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Quote of the Day: Admiral Hyman G. Rickover
“One can delegate authority; one cannot delegate responsibility.” Pithy, succinct; that’s the man who’s long been called “the father of the nuclear Navy.” The Rickover quote is from a taciturn genius with a brutally effective management style and a cold, nasty streak. You could compare him with Steve Jobs; he didn’t invent the technology that he’d forever be associated with, but his incredibly strict standards made a successful final product possible. Creating an atomic submarine wasn’t a simple process.
Using the waste heat of atomic decay to power submarines was a known possibility even 15 years earlier. In fact, it was the only one of the US’s WWII atomic research programs that the Nazis found out about. There was no possibility of putting a seagoing reactor to work during that war, and the immediate political climate in the first couple of years after the war didn’t encourage expensive experiments. But by 1950, the quest for a suitable power reactor was in full swing.
America had every reason to be proud of its engineers. And of Walt Disney, who followed the real Nautilus closely with the fictional Jules Verne version on screen, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.
Rickover’s next role was criticizing the country’s educational establishment. At the time, as a ten-year-old, he seemed to be an unwelcome advocate for making us all work a lot harder in school. Now, of course, I can see he had a point.
Like Jobs, in our own era, there was a question then and now as to whether Rickover had to be such a rude, obnoxious jerk to get the results he got. Today’s quote shows that, at the very least, he never spared himself from the impossibly high standards he demanded from subordinates.
This post is part of the Quote of the Day series, ably helmed by @arahant.
Published in General
The thing is the damage done is offset by many benefits. If the damage you are referring to is preventing migrating fish from going upstream to spawn, there’s a workaround for that too.
My one opinion that differs from Rickover is that we should have diesel subs as well. Okay, they have limitations in blue water, but they would be ideal for coastal defense. With new technology that allows them to spend days underwater without charging their batteries (as opposed to hours), they can be a formidble weapon not only for the Navy, but the Coast Guard as well.
Cheaper to build, cheaper to operate, and cheaper to train the crew – what’s not to love?
No the damage I was thinking of, was flooding thousands of acres of land – sometimes forested lands like with the James Bay project in Norther Quebec.
OK, a comparison. General Thomas Power was SAC’s ramrod. Even Gen. Curtis LeMay, who gave him the job, freely admitted that Power was an actual sadist. But he felt he needed an inflexible perfectionist. Thomas Power didn’t have the reputation, the charisma of Rickover, but there’s a similar question: If we truly needed a hardass, and we did, did we overshoot the mark with these guys? Or was it 100% necessary?
Yes, and especially valuable in relatively shallow to “brown water” operations around the world.