The inside of a nuclear submarine used to be something few civilians could hope to see. It might as well have been part of the world of Jules Verne’s classic novel, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea—full of fantastic machines. But since April 1986, the Nautilus Memorial/Submarine Force Library and Museum in Groton, Connecticut, has offered a glimpse of real nuclear submarines.
The USS Nautilus (SSN-571), the first nuclear-powered submarine (commissioned in 1954), dove deeper and cruised faster, farther, and for longer periods than any craft before. Decommissioned in 1980, the submarine was towed to her final, permanent berth in 1985. The collections and artifacts she joined in Groton form the main repository of official U.S. submarine-related information.
Before becoming part of the museum, these collections belonged to a library established in 1955 by the Electric Boat Division of General Dynamics Corporation in Groton. The contents were donated to the Navy and relocated in 1969, at which time the name Submarine Force Library and Museum was formally adopted.
The hangar-like, partially solar-heated structure has three periscopes projecting from its roof; inside, visitors can peer through them from the submarine control room, where the atmosphere is enhanced with taped messages from the commanding officer and officer of the deck and with a simulated conning tower.
The museum features the history of U.S. submarine development from its Revolutionary War-era beginnings. Two mini-theaters show five-minute films about the submarine force and the Nautilus. The museum’s second floor houses the library. One wall is entirely covered with a model of a fleet boat, halved to show the decks in miniature—the officers’ staterooms, galley, wardroom, control room, and engineering spaces. The Nautilus room is also on this level, offering a view of the real boat outside.
The Nautilus was the fourth U.S. Navy ship to bear the name, the others being two schooners and a submarine (SS-168). The nuclear submarine Nautilus's keel was laid in 1952 in Groton at Electric Boat, about a half-mile away from the museum. During her 26 years of service, she set a cruising record from the Panama Canal to San Diego, California, and was the first ship to reach the North Pole, on 3 August 1958, while sailing under the Arctic ice pack. For that trip, she traveled four days and 1,830 miles submerged.
Today, visitors may pass through her torpedo room, officers’ wardroom, attack center, control room, and galley, but the classified engineering spaces remain sealed off.
Other exhibits include a small park near the museum’s entrance displaying four midget submarines—a Japanese Type A, an Italian Maile, a German Seehund, and an early American research submarine, Simon Lake’s Explorer. Visitors also pass through a four-story arch the width of a state-of-the-art Trident submarine hull, and by an open Trident missile hatch.
The museum’s entrance features an 11-foot model of Captain Nemo’s fictional Nautilus from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. The model looks appropriately phantasmal compared with the real boat docked just outside. In 1869, Jules Verne wrote:
“On the Nautilus men’s hearts never fail them. No defects to be afraid of' for the double shell is as firm as iron: no rigging to attend to; no sails for the wind to carry away; no boilers to burst; no fire to fear, for the vessel made of iron, not of wood; no coal to run short, for electricity is the only power; no collision to fear, for it alone swims in deep water; no tempest to brave, for when it dives below the water, it reaches absolute tranquillity That is the perfection of vessels.'