Carter was no nuclear submariner. He wasn’t even a nuclear engineer. I probably knew just as much as he did about nuclear power when I got out of Nuclear Power School and my parents were married.
He got out of the navy in 1953. He was a flunkie for Rickover at Naval Reactors during the very beginning of naval nuclear power and then quit to become a peanut farmer.
The USS Nautilus was commissioned in 1955.
I get tired of the people that say he was some big yay-hoo in naval nuclear power. He was probably Rickover’s fluff boy.
He was a junior officer and never had a command, especially command of a US man of war.
Rickover thought he was an idiot. Took him for political reasons.
“He wasn’t even a nuclear engineer.”
Wow! Thanks for that. For decades I’ve uncritically accepted MSM’s claim that he was, as illustrated by this boot-licking article in Time:
“Jimmy Carter has always been proud of his breadth of achievement: nuclear engineer, farmer, U.S. President, humanitarian and 2002 Nobel Peace Prize winner.”
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,552101,00.html