea is not too rough), and most other small escort vessels are sluggards by comparison. If necessary, nuclear submarines can be made faster than any surface-going vessel. Since they lose no power in piling up waves, they get more speed out of the same expenditure of energy.

Submariners believe that the Nautilus and its successors will eventually make the oceans unsafe for any kind of hostile enemy craft--including aircraft carriers. But the nuclear submarine, say its admirers, will not stop when it has swept the sea of all surface warcraft. It can attack other submarines, hunting them when they are on the surface or running them down in the depths (if they are not nuclear too), with its greater speed and endurance.

Missile-Launcher. Perhaps their most important mission will be as missile-launchers. There is certainly some doubt that an aircraft carrier can approach an enemy-held coast and survive concentrated attack by land-based airplanes armed with atomic bombs. The nuclear submarine can. It can cruise to the enemy coast submerged, rise to the surface briefly at night, launch its atom-armed missiles at short range and cruise away under water. It is probable that some missiles can actually be launched from beneath the surface. A missile-launcher of this type would be well-nigh undetectable.

Most such developments are far in the future, but many ambitious young officers are already getting in on the ground floor of nuclear submarining. The first big prize, command of the Nautilus, went to Commander Eugene P. Wilkinson, now known to his envious associates as "Captain Nemo."

Admiral Rickover is convinced that nuclear submarines will save the Navy from near-complete elimination as a fighting arm of the nation. He also believes that out of them will grow the use of nuclear power for constructive, rather than destructive, purposes.

Peaceful Payoff. At present, nuclear reactors do not seem to be practical competition for conventional sources of power. But the Idaho tests of the STR showed ways to save large sums of money in building the second model. Other savings are in prospect. Eventually, Rickover thinks, nuclear reactors will spread from the submarines and find profitable jobs on land.

Both Rickover and Dr. Hafstad of the AEC have long believed that the U.S. should speed up this development process by financing civilian power reactors to use as proving grounds. Three months ago the AEC made a quick turn-around and decided to build a really big (60.000 kw.) reactor for a land power station. It gave the job to the practiced team of Rickover and Westinghouse.

When the Nautilus is launched, Rickover will be on hand to see it christened. Its sponsor: Mamie Eisenhower. He will probably keep well behind the horde of political and military notables. In Rickover's mind the Nautilus is not perfect; he criticizes it rather than praises it, for that is his way with the things he loves. He knows how it could be made better and how future nuclear submarines will be better. His nimble brain has already run ahead to the day when atomic engines will have proved themselves in submarines and will have multiplied to change the face of the world.

*Exact heading: northwest by J4 north, i.e., 318DEG true. *The first Nautilus, built by Robert Fulton in 1800, was named after the paper nautilus, a mollusk that was mistakenly thought to cruise the surface of the sea with fleshy sails, and to submerge at will. Most famed Nautilus (named after Fulton's) was the prodigious sea raider commanded by Captain Nemo in Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. /- Natural uranium from which some of the nonfissionable U-238 has been removed, leaving a larger proportion of fissionable 0-235. *The story of Rickover's campaign to develop the nuclear submarine is told in detail in the book, The Atomic Submarine and Admiral Rickover (Holt; $3.50) by TIME Correspondent Clay Blair Jr., to be published next week.

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