Responsibility is a unique concept. . . . You may share it with others, but your portion is not diminished. You may delegate it, but it is still with you. . . . If responsibility is rightfully yours, no evasion, or ignorance or passing the blame can shift the burden to someone else.1
In the spring of 1963, USS Thresher, the first of a new class of nuclear submarines, sank off the coast of Cape Cod. The ship was lost when an improperly made piping braze weld separated, permitting seawater to rush into the ship faster than the high-pressure air system could expel ballast. The day was one of the darkest of the peacetime Navy, with the entire crew of 129 officers and technical personnel dead on the ocean floor.
It was not the sub’s maiden voyage; if it had been, Hyman Rickover would also have drowned. During the thirty years he was in charge of nuclear reactors, Rickover made it a practice to be on board the first time every new nuclear-powered ship went to sea.2 I suspect he started this practice because he expected the initial at-sea tests of Nautilus might experience more than the usual dangers. The Nautilus’ circumstances were at least challenging—the first operating reactor was going to sea in a cobbled-together submarine. Anyone would have good reason to suspect that initial underway experience might prove a bit iffy.
I believe Rickover continued to ride these initial trials because many of us needed his presence. Submarines were dangerous business—unnecessarily so. Rickover had not yet successfully won the battle to alter Navy culture. Submarine safety was not paramount in the shipyards and other Navy staffs. Technology was pushing operations faster than the safety envelope was expanding. Safety needed to be established as dominant. It couldn’t simply be assumed, for in a shipyard a hundred thousand engineering evolutions occurred each day. Tens of thousands of workers, located in back shops sprawled out over a shipyard’s hundreds of acres, could be working on equipment that went on board one submarine. There was no chance that a submarine commanding officer, with a crew of only a hundred, could monitor every evolution. The shipyard workers themselves had to absorb the culture of safety.
But the nonnuclear Bureau of Ships was actually headed down a vastly different path. Indeed, at the time, rather than imposing extra care and attention, the Bureau of Ships appeared prone to cede submarine technical authority to any iterant shipyard possessing a set of metric wrenches. This was not a minor problem. Most nuclear-submarine officers believed the Bureau of Ships’ freewheeling delegation was a sure way to get more submariners killed. In contrast, diesel submariners were comfortable with this approach.
Nonnuclear engineering duty officers ran not only the Bureau of Ships but also the shipyards. I suspect every nuclear-trained officer on at least one occasion witnessed a senior engineering duty officer trying to cover up a serious mistake. Many of us thought that the Thresher investigation was incomplete at best and that responsibility for the loss (clearly attributable to errors during construction) should have been laid directly at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard commander’s door. Some held the strong suspicion that the investigation was a whitewash. The Portsmouth admiral responsible for several questionable decisions was the very man the Engineering Duty Corps had been promoting to relieve Rickover.3
If Rickover couldn’t control the entire submarine (a nirvana he never achieved), the nuclear officers whose lives were at risk felt they had to take action. Many of us became strongly interested in centralizing submarine technical control so that decisions would be less affected by the immediacies of waterfront budget and schedule.
Again and again I watched the shipyard engineering duty officers make decisions that threatened my life in order to maintain their schedule or budget. My life is real. Schedules are paper, and money is fungible. I was more interested in returning home safely from sea than in meeting any schedule and budget. Engineering duty officers by definition did not face the dangers of the deep. For years the other commanding officers and I were often more attentive to following the technical standards than the engineering duty officers charged to repair our submarines.
But this one issue, no matter how important, does not explain why Rickover for decades continued going to sea on every new submarine, even after the shipyards had altered their culture and new submarine designs were nearly perfected. Since Rickover continued to ride submarines throughout his sixties and seventies and well into his eighties, the rough-and-tumble environment of a submarine at sea was a tremendous physical stress on him. Perhaps equally important, the country was building twelve or more ships a year, and his two-to-four-day attendance at each vessel’s trial was a distraction from his other personal and professional responsibilities. Rickover was running one of the largest industrial organizations in the world. He had a wife and child at home. Why did he take the time to put his own life at risk?
I believe it was because he understood that those of us who were sailing his ships needed to see Rickover’s personal courage. He understood about leading from the front.
Let me relate one example I witnessed: In 1966 the Newport News shipyard and the submarine’s crew had nearly completed eighteen months of backbreaking effort in building USS George Washington Carver (SSBN-656), soon to be the United States’ newest ballistic-missile submarine. I was assigned to the Gold Crew as the reactor controls officer, and this was my first nuclear-submarine assignment.
