If you asked me to name an Admiral, his name would come immediately to mind

Thank you, my friend Maj Marty Hogan for making us aware that January 27 is the anniversary of the birth of Admiral in the U.S. Navy Hyman G. Rickover who "directed the original development of naval nuclear propulsion and controlled its operations for three decades as director of the U.S. Naval Reactors office. In addition, he oversaw the development of the Shippingport Atomic Power Station, the world's first commercial pressurized water reactor used for generating electricity."

Admiral Rickover 60 Minutes Interview
Father of the Modern Nuclear Navy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpAWiqwSw-U

Images:
1. Hyman Rickover inspecting the USS Nautilus, the first nuclear-powered submarine, in 1954
2. Dr. Waldo K. Lyon, chief research scientist for the U.S. Navy at the Arctic Submarine Laboratory, and Hyman G. Rickover
3. President Gerald Ford, President Jimmy Carter, President Richard Nixon, and Admiral Hyman Rickover, 1983.
4. tombstone of Admiral Hyman G. Rickover

Biographies
1. atomicheritage.org/profile/hyman-g-rickover
2. biography.yourdictionary.com/hyman-george-rickover

1. Background from [https://www.atomicheritage.org/profile/hyman-g-rickover]
"Hyman G. Rickover
Hyman George Rickover was a Navy admiral who served during World War II who is known as the “Father of the Nuclear Navy” due to his role in developing the first nuclear-powered submarine.

EARLY LIFE
Born Chaim Godalia Rickover in Poland, then part of the Russian Empire, Rickover traveled to the United States with his family at a young age as part of a wave of Jewish refugees fleeing Russian pogroms during the Revolution of 1905. After initially settling in New York City, the family moved to Chicago, where Rickover’s father worked as a tailor. Rickover got his first paid job at age 9, and during high school he worked full time delivering Western Union telegrams.
Rickover sought an appointment to the United States Naval Academy after high school, as his parents could not afford college tuition. Rickover graduated in 1922 in the top quarter of his class, and then joined the crew of a warship. In under a year, he was made an engineer officer, the youngest in the squadron. He served next onboard a battleship before returning to school. After a year at the Naval Postgraduate School and time at Columbia University, Rickover received his M.S. in Electrical Engineering.
Rickover volunteered for submarine duty, and served on two submarines from 1929-1933. He was then assigned to duty on a battleship, and assumed ship-command of a minesweeper in 1937. This post ended after a few months, however, as Rickover became an engineering duty officer in October 1937. Rickover became assistant chief of the Electrical section of the Bureau of Engineering in 1939, and during the war he served as the head of the Electrical section of the Bureau of Ships.

THE FATHER OF THE NUCLEAR NAVY
In 1946, Rickover traveled to Oak Ridge as part of a project to develop a nuclear electric generating plant. There Rickover became convinced that nuclear-powered ships, and particularly nuclear-powered submarines, were the future of the Navy. This belief was not shared by Rickover’s supervisors, and he was reassigned to Washington, D.C. There he brought his idea up directly with Chester Nimitz, then the Chief of Naval Operations. With his support and that of the Secretary of the Navy, the Nuclear Power Division was established in the Bureau of Ships under Rickover’s direction. Rickover and Alvin M. Weinberg, the director of research at Oak Ridge, began work on the new pressurized water reactor for the submarine.
In 1949, Rickover became Director of the Nuclear Power Division, Bureau of Ships, and was appointed chief of the Naval Reactor Branch, Reactor Development Division, in the Atomic Energy Commission. These two roles allowed Rickover a large degree of control over the development of the nuclear-powered submarine, and also in overseeing the development of the first full-scale, commercial nuclear power plant dedicated to peacetime operation. In these roles, Rickover was often forced to send letters to himself to request certain things.
Congress authorized the construction of the nuclear-powered submarine, called the Nautilus, in 1951. The ship was propelled by the Submarine Thermal Reactor a pressurized water reactor built by the Westinghouse Corporation. The submarine was christened in 1954 by Mamie Eisenhower, and traveled out to sea for the first time in 1955. The submarine would go on to break many records, as its nuclear reactor allowed it to travel longer distances and to stay underwater longer than other submarines.

