The Rickover Effect

Earlier this year, I helped write a document that would be used in the dismantling of the submarine and aircraft carrier nuclear propulsion prototypes at the Idaho National Laboratory.

At about the same time, I happened across a copy of Theodore Rockwell's "The Rickover Effect" at a local thrift store, Despite the $5 price -- pretty high for this thrift store -- I bought it without question. I just started reading it a week or so ago, and so far, I've enjoyed it.

Rickover, for good and bad, was a singular force in the US Navy, working against a lot of inertia and resistance in the Navy and in the US Atomic Energy Commission to get work started in earnest on nuclear-powered submarines. He may also be one of the founding fathers of the military-industrial complex and all that entails. Pretty interesting stuff in this book.

One of the reasons Navy nuclear propulsion succeeded is that Rickover insisted that the prototypes be built not to fit a warehouse, but to fit submarine conditions, so the prototpyes were built inside ship hulls that were in turn surrounded by water, making full-scale environmental mockups. Similar attempts for nuclear propulsion for jets failed in part because they were built for warehouses, and then had to be heavily modified to even begin squeezing into an airplane.

I haven't gotten to the point the project hits Idaho, but it's impressive to see how focused Rickover was on getting the project going despite a lot of obstacles in the way.

He was also a serious control freak, wanting even to see drafts of papers that had barely come out of an engineer's head. I'm not sure I could handle that kind of supervision.