From: Don Palmrose <dpe@inel.gov>
Subject: Re: Rickover - plus or minus?
Organization: INEL EG&G Idaho
Date: Tue, 17 Nov 1992 17:33:32 GMT


From Don Palmrose <dpe@inel.gov>

In article <Bxq1r4.uq@law7.DaytonOH.NCR.COM>, drraymon@watdragon.uwaterloo.ca (Darrell Raymond) writes:
> 
> 
> From drraymon@watdragon.uwaterloo.ca (Darrell Raymond)
> 
>  What I'm more interested in is 
> whether the consensus view is that US submarines are significantly 
> compromised by the weight and power specs of Rickover's reactors. 
> Should the Conform have been built instead of the 688-class?  Is there
> any excuse for the size of the Trident subs?  Was the Thresher disaster
> indirectly caused by a scram and a loss of power?  In short, did Rickover 
> deserve the engineering credentials he proclaimed?
> 
> 

Being a former US Navy Surface Nuc and having gone through the infamous 
Rickover interview process, these questions from Darrell hooked me into a
reply.

Being a surface nuc means that I am not entuned to the sub related questions.

However, to the best of my knowledge, the size of the Trident was directly 
related to two factors: 1) the number and size of the Trident ballistic 
missile, and 2) the desire for increase room for the crew to allow for easier 
maintenance of equipment and greater creature comfort.  The power plant is 
then sized to meet the performance criteria (clearly these go round and round 
until a final size, weight, and power specs iterates to a common solution).

Why the Thresher sank will never be truely known.  The best guess, since it
susposidly happened on other subs which were able to blow tanks, was the
brazing on joining some sea water piping failed and sprayed some electrical
equipment, causing a short which scrammed the reactor.  She was very deep
at the time and could not recover in time.  All of this is from a book I
remember reading that was written within five years after the loss of the 
Thresher.

As far as Rickover's claim to fame, I feel he deserves more credit than most
people want to give him.  Technically, the program he set up was and still is
the best the world has ever seen.  In part, the loss of the Thresher shook him
up to do a complete re-evaluation of the program and where it was heading.
This has been done almost on a recurring basis to help ensure that another
such loss does not happen again.  The emphasis is to always question.

The bad side was that he did become too fixed in his ways during the last ten
years of his naval career.  This was seen in his fight for an all-nuclear
navy, the lack of new innovative sub designs (basically only two new sub
designs making it to production in the last 20 years while the Soviets must
have built 10 to 15 different classes in the same time), killing any thought
of building diesel/electrics, and by killing any US Navy research into new
sub propulsion that were non-nuclear.  He basically became so out of touch
with the rest of the navy and the new political leadership of the 1980's
(Congress, Executive, and inside the US Navy) that he was only willing to
fight them rather than building new bridges like he had done in the 1960's.

The fight to maintain technical excellence never wained and that is what
I will remember most about him.  His political side, while it ensured the
initial building of the nuclear-powered fleet, became so much of a hinderance
that it finally ended his career and may have hampered the design of subs that
the nation and the navy could found more useful.

Don Palmrose




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