On September 24, 1960, the USS Enterprise slid down the ways at Newport News Shipbuilding in Virginia, the first aircraft carrier in the world to be powered by nuclear reactors. She was 1,123 feet long, displaced about 93,000 tons, and had eight Westinghouse A2W reactors driving four shafts. She carried about 85 aircraft and a crew of about 5,800.
The case was operational. A conventional carrier has to stop every few days to take on fuel oil, and the oilers that feed it are the most vulnerable part of a task force. A nuclear ship has no such limit: Enterprise could steam at high speed for weeks, could go 400,000 miles without refuelling, and needed no stack, which is why she had no funnel and looked wrong to everyone who saw her. The first refuelling and overhaul did not come until 1964, after three years and 207,000 miles.
The design had been argued about since 1950. Hyman Rickover, who had built the Nautilus, wanted nuclear carriers and got the Forrestal class built conventionally instead. Congress authorised Enterprise in 1957 at about 314 million dollars, and the cost rose to about 451 million, which is why plans for six were cut to one. The rest of the nuclear carrier programme waited until the Nimitz class in 1975.
What Enterprise did in her first decade was the Cuban Missile Crisis and Vietnam. In October 1962 she was part of the quarantine force around Cuba. In December 1965 she became the first nuclear ship to engage in combat, launching strikes from Yankee Station in the Gulf of Tonkin, and she flew more sorties in the Vietnam War than any other carrier. Her aircraft, the F-4 Phantom and the A-6 Intruder, needed catapults and arresting gear that were at the edge of what steam could do.
She also had accidents. In January 1969, off Hawaii, a Zuni rocket on a Phantom was accidentally fired by the heat of a starting unit, which set off a chain of fires and explosions on the flight deck. Twenty-eight men were killed and 314 injured, and 15 aircraft were destroyed. Repairs took three months.
Enterprise served 51 years, longer than any other American carrier, and took part in the Gulf War, in the no-fly zones over Iraq and in operations in Afghanistan. She was deactivated in December 2012 at Norfolk, after eight reactor cores and about a million miles. Removing the fuel and dismantling the reactors is still going on.