Word: skipjacks
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...eight-year-old 252-ft. attack sub of the Skipjack class, Scorpion was returning to Norfolk, Va., from a cruise in the Mediterranean with 99 officers and men aboard. On May 21, just south of the Azores (see map), she filed her last "movement report" before transiting the inadequately charted undersea mountains of the mid-Atlantic. Not until six days later was the Navy aware that anything was amiss-and then only when Scorpion failed to report her arrival off the U.S. coast. The cold-war code for U.S. nuclear subs requires them to cruise submerged without any radio signals...
...Electric Boat's Groton yard, a nuclear-attack sub of the Skipjack class was well along in construction. Her reactor and control-room sections were nearly completed. By chopping that 250-ft vessel in half and inserting a 130-ft missile bay in her midriff, she could be commissioned in two years as a Polaris submarine. But though he knew his scheme was technically possible, Raborn still had to convince himself that U.S. industry would work as hard as his new schedule required...
...Burke. Said Burke to Rear Admiral William Raborn Jr., officer in charge: "Tell me what you have done, not what you are going to do." Raborn cut years off the schedule (original target date: 1963), partly by starting in on a hull that was already in construction (the first Skipjack). The parallel program for the development of the Polaris solid-fuel missile cranked up more speed. Raborn poured new money into every bottleneck-ing delay, kept his promise that he would have the first ship in commission by late 1959; he made his deadline...
...wish to thank TIME [June 15] for the fine article on the submarine George Washington. However, we would like to point out that the atomic submarines George Washington, Triton, U.S.S. Skate, U.S.S. Skipjack, U.S.S. Seawolf and U.S.S. Nautilus, all built in Groton, were built by the Electric Boat Division of General Dynamics Corp...
...When the Skipjack is maneuvering under the surface like a sportive whale, she must be handled more like an airplane than a ship. Her pilot, copilot and engineer are strapped tight in airplane-type seats, steering in three dimensions with an aircraftlike "stick." And as Skipjack dives and banks and turns in the dark depths, propelled by her tireless nuclear engine, the rest of the 83-man crew hang on for dear life. Only when the Skipjack comes to the surface does she tend to wallow clumsily like a surfaced whale...