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SAC kept the world from unlimited war, but by reason of its own massive power—and a political decision by President Truman—it could answer Korea's limited challenge only in the old way (by conventional bombs). Nor did the Navy have all the answers, even though peninsular warfare is traditionally the Navy's meat. Item: at this critical moment, the Navy had no aircraft to meet the Russian MIG, had to make the humiliating decision to stay out of MIG Alley. (While the Air Force F-86s knocked MIGs out at a rate of 13 to 1.) Obviously, what was needed was a force to fight any kind of war, big, medium-sized or little.
But already the challenges of the new age were being met. In late 1950, in a storage shack nicknamed "Siberia" in a shipyard in Groton, Conn., Nautilus began to take shape under the intense, sometimes ruthless direction of Captain Hyman Rickover. Some of the salt-encrusted admirals had sneered at Rickover's folly and his obstreperous methods, obstructed him for five long and crucial years, tried to break up his team and even to get him tossed out of the Navy. It remained for Arleigh Burke, Chief of Naval Operations since last August, to realize fully what Nautilus meant, to pick up where the engineers had left off and, as a professional Navy man, to turn the professional Navy once and for all toward the future.
The All-Nuclear Fleet. At his Pentagon desk, Burke smacks the dottle from his pipe against his heavy Annapolis ring, looks far beyond today's Navy and sees Nautilus as the forerunner of the all nuclear fleet. Burke's Navy no longer makes conventional submarines: the atomic Sea Wolf is ready for commission, seven more A-subs are under construction or authorized, another six are scheduled in the budget now before Congress. That budget makes a pair of historic requests: one is for a construction start on the first nuclear-powered surface vessel, a missile cruiser of about 11,000 tons; the other is for funds to begin design and procurement on the nuclear power plant for an aircraft carrier. Best estimate of the time required for the Navy's complete nuclear conversion: 20 years.
Moving in as weaponry for the new Navy is a growing family of guided missiles: Terrier, Talos and Tartar, Regulus, Petrel, Sparrow and Sidewinder. With a big stock of conventional big-gun ammunition on hand, the Navy is making no more (except for target rounds). The missile cruisers Boston and Canberra are in service with their radar-controlled antiaircraft Terriers. The ancient battleship Mississippi, converted three years ago to a missile carrier, is a busy floating laboratory for missile development. Two conventional submarines. Tunny and Barbero, have been converted to missiles, and two more conversions are authorized. The Navy is asking funds for five more cruiser conversions, along with four new missile-launching frigates and eight destroyers. Arleigh Burke sees in the missile a chance that the battleship (the Navy has three afloat, 12 in mothballs) may be brought from semiretirement: it might, he thinks, be just the big, steady sea platform needed for launching the intermediate-range (1,500 miles) ballistic missile, Jupiter, on which the Navy and Army are now working together.