On January 17, 1955, the USS Nautilus (SSN-571) backed away from its pier on the Thames River in Groton, Connecticut, with Hyman G. Rickover, the father of the nuclear Navy, aboard and press boats swarming. A terrifying noise from the starboard reduction gear turned out to be a loose locking pin on a retaining nut, and minutes later a signalman blinked the message: underway on nuclear power. Authorized by Congress in 1951, the submarine borrowed its streamlined hull from the German Type 21 U-boat and ran on the S2W pressurized water reactor from Westinghouse and the Bettis Atomic Power Laboratory, first proven in a landlocked prototype in Idaho. Because the reactor needs no oxygen, the boat no longer had to surface or snorkel, making World War II radar and patrol aircraft tactics obsolete.

In May 1955 it ran 1,300 miles fully submerged from New London to San Juan, Puerto Rico in under 90 hours, and by February 1957 it had logged 60,000 nautical miles, matching the fictional Nautilus of Jules Verne. After Sputnik, President Eisenhower ordered Operation Sunshine: a first attempt in June 1958 was blocked by deep drift ice in the Chukchi Sea, but on August 3, 1958, under Commander William R. Anderson, Nautilus became the first vessel to reach the North Pole. Its flaw was noise, as hull and sail vibration deafened its own sonar above four knots, lessons that shaped every quieter submarine that followed.

• With magnetic compasses useless above 85 degrees north, the crew relied on an N6A1 inertial navigation system adapted from the Navajo missile.
• Ice in the Bering Strait hung as much as 60 feet below the surface, and Anderson planned to torpedo a hole through it in an emergency.
• The crew spent 96 hours under the ice, covering nearly 1,600 miles, and earned the first peacetime Presidential Unit Citation.
• Nautilus joined the Cuban Missile Crisis blockade in 1962 and collided with the carrier USS Essex in 1966.
• Decommissioned in 1980, it became a National Historic Landmark in 1982 and a museum in Groton drawing about 250,000 visitors a year.