The mere act of putting Carver out to sea and sailing her across the Atlantic Ocean would target the Soviet Union with significantly more missiles. Our one ship would help redress the missile gap between the two countries. Concurrently, getting Carver to sea would be a thumb in the eye to the U.S. Air Force. Among young enlistees and officers, rivalry between the military services is serious business, and the Navy and Air Force were at the time locked in a competition to get intercontinental missiles targeted on the Soviet Union. The new sub would give the Navy admirals a boost toward “correcting,” as the admirals perceived it, a strategic (nuclear-missile) imbalance between the Navy and the Air Force.4
It is difficult to re-create for the reader the sense of military urgency of the time. America was frightened of the Soviet Union’s missile capability. As a candidate in 1960, John F. Kennedy had said there was a missile gap. We believed him and worked accordingly. Our haste produced casualties. On board Carver we inadvertently fatally closed the BRA-8 communications buoy hatches on one crew member who had been busy adjusting the limit switches inside the superstructure. We crushed another by lowering the giant Type 11 mast on his chest. Neither fatality slowed progress. We were working sixteen hours a day, seven days a week, at a terrifying pace. We all knew that in our haste to build the ship, we had killed shipmates, and no matter what words were written in the accident investigations, I was there: the deaths resulted solely from human error—and were preventable.
The president of the United States considered nuclear submarines as the front line against encroaching communism. The Congress agreed and was diverting hundreds of millions of dollars from Navy surface ships into submarines. The challenge was exciting, but there was a definite downside. Those involved did the very best that they could. But even though the Navy had thrown human talent at the problem, sometimes the tasks were simply too hard. Some crew members worked until they broke, emotionally and physically. As is often the case in organizations staffed by highly motivated personnel, individuals were too proud to admit they could not keep up. They did not ask for help but took other ways out. Our small crew saw multiple suicide attempts, and some succeeded. My best friend succumbed to the pressure and cut his throat open with a straight razor, in front of his wife. After a year and a half of around-the-clock work, Carver was completed eight days early.
Given the haste of building this extraordinarily complicated platform and the errors individuals had observed, some wondered aloud if all the new machinery was going to work properly the first time we went to sea. Were there as many hidden fractures in the ship’s thick metal as there were in the crew’s psyches? It is not as if the submarine force had the finest safety record in the world.
The loss of Thresher was a recent memory. Subsequently, there had been several near calls, especially on board Seawolf off the underwater Maine coast.5 Taking risks and pushing machinery to the limits are the essence of being a submariner. It is important to understand that young military personnel on the front lines of a conflict usually accept risk taking relatively dispassionately—it permeates the career they have chosen. At the same time, no one intends to die, and several nuclear officers instituted more aggressive safety measures. As only one example, Cdr. Dennis Wilkinson, on board Nautilus, had begun a process of controlled testing of a submarine before it went to sea.
The testing Wilkinson popularized was essentially a series of cruises alongside the pier after the submarine was built or, as became popular, had been refitted. During the lines-still-tied-up cruise, all equipment was operated and glitches discovered and fixed. Each successive at-sea replication (the hatches were shut as if the ship truly were at sea) was intended to duplicate as best as possible at-sea conditions. Finally, a series of several days was scheduled to test the ship at sea. As I’ve indicated, Rickover was always invited to attend the first sea tests, or trials.
During these three or four days at sea, we tested the ship at the edges of its operating envelope. This included firing inert weapon shapes at the highest speeds and deepest depths and operating the propulsion plant at its design limits, including full-speed ahead and an emergency reverse. The latter was necessary as reversing power is sometimes useful when a ship is evading torpedoes or when a plastic sonar dome is approaching a concrete pier much too fast.
Before Rickover permitted anyone to declare a ship ready, he wanted to be sure that the ship could operate without restriction at the design limits if the need occurred (for example, if, as later happened to me, some nasty Soviets decided to depth-charge my submarine). And sometimes a crew needed to be pushed to ensure the equipment was tested to its full limits because many military service personnel are normal people with normal fears. Huge noisy machinery rotating at high speeds can frighten more people than ever did my Aunt Ruth with her cast-iron frying pan.
