Two other submarine projects are considered to be among the U.S. first-generation nuclear sub-marines, the radar picket Triton and the missile-launching Halibut (SSGN 587). Studies of an improved submarine power plant were initiated in 1951, before construction of the Nautilus began, with the emphasis on high speed and maximum reliability of operation.42 From the beginning a two-reactor design was chosen to meet these crite-ria. In addition to considering pressurized water (as in Nautilus) and sodium (as in Seawolf) as the coolant/heat transfer fluid, Rickover’s staff looked at fused salts, hydrocarbons, lithium, potassium, and various gases. One by one these coolants were discarded from submarine application for techni-cal reasons. By late 1953, after six months of oper-ating experience with the STR/S1W land proto-type, the decision was made to proceed with pressurized water. The complexity of a two-reactor propulsion plant required that a land-prototype S3G reactor plant be constructed at West Milton, New York. The similar S4G would be installed in the submarine.
With Rickover exerting his growing influence with Congress, the fiscal year 1956 shipbuilding program included funding for a radar picket
sub-marine (SSRN) with high surface speed.43 The radar picket (SSR) concept grew out of the latter stages of World War II, when Japanese suicide air-craft attacked and sank numerous U.S. picket destroyers that were providing early warning of air attacks against carrier and amphibious forces. The SSR would submerge to escape attack after provid-ing warnprovid-ing of incomprovid-ing air raids.
The first fleet boat/SSR conversions were under-taken shortly after the war. In all, ten fleet boats were converted, some being lengthened 30 feet (9.1 m) to accommodate electronic equipment and air-plotting spaces. Two new SSRs also were built, the large Sailfish (SSR 572) and Salmon (SSR 573).44 However, even as the Triton was being ordered from Electric Boat in October 1955, the SSR concept was being overtaken by technology. Land-based aircraft and carrier-based aircraft could provide longer-range and more responsive radar coverage. The few conventional SSRs kept in service after the late 1950s were used primarily in the missile-guidance role to support the Regulus program.
But Rickover justified continuation of the Triton project: “The importance of the Triton goes beyond the specific military task which has been assigned to her. The Triton, in her operations, will test an advanced type of nuclear propulsion plant and will pave the way for the submersible capital ships of the future.”45A most perceptive U.S. flag officer, Admi-ral I. J. (Pete) Galantin, a non-nuclear submariner,
has written of a discussion in the mid-1950s with Milton Shaw, an early and important member of Rickover’s staff:
In spite of the success being demonstrated by Nautilus and the plans to proceed with the single-reactor Skate class, [Shaw] said, Rick-over shared the uneasiness of senior engineers in the reactor development community about reliance on a single reactor. Difficulties being experienced with the liquid-metal cooled reactor prototype plant for Seawolf, and with many other AEC reactor programs, may have been a factor. During this pioneering stage, scientific knowledge and theory were not pre-cise enough to overcome tremendous concern about the unknowns that could arise in the engineering and operation of reactors.46
In the event, the U.S. Navy would build only one two-reactor submarine plant, the S4G used in the Triton.
Captain Edward L. Beach, President Eisenhower’s naval aide, who would become the first commanding officer of the Triton, later observed that “Rickover was always engineering-oriented. To him the two-reactor Triton was much more important than the follow-on Skipjack [and] George Washington [SSBN 598], despite all the other exotic stuff the G.W. had.
We had, of course, a surface ship plant . . . and it’s
The Triton was the world’s largest submarine when she was completed in 1959. She was the only U.S. nuclear submarine with a two-reactor plant; a superlative undersea craft, her radar picket mission was passé by the time she joined the fleet.
Note the fairwater opening for her retracted SPS-26 air-search radar.(U.S. Navy)
66COLDWARSUBMARINES
Triton (SSRN 586). LOA 447 ft 6 in (136.4 m) (©A.D. Baker, III)
now plain we were the prototype for the surface ship multiple reactor plants then under design.”47
The Triton would also be the world’s largest sub-marine when she was completed in 1959. Previously, the world’s largest undersea craft had been the Japanese I-400 class of submarine aircraft carriers.
