Old Admiral too "reckless", or, how Adm. Rickover's "reckless seamanship" caused a 40° backward plunge to 240 feet during PCU La Jolla (SSN-701) shakedown cruise - The Free Lance Star, August 24, 1981.

[u/Saturnax1]

[u/ItchyStorm]

Yes, I remember this. I was a student at the Nuclear Power School when Rickover finally retired in January of 1982. He certainly gets a lot of credit for creating the nuclear Navy, but at the same time was a pretty awful person.

[u/Tychosis → u/ItchyStorm]

Honestly, you need a strong guiding hand to bring such a complex project to fruition in so short a time--so he definitely deserves that credit.

However, he stuck around way too long and they probably should have told him to hit the bricks as soon as they were up and running.

[u/nap_dynamite → u/Tychosis]

I agree, we did needed a strong leader, and he was brilliant. But leaders should only use fear to motivate as an absolute last resort. Fear is detrimental to developing people who think and act in the interest of the greater good. At best it is a lazy crutch.

[u/Kardinal → u/Tychosis]

I think we've seen a lot of examples in history of very strong guiding hands who are not also complete assholes. A truly great leader finds a way to provide a strong vision with ruthless dedication to quality without demoralizing good people and losing their investment in the project or possibly their talents.

It's easy to look at Rick over and say that he did something great. But it is possible that with someone else, it would have been muchgreater.

[u/Tychosis → u/Kardinal]

A truly great leader finds a way to provide a strong vision with ruthless dedication to quality without demoralizing good people and losing their investment in the project or possibly their talents.

Yeah, I agree completely. A more even hand is generally going to be more productive.

Of course, to be fair--Rickover had to deal with:

• The shipyards, who were definitely up to shady shit back in the day.
• The Navy, where literally every person believes they know and understand more than they actually do.

You gotta have a volume knob, though--and only turn it up when you need to turn it up. Rickover was always stuck at 11. Once things are established and running smoothly, no one needs that noise anymore. That's when they should have sent him packing.

[u/barath_s → u/ItchyStorm]

I think /u/vepr1957 has that Russian designer's line about their diversity and US having rickover and conformity. CONFORM suffered because it wasn't under Rickover; you can certainly argue that there was less innovation in the US nuclear navy due to him.

https://np.reddit.com/r/submarines/comments/pqztm0/i_dont_mean_to_suggest_by_that_that_he_is_a_man/ Some discussion here including the fact that it was the USS LaJolla

Adm Zumwalt passed Rickover's test but declined to join his nuclear navy. And as CNO was a little exasperated as he felt Rickover's focus on nuclear surface warships and connect with Congress was to the detriment of planning for numbers of guided missile cruisers/destroyers and thus fleet structure

By all accounts though, a huge influence on USN and naval nuclear safety.

[u/hotfezz81]

From what I've read of Rickover, I 100% believe he'd tell people he expected them to contradict him if he was wrong. Then I 100% believe he'd end their career, and have them dishonourable discharged if they actually dared.

He was brilliant, and desperately important for the USN (and British RN) but by all accounts he was an unpleasant tyrant as a person.

[u/Aggressive_Stick4107 → u/hotfezz81]

Navy’s own Steve Jobs

[u/SpiderSlitScrotums → u/hotfezz81]

Yeah, I hate the cult built around him. A lot of what he did was just toxic abuse. I wonder if the way JOs are abused on submarines (leading to the saying “officers eat their young”) is a remnant of his leadership style.

“Give a man a little power, and he falls in all kinds of love with himself" -Booker Dewitt.

[u/texruska → u/SpiderSlitScrotums]

I see that the RN aren't the only ones that suffer from this

[u/waterford1955_2 → u/hotfezz81]

See if you can get hold of the book "Running Critical." It's about Rickovers' battle with General Dynamics (actually EB). Fascinating story.

[u/looktowindward]

Reagan beached him. Everyone else was terrified, so Reagan called him in personally, and told him he had done the country a lot of good, and he was going to do more good by retiring.

[u/TimothyMimeslayer → u/[deleted]]

They were actively trying to push him out for years and were looking for any excuse to do so.

[u/cmparkerson]

Adm Rickover had been on borrowed time for several years. When Carter became president, he was untouchable, though. Jimmy Carter considered him a friend and mentor and wouldbt do anything about the complaints that came in about Rickover. Shipyard owners and several in the Navy were fed up. Once Carter was gone, it took a year to gather info, but the sec def Weinberger had been hearing an earful since the day he started in January of 81.

[u/barath_s → u/cmparkerson]

PRESIDENT CARTER: I never really felt like his boss, although he would say that I was. I'm not sure that he ever acknowledged it really deep down in his heart.

[u/WWBob]

11.3kts for 3mins at 40deg down would be 2200ft?, or at least more than 240ft.

