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",
Jules Verne life. (Modern scholars have hypothesized that he suffered from colitis; Verne believed the illness to have been inherited from his mother's side.) Rumors of an outbreak of cholera in March 1849 exacerbated these medical concerns. Yet another health problem would strike in 1851, when Verne suffered the first of four attacks of facial paralysis. These attacks, rather than being psychosomatic, were due to an inflammation in the middle ear, though this cause remained unknown to Verne during his life. In the same year, Verne was required to enlist in the French military, but the sortition process spared him, to his