History of submarines few years before the US, and paralleled subsequent US development in this area. In the 1950s, nuclear power partially replaced diesel-electric propulsion. The sailing of the first nuclear-powered submarine, the USN ""Nautilus"" in 1955 was soon followed by similar British, French and Russian boats. Equipment was also developed to extract oxygen from sea water. These two innovations, together with inertial navigation systems, gave submarines the ability to remain submerged for weeks or months, and enabled previously impossible voyages such as the crossing of the North Pole beneath the Arctic ice cap by the USS "Nautilus" in 1958. Most of the
Nuclear weapons and the United Kingdom remain classified. Much of the HEU supplied by the US was used not for weapons, but as fuel for the growing fleet of UK nuclear submarines. Under the MDA, the US supplied the UK with not just nuclear submarine propulsion technology, but a complete S5W pressurised water reactor of the kind used to power the US submarines. This was used in the Royal Navy's first nuclear-powered submarine, , which was launched in 1960 and commissioned in 1963. The S5W had a Nuclear reactor core that used uranium enriched to between 93 and 97 per cent uranium-235. Reactor technology was transferred