Admiral Hyman Rickover: Engineer of Power. By Mark Wortman (Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2022) 310 pages.
Admiral Rickover

The father of the US nuclear submarine program created a phenomenal enterprise and capability.

Written by

Peter Jennings

Hyman Rickover served in the United States Navy for 63 years. He pioneered nuclear propulsion and civilian nuclear power, personally approved the trials into service of 126 nuclear submarines and through sheer force of personality changed the Navy’s officer culture from generalists to engineering technocrats. Rickover’s achievement as the father of the Nuclear Navy arguably tipped the strategic balance in the cold war towards the United States.

Rickover hated the Navy brass and they hated him in return. One Chief of Naval Operations said the “two greatest enemies were, first the Soviets and, second Rickover.” The “Kindly Old Gentleman – KOG”, as his staff called sarcastically called him, built his powerbase through support in Congress and by shaping close relations with every President from Truman to Jimmy Carter. From June 1948 through to 1982 Rickover ran Naval Reactors, a hybrid unit of the USN and the Atomic Energy Commission. He exercised iron control over reactor development and crucially, officer selection, setting stringent technical standards for training that are still applied.

Rickover’s interviews of nuclear trainees were famously bizarre. Candidates were forced to sit on a chair with shortened front legs. As they slid off the seat Rick would shout aggressive questions. “He could cut people to shreds and he loved it” one staffer recalled. “I have to make them mad” Rickover said “to see if they are fighters.”

Mark Wortman’s biography is a fascinating, even-handed account of Rickover’s remarkable life. Arriving at New York’s Ellis Island in 1906 as a six-year-old in a family of Polish Jews fleeing religious persecution, Rickover’s early life is a story of working-class struggle. He had a lucky-break to be accepted into the Navy’s elite officer academy but faced discrimination because of his size (125 pounds, five foot six inches tall) and his seldom-acknowledged faith.

The core of the book is about Rickover’s intense drive to design and establish nuclear propulsion, fighting the Navy, government and defence contractors to deliver his boats according to his standards through what was “a rule by fear.” By any standards then or now Rickover’s behaviour was unacceptable. He would not be tolerated in Defence or the ADF. But he maintained a loyal cadre of people that worked for him for decades, accepting that he was “an expert in getting things done.”

Wortman’s book should be on the reading list of anyone involved in the AUKUS endeavour. Read it not to imitate Rickover’s behaviour, but to understand the effort needed to deliver complex projects, often in the teeth of institutional indifference or hostility.

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