Rickover: The Birth of Nuclear Power

I was a nuke aboard a fast attack submarine in the mid-seventies and this movie brought back a lot of memories; good and bad. The Navy's nuclear training program was (and I presume still is) incredibly difficult weeded out a lot of very intelligent men who weren't able to live up to Rickover's standards. As a result, the U. S. Navy nuclear fleet is second to none. As the movie shows, incompetence, finger pointing, whining, etc. Were not tolerated. If you couldn't perform your duties as a nuke then you didn't last long. Our current "leaders" should be required to watch this movie over and over until they understand the message it contains. Barring that, this movie should be required viewing in our schools.

I was not expecting a 'Docu-Drama'... (I was hoping for a straight documentary).

But this is pretty close.. there is plenty of real footage of Admiral Rickover, whom I have never met... He resigned a year or 2 before I interviewed with Admiral McKee in Washington DC, to qualify for the Navy Nuclear Power Program.

Luckily, I was Accepted.

I hated the Navy, but I Am Proud to have Served Our Country by keeping Navy Nuclear Power Safe... USS Enterprise (CVN-65)

Admiral Rickover's experience with the US Navy and Beauracracy only vindicates my view that it truly takes a Maverick or iconoclast to buck the system and make things happen in this world, to make things Right.

5.8 hmmmmmmmmm ... why?

Because the anti-progress folks organize to destroy truth. The documentary points out that nuclear power is not evil, as the left would have you believe. And make no mistake, the only reason they want you to believe that is so you will beg them to enslave you with anti-science solutions to all of humanities problems.

Nuclear energy is like a gun ... in the hands of a woman about to be raped, it is a savior ... in the hands of leftists (like Nader, Carter, etc.) it is the extinction of life. You want good things like nuclear energy? Then you have to deplatform or lock-up the evileft. The definition of leftism is the violently insane lust for power. Nuclear energy can be a godsend, the reason people think it isn't, is because our 90% of the world's leaders (aka enslavers) are leftists.

This movie should be seen by American sixth graders. Rickover did more to make us a military superpower than any other single person, and he demonstrated that good, smart people can make a difference in the world. The script was pretty good here, with a few minor terminology mistakes. For example, the narrator referred to the Nautilus as the first true submersible. Actually, it was the diesel electrics which were merely "submersibles." The Nautilus was the first true submarine (OK, the German Type XXI came close.)

I'm old enough to remember the Nautilus as news. For 25 cents and a cereal boxtop, you could get by mail order a baking powder "powered" toy Nautilus. A little later, a smaller version was actually included in the cereal box. Not long after that, I put together a (Revell, I think) a Nautilus SSN-571 model kit.

From my reading about Rickover, I think this docu-drama came close to portraying the contribution this man made to safe nuclear power, not to mention a weapons superiority that kept the Russians in a panic for forty years and then bankruptcy. It's a shame he didn't live to see the fall of the Soviet Union. Our Ohio class SSBNs are still in war-capable condition, while the Russian Typhoons are sitting, abandoned and rusting away.

I think the small point (small in the movie anyway) about the state of American education is even more valid today than when he said it. Elementary and secondary education is all about sports and dance and not science. College is Political "Science" and LGBT Studies. The local school district where I live cannot afford to update their computer labs, while just spending $70+ million on a football stadium, built right next to...their football stadium. The local elementary school has a sign on the front proudly proclaiming that it has been rated an "Exemplary school" by the state--for 1990 (30 years ago!).

If you have kids old enough to understand this movie, you will do them a favor by showing it to them. I've got it queued for next time the grandchildren are over.

Had to watch this while doing research on nuclear energy, and didn't expect to love the film and admire Rickover by the end as much as I did. Tim Blake Nelson is excellent in it, total commitment. One of the better docu-dramas I've seen, and it's so refreshing to watch a modern documentary that's not done the way every other cookie-cutter netflix documentary has decided to uniformly look now.