This was the opportunity Craven had been looking for, a chance to tap into his most fantastic plans. There was only one thing stopping him. He had no idea how to accomplish what the intelligence officer was asking for. Even Trieste II couldn't manage much of a secret undersea raid-it was too small, and the surface ship needed to carry the submersible out to mid-ocean would be a dead giveaway.
"Basically, we are developing the technology, but not the assets," Craven said, calling upon his best Navy-speak. Silence. Two beats, maybe three. No matter how officiously he said it, he was still admitting he had no way to do what he was being asked.
Then, Craven had a flash of inspiration. "Hey, look, we don't have anything that could do your operation because that requires things be clandestine." One more quick inhale and he came out with the kicker. "So it's really not worth doing Sand Dollar unless you do it from a submarine."
There it was, blurted out in desperation, the idea for what would become the Navy's most daring venture yet. A full-sized submarine, big enough to navigate the high seas, would be outfitted to hover in place in the upper reaches of the ocean and dangle cameras miles down, deep enough to scout the ocean bottom for Soviet treasures. It was inspired. Make the effort from below the surface, find a way to be nearly undetectable. Never let the Soviets know the Americans were anywhere near.
Actually all Craven was doing was rehashing his long-held belief that operating from the ocean surface was its own kind of hell. He had already included the concept in his self-scripted "Ten Commandments of Deep-Ocean Engineering." The way he said it was: "Remember that the free surface is neither ocean nor air and that man cannot walk upon it nor will equipments remain stable in its presence. So design your equipments that they tarry not long and that they need neither servicing nor repair at this unseemly interface."
Now, suddenly, he had not only the means to put that commandment to the test, he also had his chance to fulfill his favorite part of his lineage and plunder buried treasure. His pulpit secure, his corsair's blood aboil, all Craven needed was a submarine.
There were twenty nuclear attack subs in the fleet now, and more being built. But Navy admirals weren't about to give up a first-rate boat so that it could sit out in mid-ocean trolling with cameras. If Craven wanted a sub, he would have to take one of the Navy's two nuclear clunkers, the two failed experiments whose designs were never replicated. There was the USS Seawolf, a confused boat with the v-shaped bow of a destroyer and the top of a sub built to house a touchy reactor run with liquid sodium-a reactor that had been replaced early on. Then there was the USS Halibut, a boat with a grander, but short-lived, past. Halibut (SSGN-587) had been the only nuclear sub to carry the Regulus guided missiles, making seven missions off the Soviet coast. But that program had ended in mid-1964 when the Navy began basing Polaris subs in the Pacific. With the Regulus era over, no one knew quite what to do with Halibut.
She was a marine oddball, one of the least hydrodynamic of the nuclear fleet and one of the most ridiculous-looking creations ever born in a dry dock. Unlike the flat fish she was named for, Halibut wore a huge hump that might have been appropriate on a gargantuan desert creature except for the fact that it opened up into a large shark's-mouth hatch, part of the original missile hangar. Perhaps in another time, Halibut would have been quietly scrapped. After all, this boat was not only odd, she suffered from what was a near-fatal malady for a submarine: hydromechanical cacophony. Halibut was loud. Submariners heard the din, saw only potential flooding when they gazed upon that hatch, and shuddered when they examined her cumbersome ballast tanks, gaping caverns originally designed to allow her to surface fast, shoot a missile, and submerge even faster.
Craven took one look at the submarine it seemed nobody could love and was transfixed. All he saw were the possibilities, the strange and wonderful things that could be done with all of that excess space. And when he caught a glimpse of that gorgeous gaping mouth, it was enough to send him, like any self-respecting mad scientist, reeling with joy. No other submarine in the fleet boasted a hatch larger than 26 inches. Halibut's hatch was 22 feet.
It was settled: Halibut would be Craven's submarine, his laboratory, his ministry, his pirate ship. He would have $70 million to outfit her with electronic, sonic, photographic, and video gadgets. The Navy put out the word, and in February 1965 Halibut went into Pearl Harbor to be refitted as an oceanographic research vessel.
Less a lie than a huge omission, that was only one of several cover stories Craven would employ. The DSRV program and his other deepsea projects would add more layers, all hiding what Craven had proclaimed to be his "Skunk Works"-a term he borrowed for its drama from Lockheed Aircraft Corporation, the spy-plane manufacturer Craven would soon have working on the design of the DSRVs and also on a Deep Submergence Search Vehicle. The plan was that the DSSV would be able to sit on the ocean floor 20,000 feet deep and pick up objects with a mechanical arm. It was to travel to any recovery area mounted on the top of a submarine.
It would take two years to rebuild and test Halibut, but Craven would have little time to be impatient. From almost the moment the refit began, Craven's mass of cover stories began earning him notice outside the insular realm of Naval Intelligence. Suddenly he was being pulled into other high-profile projects.
Rickover, who had once done everything he could to limit Craven's interest in deep-diving mini-subs, now came to Craven asking him to help build the first nuclear-powered one, though one of steel, not glass. (The admiral would forever remain scathing about glass, to the point of insult.) But Craven was now working with Rickover, and the liaison would prove to be a crucial step in the scientist's education: crucial because it was through Rickover that Craven would learn how to mine the Navy's budget, deal with Congress, and handle the cadre of admirals who ran the submarine program.
It was a Faustian pact. Rickover may have been sixty-four years old, an age at which even less controversial officers have long been retired, but Craven, like just about everyone else in the Navy, could never quite learn to handle him. Rickover liked to begin their conversations in a way that showed just who was in charge: "Craven, my people are more competent than your people, but your shop is bigger, so I'm going to have to work with you." Rickover liked to try to throw men off balance just to see how they would handle themselves.
Rickover personally christened the mini-sub "NR-1." It might as well have been called the USS Rickover, for "NR" was the designation for the Naval Reactors Branch-Rickover's realm. If the president could have Air Force One, Rickover would have his NR-l.
Unlike Woods Hole's Alvin, which was completed in 1965 and was only 22 feet long, NR-1 was to be 137 feet, nearly half the size of an attack sub. NR-1 would be able to go down to 3,000 feet. Equipped with underwater lights, cameras, and a grappling arm to retrieve small objects, it also would have the potential to do some spying. One of the chief design problems was finding some way to shield the nuclear reactor in the NR-1. Standard sub reactors were shielded with a foot of lead on either end. But that would have made the NR-1 too heavy. Instead, Rickover, Craven, and the other designers decided it would have the standard lead shielding only in front where it faced crew compartments. The entire thirteen-foot area of the sub behind the reactor would be closed off permanently and flooded. The idea was to allow the wall of water to absorb any escaping radiation and work as a substitute for lead shielding. Craven had no doubt that environmentalists would cringe at the plan, but both he and Rickover believed it was entirely workable. Thirteen feet of water has the same molecular weight as one foot of lead. But when NR-1 was submerged, the water would add no weight at all-when water displaces an equal amount of water, the effective weight is zero.