Hyman G. Rickover was the most famous and controversial admiral of his era. He transformed warfare and, in doing so, changed the U.S. Navy, American education, and the defense industry. Rickover conceived and built the world’s first nuclear-powered submarine. This gave America a clear technical lead and military superiority at sea over our one peer competitor, the Soviet Union. To make this technical innovation feasible, Rickover cajoled the American public into insisting on better education. This provided him the qualified sailors he needed to staff his ships. Concurrently, he threatened industry as necessary to improve its practices so companies were technically prepared to build safer submarines. Rickover demanded that both academe and industry reach higher than they were comfortable. As might be expected, many in both professions mightily resisted. These conflicts made newspaper headlines.
Within the American Navy, Rickover personally monitored the progress and career of every nuclear-trained officer and demanded continuous improvement of each of them—in fact, his numerous critics were certain he spent his life inappropriately micromanaging the entire submarine force. Even though Rickover’s peers loved to hate him, the fruit of his labor was the most powerful naval force the world has ever seen. Before he died, America’s underwater fleet controlled each of the seven seas and had irrevocably changed warfare.
No one could have foretold that Rickover would be a success. He did not rise by a conventional path. He was (at best) a late bloomer. During the first two decades of his career, he performed poorly in the very two roles the Navy most values and rewards—command at sea and performance under fire. No matter how rosy the observer’s glasses, Rickover was definitely not the warfighter the Navy professed to desire. As a result, during the long years of World War II, Rickover was not assigned within echo distance of the sound of guns.
Nevertheless, by the time he died, Rickover had become one of the very few advanced to four-star admiral rank, and his accomplishments were legendary in naval circles. He was known throughout the world for managing a revolutionary technology from start-up to maturity, altering the culture of a most conservative corporate organization, and shaping the outcome of the Cold War.
Along with his record of extraordinary achievement, Rickover left behind a legacy of knowledge applicable to every organization today. One doesn’t need to understand radioactivity to learn lessons from the admiral. Yet, despite his success, few outside the American submarine force use his unique management techniques. Why? Did people hate him so much they could ignore the success of his methods? Do they understand what he accomplished?
Rickover forced a change in the U.S. Navy’s culture. In doing so he made many enemies. His adversaries attacked with the viciousness and mindlessness of a pack of stray dogs. Unfortunately, since Rickover chose never to personally answer his critics, false stories continue to be told. Obscuring the truth even more, Rickover wrote no autobiography to set the record straight, and many of his achievements were deeply buried in the vaults of Cold War secrecy.
But the Cold War is now long over, and several of Rickover’s peers have contributed to history with biographies, memoirs, or oral reminiscences. At the same time, years have passed. Is a fair evaluation of his methods now even possible, or have the facts become obscured by the swirling of time and the dark of death? To use a boxing analogy, is it even possible to gauge Rickover’s tale of the tape?
Yes!
The best measurement involves reactor accidents. This metric is itself sensitive. The world contains adamant supporters of nuclear power as well as diehard opponents. Both camps sometimes even have difficulty speaking to one another in a civil tone. However, I think each would agree that a nuclear submarine provides grand warfighting capabilities for a nation—along with the downside of the danger of a possible reactor accident.
A reactor accident can release large quantities of radioactivity to the environment, killing people and poisoning the earth—this leads to our metric. Only two countries have built large numbers of nuclear ships: the United States and the Soviet Union/Russia. It is possible to list, by nation, the corresponding reactor accidents:1
Russian/Soviet Nuclear Reactor Accidents
K-8 (1960, November-class submarine, loss of coolant)
K-19 (1961, Hotel-class submarine, two loss of coolant accidents)
K-11 (1965, November-class submarine, two refueling criticalities)
K-159 (1965, November-class submarine, radioactive discharge)
Lenin (1965, Lenin-class icebreaker, loss of coolant)
Lenin (1967, Lenin-class icebreaker, loss of coolant)
K-140 (1968, Yankee-class submarine, power excursion)
K-27 (1968, unique reactor in modified November, insufficient cooling)
K-429 (1970, Charlie I–class submarine, uncontrolled start-up)
K-222 (1980, Papa-class submarine, uncontrolled start-up)
K-123 (1982, Alfa-class submarine, loss of coolant)
K-431 (1985, Echo II–class submarine, refueling criticality)
K-192 (1989, Echo II–class submarine, loss of coolant)
U.S. Nuclear Reactor Accidents
None.
