When the leaders of the United States, Great Britain, and Australia announced last week that America will help Australia build eight nuclear-powered submarines, the ripple effects resounded in every capital. China, at which the new alliance is clearly aimed, decried the “Cold War mentality” behind it. And France, which saw its $65 billion deal to build 12 diesel-electric subs for Australia scuttled, called it “a knife in the back.”
But why should the sharing of a 70-year-old nuclear-propulsion technology rattle adversaries and allies alike? Well, more is at stake than a quieter, long-operating ship engine, a technology that has been prowling the oceans for decades. To understand the deep background of this deep-sea furor, it is worth looking back at the only previous time the U.S. briefly opened its vault of nuclear-power submarine secrets—in the 1950s, when the Anglo-Americans agreed to a special pact that, as today, kept France in the dark.
First, some background. Nuclear energy is especially well-suited for subs because of two specific features: It generates heat without requiring oxygen or producing exhaust (except excess heat) and it can be stored in a very concentrated form, unlike the large bunkers of coal, oil, or diesel fuel that have powered steamships since the 19th century. And at the dawn of the atomic age, all of the world’s navies understood that harnessing nuclear energy inside a reactor small enough to fit within the hull of a submarine would enable such vessels to travel fast, operate for weeks or even months underwater without refueling, and, as a result, radically transform the world’s conflict-ridden seas.
In the early 1950s, under the aegis of a controversial U.S. Navy captain named Hyman G. Rickover, the Navy and the recently established Atomic Energy Commission (today’s Department of Energy), began development of the world’s first atomic-power reactor. Before then, reactors were built out of graphite and lead inside enormous steel ovens that were used to produce fuel for bombs. They were dangerous, little understood, and their radioactivity was difficult to contain. Some spun out of control and turned into dirty bombs, spewing radiation across the landscape. The idea of sticking one of those into a sub seemed impossible, bordering on crazy.
At that point, existing submarines ran on diesel-electric hybrid motors. Then, as now, they had to run on the surface of the seas while using their diesel engines to charge batteries that enabled them to submerge on their electric motors for short periods, measured in hours. They operated slowly underwater and, once above the waterline, their noisy diesel engines made them highly vulnerable to surface trackers and attack.
The addition of snorkeling technologies developed by the Germans during World War II allowed subs to stay underwater far longer. But even today the most advanced diesel-electric subs—such as the ones France was going to build for Australia—can stay submerged for just 11 days. That’s barely enough time to motor from Australia to the South China Sea and begin to patrol the threatened sea lanes.
But Rickover and his new atomic reactor brought a revolution to the U.S. Navy during the height of the Cold War with the Soviet Union. Rickover and his team figured out how to miniaturize a nuclear reactor to fit inside a sub hull and shield its dangerous radioactivity from the hundred or so sailors living and working nearby. The engineers also perfected a coolant—pressurized water—that would keep the radioactive heat energy safely under control and could transfer heat to generate steam to power the ship’s engine. Rickover’s group even invented a new metal for holding the highly enriched uranium fuel inside the reactor core.
None of this was simple to engineer, and all of it came about at great risk and cost. But with astounding speed for a major technological breakthrough, Jules Verne’s dream to “live and move freely under the sea” came true. The first U.S. nuclear-powered submarine was named Nautilus after the submarine in Verne’s famous novel Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. In 1955, when the USS Nautilus went to sea, it was the first sub capable of staying underwater and operating at full speed not for hours or days but weeks. The arrival of nuclear propulsion was no less momentous than the transition from sail to steam in the 1800s.
Nautilus quickly smashed every record for underwater operations. The passage by the sub beneath the North Pole ice cap in summer 1958 was a major Cold War event. It served as an American technological response to the astounding launch of the Soviet Union’s Sputnik satellite the previous October. The under-ice voyage deeply shook up the Kremlin, which suddenly realized that the polar ice no longer protected the Soviet navy’s northern ports from stealthy underwater intruders.
Around this time, the Soviets, French, and British had been trying to build nuclear submarines of their own but had made only faltering progress. Finally, in 1956, Rickover went for the first time to meet with his British counterparts to discuss the possibility of sharing nuclear-propulsion secrets. When Rickover, a crusty, profane immigrant from a shtetl in Poland, met the august First Sea Lord and great-grandson of Queen Victoria, Lord Mountbatten, the two men hit it off.
That began a series of meetings between the two and their staffs that culminated in a 1958 agreement by Congress to permit the sharing of nuclear secrets with the Brits, including America’s most prized possession: its nuclear-engine technology. According to Mountbatten, by sharing those secrets the man he called “that stormy petrel of the American Navy” sped up completion of the first British nuclear sub by as much as three years and saved millions of pounds in development funds.
The sharing agreement, however, came with a catch. While it allowed the Brits access to nuclear weapons technology, it put a five-year cap on nuclear propulsion technology. Rickover insisted, and Congress agreed, that the deal would last just long enough to get the first Royal Navy sub to sea and through her first refueling. Why?
Rickover’s intention from the outset was to kick-start the British allies to develop their own independent nuclear submarine program. That is exactly what they did. And in the decades since, with the formal secret-sharing agreement ended in the early 1960s, the British built the infrastructure to engineer and operate what is today an all-nuclear submarine fleet.
During this period, the French too, were trying and failing in their efforts to build a nuclear ship engine. They were also a NATO ally, and in 1959 they turned to the U.S. for help, sending a delegation Stateside to ask for a technology-transfer deal like the one the British had struck. But then, as now, the U.S. said, Non. Concerned about its secrets falling into the wrong hands, the American government refused to let Paris in on its underwater nuke know-how.
Working largely on their own, the French would not get a first nuclear-propelled sub to sea until December 1971. When they did, their technology differed in important ways from that provided to the Royal Navy and soon the Aussies. Most significantly, the French opted to use a less potent, low-enrichment form of uranium fuel for their sea-faring reactors. That affects their operation and maintenance, and makes their nuclear-powered engines incompatible with the Anglo-American versions in their subs (and American carriers) at sea around the world.
The British and American silent services, as the submarine fleets are known, proved unmatched in their ability to deter Soviet incursions. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, for instance, the Nautilus shadowed the Soviet naval vessels as they withdrew the nuclear missiles and warheads. The subs also sparked the Soviet military to spend vast sums, which the Kremlin could ill-afford, in attempts to catch up to the British and American sub-propulsion programs. (Nuclear subs later played important roles in conventional conflicts, including during the British-Argentine Falklands War when the HMS Conqueror became the first nuclear sub to sink a surface ship.)
Today, China possesses a larger and generally much newer navy than the U.S. and is speeding up its growth. But the American and British fleets maintain a distinct war-fighting and deterrent advantage below the sea. Nearly all defense analysts agree that over the course of nearly 60 years since the U.S. stopped sharing its nuclear-propulsion secrets, American and British subs have advanced and still remain the world’s most powerful and hardest to detect while the Chinese lag badly in anti-submarine warfare capabilities.
As part of the deal announced last week, the U.S. will begin sharing nuclear-propulsion secrets that it had previously hidden from all other nations—except for that five-year window almost six decades ago. But the kick start that Rickover gave the British back in the 1950s paved the way for Australia to join an exclusive club—and kept the French out.
In joining the Anglo-American duo, Australia will also learn how to stand on its own feet as it defends itself and bolsters the future AUKUS silent service in the Pacific. And the nation that birthed Jules Verne and his deep-sea dreams will continue traveling underwater alone.
Marc Wortman is the author of the forthcoming biography Admiral Hyman Rickover: Engineer of Power, due out in February 2022.
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