Atomic America by Todd Tucker

Author:Todd Tucker
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2009-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

The nuclear plane’s prospects were not so bleak as to prevent the Navy from attempting to move in on the Air Force’s turf. The project’s massive budget made it almost inevitable.

The Navy had kicked in a token amount of money for the ANP’s budget almost from the beginning: through the life of the ANP program the Navy contributed $14 million, about 2 percent of the total. (In a similar fashion, the Navy maintained a small presence in the Army nuclear power program, the reason Richard Legg was at SL-1.) But starting in 1953, the Navy began to propose in a serious way a nuclear-powered seaplane, a plane that acquired the decidedly unmartial name of Princess. The Navy argued that a subsonic, high-endurance plane designed for antisubmarine patrolling was a more useful, and a more practical, atomic plane than the Air Force’s prospective high-speed intercontinental bomber. In addition, because a seaplane took off and landed on the ocean, many of the worst safety issues surrounding the atomic plane would be mitigated, as well as the difficulty of obtaining permission to land on foreign airfields. The Air Force recognized with horror that the Navy’s argument actually made sense, and the possibility that the Navy might produce the first nuclear airplane was one more scenario that kept the Air Force committed to its own program.

Voices of reason frequently argued that the nuclear airplane program should be focused on research until some of the fundamental engineering problems had been solved. The Air Force, however, remained committed to building something nuclear powered that could actually fly—whether it was militarily useful or not. The battle cry was “fly early,” and anyone that advocated anything less ambitious was labeled as a small thinker, a penny-pincher, or worse. Any attempt to refocus their efforts on pure research was seen, at times with some accuracy, as a veiled attempt to kill the program. The Air Force may have been paranoid, but the program did in fact have many real enemies.

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