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 rather than a serious author worthy of academic study. This denial of formal literary status took various forms, including dismissive criticism by such writers as Émile Zola and the lack of nomination to Verne for membership in the Académie Française, and was recognized by Verne himself, who said in a late interview: "The great regret of my life is that I have never taken any place in French literature." To Verne, who considered himself "a man of letters and an artist, living in the pursuit of the ideal", this critical dismissal on the basis of literary ideology could only be