Game-changing Maritime Inventions
History Book Club
Wednesday, July 27, 2022
Wednesday, July 27, 2022. Game changing maritime inventions. Read about the days of ships propelled by sail, oars, coal or oil, paddle wheelers, steam engines, or warships like dreadnought, submarines, aircraft carriers, or torpedoes, propellers, chronometers, sextants, etc. [Proposed by Janos Posfai]
James E.
Bradford, Editor, America, Sea Power and the World, Chichester,
UK: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.; 2016.
Herman Kahn, On
Thermonuclear War, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1960.
I’ve been involved with maritime
inventions ever since I arrived at the Naval Academy as a 19-year-old in an
ill-fitting light blue suit. I arrived in 1953, and at that time the U.S. Navy
was starting to build a massive nuclear submarine force.
Captain Hyman Rickover was an
irritable, ornery engineering duty officer who was behind the creation of our
nuclear navy. He single-handedly pushed
and shoved and agitated the admirals of the Navy and members of Congress to develop
nuclear power plants for submarines. He had loads of opposition—the very idea
of squeezing fissionable material into a core that would heat water used to
drive turbines to propel a submarine scared the daylights out of most senior
officers in the Navy.
However, senior officers had looked
askance at ships substituting steam power for sails. They doubted the
effectiveness of heavily armored battleships. Except for naval aviators, they
looked at aircraft carriers as sitting ducks for enemy guns. The senior
leadership of the Navy most often was too “dug in” to status quo, so they rejected
new ideas.
The Navy experimented with submarine
power plants using liquid sodium, as well as water. Water won out. Rickover pushed and soon USS Nautilus
became a reality. Men who had served on
submarines all during World War II had great misgivings about nuclear-powered
submarines, even after some of them took command of the first nuclear
submarines.
Rickover was a perfectionist. Not a team player. He was brilliant, and he
eventually got his way. Senior officers
in the Navy disliked and distrusted him, and his ability to work the Congress
to obtain the money for each step toward a nuclear Navy.
I was serving on my first submarine,
a World War II submarine in New London, CT, when I was ordered to Washington to
see the “Kindly Old Gentleman” as we jokingly called Rickover.
I got the standard treatment: sitting
in a small room full of books, waiting my turn to see the Admiral. The Navy
had, with pressure from his supporters in Congress, promoted Rickover. Finally,
I went into his office and sat in a chair with the front legs shortened, so you
felt like you would slide out of the chair.
All part of the “treatment”.
He noted my academy academic record
and observed that math and science were not my best subjects. He kicked me out, and ordered me to go back
to my submarine and study, and if I was up to it, come back to see him in a
year. I tried reading nuclear physics text books in my spare time, but for a
young officer aboard a submarine, there wasn’t any spare time.
A year later I received orders for
training to go aboard a Polaris submarine as weapons officer. This meant I
would focus on handling 16 missiles with thermonuclear warheads, and other
officers would worry about Rickover and the power plant.
The idea of putting intercontinental
ballistic missiles aboard a submarine was not an easy idea for the Navy, or
Congress, to handle. The idea of a
missile in a nuclear submarine accidentally exploding conjured the image of a catastrophic
nuclear event, with both power plant and weapon.
President
Eisenhower wrestled with this first, as we faced the Soviet Union, which was
rapidly building a missile force capable of demolishing many American cities.
By the time John F. Kennedy relived him, the first Polaris submarines were built
and about to go on patrol.
In 1962 I had
spent the Cuban Missile Crisis as a submariner on a battle staff set up in
Argentia, Newfoundland. We were flying antisubmarine
warfare planes from there, Iceland and the UK, and coordinating with American
submarines patrolling all down the Atlantic, to oppose the Red Fleet surface
warships and submarines that we expected would
burst out of Soviet far northern bases and head to Cuba.
