Navy Electronics Laboratory events—the submerged voyage of USS "Nautilus" from the Pacific to the Atlantic, via the North Pole, in 1958, with NEL’s Dr. Waldo Lyon aboard as chief scientist and ice pilot. That same summer, the USS "Skate" cruised from the Atlantic to the North Pole and the central Arctic Ocean, surfacing 9 times through small holes in the ice cap. Dr. Eugene C. La Fond, head of NEL's Oceanography Branch, was chief scientist In March 1959, the "Skate" returned to the Arctic, under winter conditions, with Dr. Waldo Lyon as chief scientist, and for the first time, the nuclear submarine was
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