Admiral Rickover had the courage of his convictions—as well as of his engineering. Therefore, on each sea trial, with the admiral sometimes actually seizing the equipment and operating it himself, each crew performed evolutions until they finally got his message that his reactor—just like the diesel engines it was replacing—was designed to serve the simple purpose of moving the ship into and out of combat. If the engineering plant did not so perform, then Rickover modified it. If submariners were reluctant to use the equipment to its full capacity, then that called for a different sort of correction—removal of the men from the submarines—a decision Rickover was also willing to make. In every sea trial, through his personal actions, Rickover taught that the reactor and the propulsion equipment were to be managed, not coddled.
At the same time, sea trials provided the admiral an excellent opportunity to evaluate how well each shipyard was performing (in the 1960s he had nearly a dozen different shipyards on all American coasts simultaneously building submarines). They also provided him early insight into how his own training system was doing in turning out competent officers and enlisted. Personally observing trials was a win-win-win situation for him. But that is not what I best remember.
George Washington Carver had two hatches on its top level. In port they were the access and egress portals. One was in the engineering spaces just forward and to the port side of the maneuvering room, where the watch standers who controlled the reactor, electrical, and steam plants sat. The second hatch was another fifty yards forward, just aft of the conning officer’s periscope area. These hatch areas were designed in the event of an underwater emergency to also serve as escape chambers, or trunks.
It is a matter of physics that once a submarine is but a few feet underwater, the sea pressure outside the ship makes it impossible to open any of the submarine’s thick steel hatches. One cannot escape the ship until the pressure inside an escape trunk has been raised to match the outside sea pressure (compressed air from the ship’s banks is used for this). In a life-threatening event three or four crew members at a time could climb inside the hatch areas and, after the pressure inside was equalized, theoretically escape from the ship and make their way to the surface.6
The escape trunk was, of course, unoccupied at sea, and the upper hatch, which opened directly into the sea, was tightly closed. Even the lower hatch, opening into the ship, was normally kept shut. This provided increased protection against an inadvertent mishap. However, to ensure the crew was alerted if water began seeping by the upper hatch (compressed against its metal seat by tons of pressure at the depth we were operating), the drain valve on the escape trunk was cracked open. In this way the conditions in the escape trunk could be remotely monitored.
To return to the 1966 sea trials with Admiral Rickover, we had been at sea three days and were finally down at the deepest depth Carver was designed to go. The sea pressure outside the hull was squeezing our huge steel cylinder hard enough to cause the decks to slide several inches inward on their greased athwartship skids (every piece of a ship’s equipment is mounted on giant movable frames to accommodate this continuous hull expansion and contraction). Day three of the trial was devoted to testing the torpedo tube handling and firing mechanisms. Today we would spend many long hours at the deepest depth the ship was designed to operate. While there, the sailors in the forward-most compartment would shift huge shapes and weights around in the torpedo room (to ensure all clearances were adequate when the ship’s hull was compressed). They would also fire water from the torpedo tubes (a “water slug” in submarine parlance) to make certain the ship’s weapon delivery components worked all the way down to the very nadir of the ship’s theoretical operating depth.
While the test depth was just within the bottom line of our safe-operating envelope, everyone on board knew, if something went wrong, the chances of surviving decreased exponentially the deeper we were. Being at test depth, especially during a time when submarines were being lost, was emotionally draining. In addition, it was the first time this ship had been to sea. All the submariners on board had been working on dry land for the last two years. Many of the crew members, even those with diesel experience, had never actually been this far below the surface (we were much deeper than a diesel boat could ever safely go). We were well down in the land of giant squid and odd-shaped fish that never saw a hook or experienced a net. Light could not filter down here, and even the whales seldom dived this deep. This far underwater the slightest leak required dramatic action to save the ship. The strain was evident on everyone’s face. Whenever someone walked past a sea-pressure gauge—which for the previous two years had rested at zero—the black needle now quivered accusingly at a number reading several hundreds of pounds of pressure per square inch, very nearly up to the red line that marked the maximum safe reading.
The first set of torpedo-room evolutions was expected to require six to eight hours, and maybe as many as twelve. We had been at test depth for about three hours, most of us listening over the sound-powered phones to the torpedomen swearing imaginatively (torpedomen are the Navy poet laureates of profanity). They were using crowbars and sledgehammers to dislodge one particular torpedo skid—the heavy supporting cradle keeping the narrow, long, heavy weapon from bending—that had apparently become pinched during the last two-hundred-foot descent. Suddenly, the upper-level engine room watch stander discovered a stream of water gushing from his escape trunk drain. This was trouble.
