The Navy is presently going through the most tremendous change it has ever undergone. It is passing from steam to nuclear power, from gunpowder to nuclear weapons, from guns to guided missiles, and in the air, from propeller-type planes to supersonic planes, all at the same time.
—Navy Secretary Charles Thomas
With a soft rustle, the curtains open on the revolution in U.S. sea power. Drawn wide by a briefing officer, they reveal the secret wall maps in the blue-and-gold Pentagon office of the U.S. Chief of Naval Operations. The clock strikes 8 bells—and the Navy's boss, a sea roll to his stride, a faint touch of salt-spray green on the broad gold stripes on his sleeve, barges through the door at 31 knots. This freighter-shaped (5 ft. 11 in., 200 Ibs.) admiral, his ties fast to the old Navy and all its traditions, is plunging ahead in a new and astonishing naval era at the same hell-for-weather clip described by a destroyer shipmate from the Solomons Slot: "It's always been the same. All boilers on the line, superheaters cut in. Arleigh Burke is on the way."
Admiral Arleigh Burke, 54, blue eyes for the moment behind horn-rimmed glasses, looks past the curtains: on his maps, pinpointing every major warship and command, are the symbols of his Navy's revolution.
There, steaming from Istanbul to Athens in the Mediterranean, is Vice Admiral Harry D. Felt's Sixth Fleet—soon to include the bristling guided-missile cruiser Canberra*—offering defense-in-depth to NATO's long, thin southern flank and imposing its stable strength on Middle Eastern foment. There, riding at anchor in the soft swell of Okinawa's Buckner Bay, is Vice Admiral Stuart Ingersoll's Seventh Fleet, ready to turn its carrier-keyed task force toward the first break in Asia's ominous calm (a calm that might well not exist were it not for the Seventh Fleet's presence). There, in drydock for routine overhaul at Norfolk's huge (35 admirals on duty) Navy complex, is the 60,000-ton carrier Forrestal, most powerful ship afloat, preparing to join the fleet in the fall as the Navy's champion of nuclear striking power. She is designed to land and launch bombers, e.g., the Douglas A-3-D, which can carry city-razing payloads at more than 600 m.p.h.
And from New London, Conn., on a cruise to New York, slips the symbol of them all: the nuclear submarine Nautilus, its atomic engines still generating untold power after a year—and upwards of 30,000 miles—without refueling.
A Start in "Siberia." In terms of the new, atomic-age thinking, the Navy's revolution reached its most dramatic stage with Nautilus. After World War II and a brilliant and imaginative performance on the sea and in the air, the Navy turned slowly to the military potential of the atom. While the Air Force and its Strategic Air Command took over an urgent proprietorship in the atomic age, the Navy fought stoutly to preserve its great fleet, to keep a maximum of ships at sea. It fought the Air Force concept of long-range nuclear retaliation as immoral and stupid—and came perilously close to foreclosing its own future as anything but a sub-hunting ferry command.