(See Chapter 15.) The Triton was longer, with a slightly greater displacement—the nuclear subma-rine was 4471⁄2-feet (136.4-m) long, displaced 5,662 tons on the surface and 8,500 tons submerged.
The Triton had a modified Type XXI hull, optimized for surface operation. Indeed, she probably was the world’s only nuclear-propelled submarine to be designed with the same surface and underwater speeds—28 knots. At sea, according to Captain Beach, the Triton was “slightly faster surfaced than submerged, though capable of more than 30 knots in either condition, if we slightly exceeded the operat-ing parameters imposed. This we did, with Rick-over’s approval and under his observation.”48That event occurred on the Triton’s initial sea trials of 27 September 1959, with Rickover on board. The two-reactor plant produced 45,000 horsepower when the
“delta T”—the difference between the cold leg and the hot leg of the primary coolant—was increased.
Beach believed that the plant could have reached 60,000 horsepower “had that been necessary.”49
The giant Triton retained a classic double hull configuration, with a reserve buoyancy of some 30 percent. The ship had ten compartments: the bow compartment had four torpedo tubes (there were another two tubes aft, with a total of 12 torpedoes being carried); crew’s compartment; operations compartment; air control center-“officers’ country”
compartment; two reactor compartments; No. 1 engine (turbine) compartment; auxiliary machinery compartment; No. 2 engine compartment; and stern compartment. Amidships the ship had three levels.
The sail—the largest of any U.S. submarine in height and length—contained a small conning tower (compartment), the last in a U.S. submarine.
The huge sail provided a streamlined housing for an AN/SPS-26 air search radar.50It was the first electronically scanned, three-dimension radar, employing frequency scanning for elevation. It could track a high-flying aircraft at some 65 n.miles (120 km) at altitude up to some 75,000 feet (22,866
m). According to Beach, “We very seldom used it, or had a chance to use it. Nearly all of its operating hours were spent in routine testing to keep it func-tioning.”51The radar had very low reliability.
The radar antenna and the massive hoisting cylinder took up much of the sail’s volume. For stowage the SPS-26 antenna was rotated 90oto the centerline and fully retracted into the sail.
Even before the Triton was launched on 19 August 1958, controversy was swirling over the
$109-million submarine.52Four months earlier the Navy had announced plans to take half of the exist-ing radar picket submarines out of service. The remaining five submarines would follow shortly.
Although the subsequent crises in Lebanon and the Taiwan Straits delayed their retirement, the end of the SSR concept was in sight.
The president’s wife, Mrs. Mamie Eisenhower, christened the Triton. After launching, the Triton was completed at Electric Boat, but behind sched-ule. During 1958–1959 the emphasis at the yard was on Polaris submarines. The Triton was to have been commissioned in August 1959, but she did not even get underway on sea trials until 27 September.
Belatedly, she was placed in commission on 10 November 1959. She would never serve as a radar picket, and her career would be short.
Speaking at the commissioning, Vice Admiral Bernard L. Austin, the Deputy CNO for Plans and Policy, put a positive perspective on the submarine:
on this ship will fall the opportunity for demonstrating the practicability of large submarines. Her experience may well point the way for the future course of naval science.
As the largest submarine ever built, her performance will be carefully followed by naval designers and planners the world over.
For many years strategists have speculat-ed on the possibility of tankers, cargo ships and transports that could navigate under water. Some of our more futuristic dreamers have talked of whole fleets that submerge.
Triton is a bold venture into this field.53
Electric Boat workmen added the “finishing touches” to the Triton. Then, in late January 1960,
Captain Beach was ordered to a top-secret meeting in Washington on 4 February. There he was informed that the Triton was being sent on an underwater, around-the-world cruise, essentially following the course of Ferdinand Magellan’s ships (1519–1522). Such a trip would make important contributions to geophysical and oceanographic research and would help to determine the problems of long-duration operations—all important to the Polaris submarine program. However, like the Arc-tic cruises of the Nautilus and Skate, the around-the-world cruise was also looked at as a means of demonstrating U.S. technological excellence in the face of continuing Soviet space successes. The high-ly secret voyage would have the code name “Sand-blast,” the Sand, of course, referring to Beach.