The conservative recommendation—that we surface the submarine until we determined the extent of the problem—was immediately relayed to the commanding officer, Capt. Robert D. Donovan. Before he would take such action, Captain Donovan reported the problem to the senior officer on board, Admiral Rickover, who had been reading in the stateroom temporarily allotted him.
Abandoning test depth was not a minor issue. While the problem was real, if Carver returned to the surface, we would lose at least a day of trials and possibly several weeks. The torpedo evolutions had to be performed (at test depth) before the final phase of the overhaul could begin. If we returned to port, we would have to fix the escape-trunk problem and immediately return to sea (given the size of the submarine, no chamber in the world was large enough to simulate the stress of test depth on the ship). However, ever since the Thresher loss three years earlier, the process of getting a brand new submarine out to sea and down to test depth had become lengthy. Rescue ships had to be scheduled on the surface, specific additional inspections needed to be made, and onetime reports had to be filed.
And our post–sea trial schedule was already tight. We had scheduled events seven days a week until the morning we were to deploy. It was not too difficult to imagine that surfacing to fix the problem in the escape trunk might irreparably delay Carver’s initial Mediterranean deployment. Any delay meant our missiles would be late arriving on station to fulfill the U.S. North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) requirement. Other ships would have to remain at sea to cover our tardiness.
We first became aware of an alternative solution when Rickover, who at that time was sixty-six years old, stepped through the hatch into the engine room, a hammer in his belt and a wooden fid in his hand.7 “Where is the engineer?” he asked.
Lt. Ken Folta poked his early balding head out of maneuvering: “Here, Admiral.”
“Call the captain. Get permission to open the lower escape trunk hatch. You and I will lock ourselves inside and fix whatever is wrong.”
The admiral pretended as if he didn’t even notice Folta’s astonished look. “You there,” he said, reading my name tag, “Oliver.”
“Yes, Sir.”
“You will be the telephone link to the commanding officer. You can be the first person to tell him if we die in there.”
The words I was thinking were completely inappropriate, but from my mouth came, “Yes, Sir.”
The two of them opened the lower hatch, crawled up the steel ladder, and closed and dogged (locked) the lower hatch behind them.8 I dutifully reported to Captain Donovan events as they occurred.
The rest of the ship waited with apprehension. There followed thirty or forty minutes of muffled banging, with Folta and the admiral stopping occasionally to discuss the best thing to hit next (the correct submarine term for striking something with a hammer is adjusting). I relayed all of this as best I could to my very curious commanding officer until the water stopped flowing from the drain and the admiral and Folta backed down the ladder, the latter beaming, both pretty much covered with sea slime.
The admiral handed me the tools without comment. He then proceeded to his stateroom. It was time for him to return to overseeing production of the personal letters intended to be postmarked at sea and mailed immediately upon our arrival back in port to members of Congress and senators who had supported the authorization and construction of USS George Washington Carver.
While I watched Rickover’s back disappear through the hatch, I realized I had learned a valuable lesson. I was beginning to understand responsibility. I would subsequently put my body between danger and the people who looked to me for leadership.
Rickover was known to hold his subordinates strictly accountable. Other military components often did not share this absolutist view to the same extent. Rickover believed that one strike was often more than sufficient to cause doubt as to an individual’s good judgment and that in some cases a person should be removed from the submarine service (and any further association with nuclear power) no matter how expensive the previous training or how many years of previous exemplary service.
Do you agree with Rickover’s concept of accountability? He phrased it thusly: “You may share it with others, but your portion is not diminished. You may delegate it, but it is still with you. . . . If responsibility is rightfully yours, no evasion, or ignorance or passing the blame can shift the burden to someone else.” Does this definition say anything about current philosophical flirtations with group or team responsibility in the workplace?
In the late 1960s nearly everyone in the submarine force knew someone who had died in one of the two submarine disasters (Thresher and Scorpion). Only fools were not afraid, but surprisingly few addressed these fears constructively.
Fear of something or someone can be a common problem in the work environment. When it exists, fear causes disproportionate difficulties because so few are willing to acknowledge its existence. We ignore it and thus refuse to think about what we might or should do to ameliorate the reason for the fear. What do people in your organization fear in your workplace?