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62 so u R c e s o f we a p o n sy s T e m s In n o v a T Io n In T h e depaR TmenT o f defense
their working knowledge of hydrodynamics to problems in hull design, and,
during World War II, they diversified into similar studies of mines, torpedoes,
and other types of underwater ordnance. Although practical investigations
persisted in such fields as propeller quieting and acoustic countermeasures to
ward off homing torpedoes and shipborne sonar, studies of a more fundamental
nature flourished after the war. They included research on nonuniform bodies
through a fluid, vortex formation and interactions, turbulence, and interfaces
among different fluids. 79 In 1958, one year before it released a similar statement
on behalf of the Engineering Experiment Station, the Bureau of Ships revised
the model basin’s mission to include “fundamental and applied research in the
fields of hydromechanics, aerodynamics, structural mechanics, mathematics,
acoustics, and related fields of science.” 80 Work in these fields during and after
the war played a pivotal role in the transformation of the submarine fleet from
diesel-electric to nuclear power.
At the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry in Berlin at the end of 1938,
chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassman obtained experimental evidence
of uranium fission. News of this groundbreaking discovery quickly spread to
the United States early in 1939, where it immediately caught the attention of
Rear Adm. Harold Bowen, chief of the Bureau of Engineering and soon-to-be
director of the Naval Research Laboratory. Bowen and other like-minded naval
officers had been searching for new techniques to improve submarine propulsion
and performance, which at the time relied on a cumbersome combination of
diesel engines for surface operations and electric storage batteries for undersea
maneuvers. Bowen set up a new research program at the Naval Research
Laboratory to investigate the power potential of uranium fission, but this work
was quickly absorbed into the much larger effort undertaken by the National
Defense Research Committee (and subsequently OSRD and the Army Corps
of Engineers) to develop the atomic bomb. 81
The Navy’s interest in nuclear propulsion resumed at the end of the war
but not under the guidance of Admiral Bowen. In his place was Capt. Hyman
Rickover, who had distinguished himself during the war in the electrical
section of the Bureau of Ships. Although he lacked Bowen’s position and rank,
the hard-driving Rickover was still able to create, almost single-handedly, the
Navy’s nuclear submarine fleet through a well-established network of personal
and professional relationships in the bureau system and private industry.
For decades, the Navy’s propulsion requirements had been met by industrial
contractors. Large firms, such as GE, Westinghouse Electric, Babcock and
Wilcox, and the Allis-Chalmers Manufacturing Company, designed and built
79 Carlisle, Where the Fleet Begins, 185–86.
80 Ibid., 487.
81 Richard G. Hewlett and Oscar E. Anderson Jr., The New World, 1939–1946, vol. 1 of A History
of the United States Atomic Energy Commission (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press,
1962), 10–11, 15. See also Joseph-James Ahern, “‘We Had the Hose Turned on Us!’: Ross Gunn and the
Naval Research Laboratory’s Early Research into Nuclear Propulsion, 1939–1946,” Historical Studies in
the Physical and Biological Sciences 33 (2003): 217–36. On the wartime Manhattan Project, see Richard
Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986).