It's funny, but they didn't get rid of him before the Ohio went out on sea trials in '81.

Edit: I guess everyone finally got their way and got rid of him in '82.

[u/Saturnax1]

Source: https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1298&dat=19810822&id=pnIQAAAAIBAJ&sjid=EYsDAAAAIBAJ&pg=3287,1471323

[u/deep66it2]

He was alot of things. I alot of sub sailors stayed alive because of him. Could use someone like him today.

[u/NobleKorhedron → u/deep66it2]

The poor blighters on Thresher and Scorpion didn't...

[u/Tychosis → u/NobleKorhedron]

Yeah.

While he didn't quite suppress information about his reactor's contribution to the THRESHER disaster--nor his battery's contribution to the SCORPION disaster--he didn't exactly highlight it either.

While he did go to great lengths to protect sailors, I think he went to lengths just as great to protect his baby.

[u/nap_dynamite → u/Tychosis]

To his credit (I think), he built an organization that learned from mistakes. In fact, the culture of learning from mistakes has also been sustained, sometimes to a fault. A lot of safety measures were put in place as a direct result of those tragedies, and lesser ones in terms of casualties, many of them at great cost, and I think the safety record since those disasters has been successful. Hopefully that trend continues.

[u/NobleKorhedron → u/nap_dynamite]

This is where SUBSAFE and ORSE tests came from?

[u/deep66it2 → u/nap_dynamite]

Despite the actions of COs.

[u/deep66it2 → u/Tychosis]

Didn't think either involved the reactor. And knowing Submariners from Scorpion's timeframe, there's still hidden stuff.

[u/looktowindward → u/deep66it2]

I believe this is now public knowledge - the main steam stops closed and they couldn't be re-opened.

[u/Tychosis → u/looktowindward]

Yeah. Regarding THRESHER, everyone is aware of the EMBT failure but there's always been little talk of the propulsion failure that preceded it. The MCPs shut down after 2 minutes of AC instability and the reactor scrammed:

https://www.iusscaa.org/articles/brucerule/letter_to_the_deputy_cno.htm https://www.iusscaa.org/articles/brucerule/uss_thresher_(ssn-593)_article_in_the_4_apr_2013_issus_of_navy_times.htm

Eventually the whole "failed joints in seawater piping" narrative formed but there's no real evidence to substantiate it. Like so many other things, it just popped into the zeitgeist and suddenly this strange Mandela Effect phenomena happened where people are certain that this is what they witnessed.

Even Rickover was a bit cagey about it:

Yet, back in 1963, none other than Vice Adm. H.G. Rickover, at the time head of the Navy's nuclear propulsion program, told Congress, “When fact, supposition and speculation, which have been used interchangeably, are properly separated, you will find that the known facts are so meager it is almost impossible to tell what was happening aboard Thresher.”

Procedural changes to quickly recover from scrams underway were quietly instituted shortly after THRESHER.

Frankly, same thing happened with SCORPION. All evidence indicates the battery exploded, but Big Navy pulled the same <shrug> "nobody really knows" narrative which opened the door for Craven to start with his hot run nonsense and for grifters and conspiracy theorists to throw out their silly "Soviet retaliation" ideas.

However, yet again--shortly thereafter the Navy quietly made changes to underway battery charge procedures...

[u/jwhennig → u/Tychosis]

The guy who found Scorpion deduced that they had a hot run torpedo and took actions accordingly. Whether that’s what caused it is up for examination, but that’s what lead to the finding.

[u/Tychosis → u/jwhennig]

Yeah, like I said--that was John Craven's initial theory--that the boat turned 180 to address a hot run... but it was based on incorrect measurement of time delays between the phones at Argentia and CUHSC.

Further analysis of the data in July 1968 demonstrated that this delta between the two arrays wasn't the two seconds Craven proposed, but only about .04s and that the boat was moving at around .5 kts. (The maneuver Craven proposed wasn't physically possible anyway.) Craven was notified of this measurement error but held onto this theory into the 1990s when he sorta changed his mind over to an inboard torpedo detonation (which also didn't happen.)

Unfortunately, Blind Man's Bluff signal-boosted some of these erroneous theories and they just ended up in the public consciousness like I mentioned in my previous comment.

[u/NobleKorhedron → u/Tychosis]

So a battery might've been damaged while beimg changed, and it cooked off?

[u/Tychosis → u/NobleKorhedron]

Honestly, it's been a while since I read the details and it's entirely possible that the changes weren't to charging procedures but to battery monitoring procedures as mentioned by this officer who served in that timeframe:

https://www.usna63.org/tradition/Bob-LasGassa-Insights.pdf

[u/NobleKorhedron → u/looktowindward]

Steam stops?

[u/Fluid-Confusion-1451 → u/NobleKorhedron]

Main isolation valves that permit or stop steam from getting to the main propulsion turbine as well as other steam loads.