A year later I was on my first patrol, in
charge of the weapons department aboard USS Ethan Allen, Gold Crew. The Blue crew brought the ship in, and then
our crew spent nearly a month in port in Holy Loch, Scotland, getting ready for
the next patrol. Then we went out for a couple of days of sea trials near Northern
Island. Finally, we sailed, submerged all
the way, to the Mediterranean, and headed east near the coast of Lebanon and
Israel.
As we were en route to our patrol area
we were busy with all the tests on our weapons, and standing watches. In spare moments I read Herman Kahn’s On
Thermonuclear War, which was his idea of the concept of “MAD” or
mutually assured destruction. Years later, serving as Naval Attaché in the
USSR, I learned that Soviet naval officers had been reading Kahn’s book, as
well.
Now we were carrying missiles as
close as we could get in the Mediterranean, aimed at Soviet targets. Part of the Cuban agreement between Kennedy
and Khrushchev had been to give up our Jupiter missiles in Turkey. We were covering those targets in the USSR.
On Thermonuclear War gave us
all something serious to think about. We believed that if we had to shoot those
missiles, we’d wipe out major Soviet cities.
And the Soviets would wipe out some of ours.
I’m happy to report, as you well
know, that we didn’t use those weapons. Yet.
--Sam Coulbourn
-end-
2022-2023
Wednesday, August 31, 2022. How Should We Deal with China? Let's dig into the history of China and try to learn how
the United States should approach China, in terms of human rights, trade
policy, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Global Warming, Nuclear Weapon Proliferation,
autonomous weapons, public health, and much more. We are tremendously
interdependent: should we continue to view China as an Opponent? [Proposed
by Walt Frederick]
Ethel
and Julius Rosenberg
Wednesday, September 28,
2022. Trials of historical
significance. Read about the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials (1945-46), or the Trial of
Julius and Ethel Rosenberg (1951), Burning of the Reichstag trial (1933), or
the Trial of Galileo
Galilei (1633), Martin Luther and
the Diet of Worms, (1521) (not what it sounds like), the Trial and Death of
Socrates by Plato (399 BC), or many more. [Proposed
by Janos Posfai]
Salem Witch Trials
Wednesday, October 26, 2022. Religion and Politics in
America. Religious impact in American
political events. E.g.: Influence of fundamentalist and Catholic churches on
Supreme Court decisions, Puritan Exceptionalism, justification of slavery
through the Bible, Abolition Movement, treatment of Native American
Christianization movement, Justification of Imperialism’s Christianization
mission, Father Coughlin vs. Franklin Roosevelt, Cotton Mather and the Salem
Witch Trials. [Suggested by William Tobin]
Wednesday, November
30, 2022: India from British Colony to Major World Actor.
Read about how,
after World War II ended Mahatma Gandhi led the fight for India’s independence;
then came separation of Hindu India and Muslim East and West Pakistan; then
East Pakistan became Bangladesh and India and Pakistan went to war. Read about
how America’s presidents looked down their noses at India as it became an ally
of the USSR; development of nuclear weapons; now read about relations with
China, and India’s growing influence in the world, including the U.S. [Suggested by Craig Corvo]
THERE WILL BE NO MEETING IN DECEMBER.
Wednesday, January 25, 2023: What will it take to have peace between
Palestinians and Israelis? It started as “The Land of Milk and Honey”
6000 years ago. Then there were the crusades. Centuries of mistreatment and
exclusion of the Jews; the pogroms; the Holocaust which killed six million Jews
in World War II; There was the United Nations General Assembly
partitioning of November 1947; The creation of Israel, in 1948; The Six-day War
of 1967 which resulted in huge loss of territory by the Arabs; And there were
the meetings at Camp David hosted by President Carter with Anwar Sadat and
Menachem Begin; The Palestinians have steadfastly opposed any plan that gives
them land, including part of Jerusalem, most of the West Bank, etc., as long as
the Jews are still around. What will it
take? Read any book on this subject.
[Suggested by Craig Corvo and William Tobin.]
