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- From: Don Palmrose <dpe@inel.gov>
- Subject: Re: Rickover - plus or minus?
- Message-ID: <BxvFFx.8r9@law7.DaytonOH.NCR.COM>
- Sender: military@law7.DaytonOH.NCR.COM (Sci.Military Login)
- Organization: INEL EG&G Idaho
- References: <Bxq1r4.uq@law7.DaytonOH.NCR.COM>
- Date: Tue, 17 Nov 1992 17:33:32 GMT
- Approved: military@law7.daytonoh.ncr.com
- Lines: 81
-
-
- 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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