This list is history’s evaluation of Rickover versus the “peer competitor” he faced and bested. But, like all impersonal metrics, while it may provide important data, it leaves questions unanswered. How did the man become so wise? What were the management methods he used or discovered?
This book is not a biography but rather offers a perspective on the admiral’s leadership. In effect, I am writing about his management style, not his life. Nevertheless, a short history of the man will assist in placing his challenges in context.2
Hyman G. Rickover was born in Poland in January 1900. His Jewish parents fled the pogroms in Europe, immigrated to New York when he was five, and moved two years later to Chicago, where his father worked as a tailor. After having excelled academically in high school, Rickover received an appointment to the U.S. Naval Academy. He graduated in June 1922 in the top quarter of his class. He was assigned to a destroyer for his first duty and then to a battleship. He subsequently attended Columbia University, where he received an advanced degree in the new science of electrical engineering and, more important, met the beautiful Ruth Masters, the woman he would marry after she had obtained her PhD from the Sorbonne in 1931.
Dr. Masters would have her own quiet career, writing knowledgeably on a myriad of subjects, including her own specialty, international law. Her husband distributed, without attribution, her monographs to all nuclear submarines, where they were avidly read by those of us bored by a constant diet of electrons and decaying nuclear particles. Following his marriage, Rickover converted to his wife’s religion of Episcopalianism. They had one son. Ruth died at the age of sixty-nine in 1972. Two years later Rickover married Eleonore A. Bednowicz, another strikingly lovely and accomplished woman who, as a Navy nurse, had cared for him during his first heart attack.
Returning in time to the 1930s, after he had graduated from Columbia, Rickover volunteered for submarine duty (for many years one had to prove oneself on board a surface ship before applying to fly airplanes or serve in submarines).3 Accepted, Rickover completed the prerequisite six months of submarine training and served on board two submarines. During his underwater career, he and Ruth lived in a picturesque New England town within a few miles of the submarine base in New London, Connecticut.
When he failed to be selected for command of a submarine, Rickover was assigned to another battleship. He then experienced command on board a minesweeper off China, at which time he requested to shift his career designator from “line” (delineating those officers theoretically eligible to serve on and command any ship in the Navy) to “engineering duty only” (the term for an officer who intended to devote his career solely to engineering). In 1937 this career change was approved. Rickover’s first engineering duty tour was in the Philippines in the Subic Bay Repair Facility (Cavite Navy Yard).
After a year there, followed by an Asian vacation Ruth documented,4 the Rickovers reported to the Washington Navy Yard in D.C. in 1939. When World War II burst on the scene, Rickover was head of the Electrical Section at the Bureau of Ships. He remained in this role for most of the conflict. Nearly all accounts laud his performance (but many negatively comment on his professional interpersonal skills).
At the end of the war, Rickover had reached the rank of captain and was within a few years of forced retirement. Several of his classmates, who had themselves commanded ships in the war zone, had already been promoted to admiral. Rickover would undoubtedly have been forcibly retired at the captain rank had he not been selected as one of five naval officers and three civilians the Navy dispatched to Oak Ridge, Tennessee, in 1946. Each of these particularly bright individuals was tasked with becoming technically familiar with what the Manhattan Project discoveries could do for the Navy. Rickover seized this opportunity by the throat and never looked back.
The Navy’s plan was to somehow build a nuclear reactor and place it on board a surface ship. However, Rickover recognized the potential of marrying nuclear power with a submarine. He took charge of the small group, maneuvered around obstacles within the Navy and Washington, and gained the personal support of President Harry Truman (and later, President Dwight Eisenhower). In September 1954 the first nuclear-powered submarine in the world, USS Nautilus (SSN-571), was launched.
Nautilus’ capabilities shattered even the most wildly optimistic expectations. After her first at-sea war games, the public began to recognize that the naval battlefield had been profoundly and permanently altered. A few years after Nautilus slid down the wooden ways at General Dynamics, nearly a fifth of our Navy’s budget was devoted to building thirty nuclear submarines (and operating another sixty), and Rickover had been promoted to the highest admiral rank.
America’s nuclear fleet was not built in a vacuum. Our sworn opponent of the era, the Soviet Union, also understood that this new warship was a disruptive warfighting technology. Although the Soviet Union started well behind, soon Soviet shipyards were frantically welding together an even larger number of nuclear-submarine hulls. The race was on!
Rickover was a serious man involved in equally serious business. As he said, “I believe it is the duty of each of us to act as if the fate of the world depended on him. . . . One man by himself cannot do the job. However, one man can make a difference. . . . We must live for the future of the human race, and not for our own comfort or success.”5