Like the Arctic cruises, an around-the-world voyage would be a dramatic demonstration of nuclear submarine capabilities. Less than two weeks later, on 16 February 1960, the Triton departed New London with 184 officers, enlisted men, and civilian technicians on board. Steaming south, the Triton was forced to broach her sail above the surface on 5 March to permit a sailor seriously ill with kidney stones to be taken off at Montevideo Harbor and to be transferred to the U.S. cruiser Macon.54The sub-marine then rounded Cape Horn, sailed across the Pacific and Indian Oceans, rounded the Cape of Good Hope, and steamed northward. On 2 May Beach again broached the sail to take aboard two officers from a U.S. destroyer off Cadiz. During the cruise the Triton was able to maintain continuous radio reception through the use of a buoyant float-ing cable antenna.
The Triton surfaced completely for the first time in 83 days, 19 hours on 10 May, off the coast of Delaware. A helicopter lifted Captain Beach from her deck and flew him to Washington, where, at a White House ceremony, President Eisenhower revealed the voyage. Beach was flown back to the Triton and was on board the next morning when the submarine tied up at New London. She had traveled 35,979 n.miles (66,669 km) submerged.55
The Triton’s achievements, however, were over-shadowed in the news by the shootdown of a U-2 spyplane over the Soviet Union on 1 May. Subse-quently, the Triton carried out routine operations.
Without publicity her designation was changed
from radar picket to torpedo-attack submarine (SSN) on 1 March 1961. But the Triton was too large, carried too few torpedoes, and was too expensive to operate to serve effectively as an SSN.
(The SPS-26 radar was not removed.)
As early as 1958—while the Triton was still under construction—there were proposals to employ the submarine in roles other than as a radar picket. Lieutenant Commander Walter Dedrick, who would become the first commanding officer of the cruise missile submarine Halibut, proposed four possible roles for the Triton in an informal paper that he routed to Beach and others: (1) a command ship for a fleet or force commander, (2) advanced sonar scout for the fleet, (3) Regulus cruise missile ship, or (4) minelayer. All but the first would require extensive conversion.
No action resulted from Dedrick’s paper nor from several subsequent proposals. The most promising of the latter were to employ the Triton as an emergency high-level command ship or an under-ice rescue ship for other nuclear submarines.
In the role of a command ship, the Joint Chiefs of Staff or even the president and other senior civil-ians would be flown by helicopter out to the Triton when there was danger of a nuclear conflict. (In the early 1960s the Navy modified a cruiser-command ship and a light aircraft carrier to emergency com-mand posts for presidential use.)
Of more interest to naval planners was the prob-lem of a U.S. nuclear submarine becoming disabled under the Arctic ice. The Triton’s twin-reactor, 34,000-horsepower propulsion plant made her the most powerful undersea craft afloat. Should a nuclear submarine become disabled under ice, the Triton could bring out spare parts and divers to make repairs, if that were possible. If necessary, the Triton also could serve as a tug to tow the disabled craft to open water. At Beach’s request, plans were drawn up for this modification, which, he believed,
“would have been easy and inexpensive.”56
In the event, the Triton continued to operate in a limited SSN capacity for the next several years until decommissioned on 29 March 1969. She was the world’s second nuclear submarine to be taken out of service, the Soviet K-27 having been the first.
The Triton, overtaken by events, was built for the wrong purpose at the wrong time. Her value as a
development ship for multi-reactor surface ships was small, as was her role in maturing large submarine concepts. If she was a “failure,” however, it was an aberration in the U.S. nuclear submarine program.
By May 1960, when the Triton surfaced from her record underwater cruise, the U.S. Navy had 11 nuclear-propelled submarines in commission and another 17 under construction. At the time the U.S.
Navy was far ahead of the Soviet Navy in the pro-duction of nuclear submarines. And all evidence available to the U.S. intelligence community indicat-ed that the designs of U.S. submarines were superior.
