"We had the hose turned on us!": Ross Gunn and the Naval Research Laboratory's early research into nuclear propulsion, 1939-1946

Abstract

In March 1939, Dr. Ross Gunn of the Naval Research Laboratory initiated a research program that would lay the groundwork for applying nuclear energy to submarine propulsion. The Navy contracts that followed initiated the first practical research into uranium production and isotope separation, and produced a practical method for uranium hexafluoride production (a process still used today). However, by the end of World War II the Navy's program had been absorbed by the Army's Manhattan Engineering District. This paper argues that the Navy, not the Army, deserves credit for laying the groundwork for nuclear energy in the united States. Although the atomic bomb was built by the Manhattan Engineering District under General Leslie Groves, the little-known and nearly suppressed story of the Navy's prior work in this field gives credence to Dr. Ross Gunn's claim that the Navy has been denied the credit it deserves. How and why the Navy was cut out of nuclear research and how the story was ignored illuminates another side of the first military applications of nuclear energy.