Since the collapse of their revolt at the start of the decade, the Navy’s admirals had never stopped resenting the Air Force for usurping the defense budget—nor had they stopped looking for a path to regain their own dominance. In 1956, Admiral Arleigh Burke, the newly named chief of naval operations, thought he found it. Burke, the commander of a carrier task force in the Second World War, had been a keen supporter of a controversial program in the late 1940s to build a nuclear-powered submarine. Now, as the Navy’s top admiral, he jump-started funding for a similar, more modern sub capable of
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