(The Soviet Navy developed a form of SSR with four Project 613/Whiskey submarines being convert-ed, rejoining the fleet from 1959 to 1963 in the radar picket configuration. These submarines had their conning towers lengthened to provide for installa-tion of a large air-search radar, given the NATO code name Boat Sail, with certain internal equipment and the two stern torpedo tubes and their reloads being removed to provide spaces for electronic gear and aircraft plotting. NATO called the SSR variant
Whiskey Canvas Bag, the name derived from the canvas cover sometimes seen over the radar. While the U.S. SSRs were for fleet air defense, the Soviet radar pickets were intended to provide warning of air attacks on Soviet coastal territory.)
The U.S. Navy had shown an interest in the possi-bility of nuclear-propelled submarines as early as 1939. During World War II that interest was kept alive by Major General Leslie Groves, head of the atomic bomb project. Immediate postwar propos-als for nuclear submarines, while simplistic, demonstrated the continued interest in such ships at all levels of the Navy.
By the early 1950s, with solutions being found to the myriad of engineering problems, the construc-tion of the USS Nautilus began amidst naconstruc-tional publicity and hoopla. By the time the Nautilus went to sea in 1955, series production of SSNs as well as the construction of several specialized nuclear-pro-pelled submarines had been initiated by the Navy.
Most impressive of the latter was the giant radar picket submarine Triton; her construction specifi-cally to demonstrate the feasibility of a twin-reactor submarine in some respects marked the rapidly growing control of H. G. Rickover over the Navy’s nuclear propulsion program. While she was a valu-able test platform for a two-reactor plant, there was no naval requirement for the Triton.
Rickover, while a technical manager but not a decision maker in developing the first “nukes,”
was key to ensuring that U.S. nuclear submarines would be relatively safe and would enjoy a high degree of support from Congress. These were both critical issues in the success of the nuclear submarine program in the United States. In that environment total control of the design of sub-marines was being shifted in the mid-1950s from the Portsmouth and Electric Boat shipyards to the Bureau of Ships in Washington, D.C. The Naval Reactors Branch of the Atomic Energy Commis-sion—soon known as “NR”—and code 08 of BuShips became increasingly powerful, having profound influence on all aspects of nuclear sub-marine design and construction.
The U.S. entry into nuclear propulsion was slow, measured, and cautious.
The Nautilus loading torpedoes. The bulbous dome on the starboard side is the UQS-1 under-ice sonar, a high-frequency sonar normally fitted in minesweepers. The light patch at right covers the tethered rescue buoy, to be released if the sub-marine is disabled in “rescuable” water.(U.S. Navy)
TABLE4-2
Nuclear-Propelled Submarines
U.S. Nautilus U.S. Skate U.S. Triton Soviet
SSN 571 SSN 578 SSRN 586 Project 627
November
Operational 1955 1957 1959 1958
Displacement
surface 3,180 tons 2,550 tons 5,662 tons 3,087 tons
submerged 3,500 tons 2,848 tons 7,781 tons 3,986 tons
Length 323 ft 81⁄2in 267 ft 8 in 447 ft 6 in 352 ft 3 in
(98.7 m) (81.6 m) (136.4 m) (107.4 m)
Beam 27 ft 8 in 25 ft 36 ft 11 in 26 ft 1 in
(8.46 m) (7.62 m) (11.26 m) (7.96 m)
Draft 21 ft 9 in 20 ft 6 in 23 ft 6 in 21 ft
(6.68 m) (6.25 m) (7.16 m) (6.42 m)
Reactors* 1 STR/S2W 1 S3W/S4W** 2 S4G 2 MV-A
Turbines 2 steam 2 steam 2 steam 2 steam
horsepower 13,400 7,300 34,000 35,000
Shafts 2 2 2 2
Speed
surface 22 kts 15.5 kts 28 kts# 15.5 kts
submerged 23.3 kts 18 kts 28 kts# 30 kts
Test depth 700 ft 700 ft 700 ft 985 ft
(213 m) (213 m) (213 m) (300 m)
Torpedo tubes*** 6 533-mm B 6 533-mm B 4 533-mm B 8 533-mm B
2 533-mm S 2 533-mm S
Torpedoes 26 22 12 20
Complement 104 95 180 110
Notes: * See Appendix C for U.S. nuclear plant designations; Appendix B for Soviet nuclear plant designations.
** Two submarines built with S3W and two with the similar S4W.
*** Bow; Stern.
# Normal speeds; exceeded on trials. (See text.)