Deep Deterrence

ARMED FORCES Deep Deterrence

Dull orange underside and shaded slate topside, the world's biggest submarine this week poised for its slow, stern-first slide into the Thames River at Groton, Conn. The submarine George Washington SSB(N) 598--longer than a football field (380 ft.) and, at 5,600 tons, almost twice the weight of Nautilus--would carry with it the U.S. Navy's highest hopes for the future. It is the first of the submarines designed around the Polaris ballistic-missile weapons system.

When the $110 million George Washington joins the fleet in the fall of 1960, it will carry 16 solid-fuel, nuclear-nosed Polaris missiles (range: 1,500 miles) in its "silos," be capable of cruising for months on its water-cooled nuclear reactors, launch its birds without. surfacing (TIME, March 3, 1958). Its mission: to provide a mobile undersea missile base that Russia can never count on knocking out in a sneak ICBM attack.

To command its great new boat, the Navy has picked one of its best: Commander James Butler Osborn, 41, a Missouri-born, Annapolis-trained ('41) package of controlled power, who has been on hand 18 hours a day since March rushing work on George Washington. A World War II submariner (six combat patrols), Osborn spent his postwar years earning a master's degree in mechanical engineering in three years at Annapolis and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, firing the first subborne Regulus air-breathing missiles from the U.S.S. Tunny, taking an advanced course at Newport, R.I.'s Naval War College. Last June he passed the personal test of the Navy's nuclear submarine boss. Vice Admiral Hyman Rickover, then hit the missile-and nuclear-training circuit from California's Lockheed plant, where the Polaris is produced, to Groton's boat yard. Says Osborn: "Driving the wedge of learning into your head is work, hard work. There's no easy way."

Asked last week if he ever failed an assignment, Osborn seemed almost surprised, snapped: "Negative." And as George Washington stood poised for launching, it was clear that her skipper planned affirmative results in one of the most important jobs in the age of the atom.

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