ABSTRACT
Captain. He commanded the first US nuclear-powered submarine, USS Nautilus, in her 1958 transit under the North Pole’s ice cap from the Pacific to the Atlantic. The voyage deployed major technological advancements, such as nuclear propulsion for ships, an ‘upside-down sonar’ that profiled the ice ceiling above the submarine, an automated and extremely precise depth control system, and an inertial guidance system that made precise underwater navigation possible. The Nautilus’s North Pole underwater transit marked a radical advance in the strategic potential of submarines, an accomplishment that was a high priority with then-CNO Admiral BURKE. That advance in strategic potential of submarines led to the Polaris and Poseidon intercontinental ballisticmissile submarines of the United States and Great Britain. The Nautilus’s submerged North Pole transit began in July 1958 in San Francisco and on 3 August 1958 at 2315 EDT, the Nautilus reached the North Pole. On 5 August the Nautilus surfaced in the Greenland Sea, completing the Northwest Passage long sought by North Pole explorers. President EISENHOWER decorated Anderson with the Legion of Merit for his historic achievement, and the Nautilus received a Presidential Unit Citation, the first such awarded in peacetime.
