Nuclear submarine nuclear-powered submarine was first proposed in the United States Navy by the Naval Research Laboratory's Ross Gunn in 1939. Construction of the world's first nuclear powered submarine was made possible by the successful development of a nuclear propulsion plant by a group of scientists and engineers at the Naval Reactors Branch of the Bureau of Ships and the Atomic Energy Commission. In July 1951 the U.S. Congress authorized construction of the first nuclear-powered submarine, "Nautilus", under the leadership of Captain Hyman G. Rickover, USN (sharing names with Captain Nemo's fictional submarine in Jules Verne's "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea",
North Pole North Pole. His feat, undertaken to highlight the effects of global warming, took place in clear water that had opened up between the ice floes. His later attempt to paddle a kayak to the North Pole in late 2008, following the erroneous prediction of clear water to the Pole, was stymied when his expedition found itself stuck in thick ice after only three days. The expedition was then abandoned. By September 2007 the North Pole had been visited 66 times by different surface ships: 54 times by Soviet and Russian icebreakers, 4 times by Swedish "Oden", 3 times by German