LATER YEARS
Rickover continued to head the Navy’s efforts into building a nuclear-powered arsenal. He interviewed every prospective officer considered for a post on a nuclear ship, tens of thousands of interviews. These highlighted his unorthodox style and stringent standards. While Rickover was not generally well liked by other Navy officials, he is largely responsible for the lack of any reactor accidents in the United States Navy. He was passed over twice for promotion to admiral, but strong support in the government led to his continued service and his eventual admiral appointment.
Admiral Rickover was finally forced to retire in 1982, after sixty-three years of service. In total, Rickover served longer than any other naval officer in history, and became the first person to receive two Congressional Gold Medals. The USS Hyman G. Rickover submarine was commissioned in 1984, one of the few ships to be named after a living person. Rickover died in Arlington, Virginia, on July 8, 1986, at the age of 86. He is buried in Arlington National Cemetery."

2. Background from [https://biography.yourdictionary.com/hyman-george-rickover]
"Hyman George Rickover Facts
Hyman George Rickover (1900-1986) was an officer in the U.S. Navy who played a significant and controversial role in ushering the Navy into the nuclear age. On active duty for almost 60 years, Rickover greatly influenced many nuclear power technicians who later served in the nascent military and civilian nuclear power industries.
Hyman George Rickover was born on January 27, 1900 (1898 according to school records), in the village of Makow, then in the Russian Empire, some 50 miles north of Warsaw. His father, Abraham, a tailor, emigrated to New York at the turn of the century. Around 1904 the senior Rickover sent for his family, wife Rachel (née Unger), daughter Fanny, and Hyman. Four years later they moved to the Lawndale neighborhood of Chicago, where Hyman attended public schools while working at various jobs as he grew older. He entered the U.S. Naval Academy in 1918.
Accounts of his years at Annapolis stress that he was a loner, perhaps because of anti-Semitism, but more likely because he preferred to concentrate on his studies. Commissioned an ensign in 1922, Rickover put in four years of sea duty before studying engineering at the Naval Postgraduate School. He then completed requirements for a Master's degree in electrical engineering at Columbia University in 1928. Promoted to lieutenant while at Columbia, Rickover met Ruth Masters, a student in international law and subsequently a scholar of some distinction. The two carried on a correspondence courtship and in 1931 were married by an Episcopal minister. They had one son, Robert Masters Rickover. Two years after his wife's death in 1972, Rickover married Eleonore Bednowicz, a navy nurse who retired thereafter and who survived him.

Sea Commands Elude Rickover
Accepted into submarine school in 1929, Rickover spent the next four years of his career in that branch of the navy. By the time his tour as engineer officer and then executive officer of S-48 was completed in 1933 Rickover hoped to receive command of a submarine. Instead, he did a two-year tour at a naval facility in Philadelphia, after which he served two years in engineering on the battleship New Mexico. In 1937 Rickover was promoted to lieutenant commander and given command of the antiquated minesweeper Finch. His hard-driving ways seem to have caused resentment, and he was relieved after three months.
Convinced by his assignment to Finch that his aspirations for a conventional career of command at sea would not be fulfilled, Rickover had already requested a transfer to the status of "Engineering Duty Only." Since 1916 the navy had officially differentiated between unrestricted line officers and EDO officers. Line officers were trained to command ships, being rotated to a variety of duties at sea and on shore to familiarize them with many aspects of the navy. In contrast, an EDO officer could design, maintain, modernize, and repair ships but could not command one.
His first billet as an EDO was at the Cavite Navy Yard in the Philippines, where he spent nearly two years. From Cavite he returned to the United States for assignment to the Bureau of Engineering, consolidated with another shore establishment into the Bureau of Ships (BuShips) in 1940. The navy was expanding rapidly, and Rickover's duties as head of the Electrical Section of BuShips put him in a key post to develop and improve electrical apparatus. His style of command—which in time would become a major part of his public persona—was considered unconventional as he ignored rank among his section's personnel and thought nothing of working on Sundays and late into the evenings.
Rickover, after 1942 a (temporary) captain, appealed for duty in a combat zone and in 1945 went to Okinawa with orders to develop and operate a ship repair base. The war ended soon thereafter, and, like many other officers in a postwar navy due for retrenchment, Rickover's future was in doubt.

Father of the U.S. Nuclear Navy
Within a decade, however, Rickover was to become world-famous as the father of the nuclear navy. Although popular accounts credit Rickover alone with the founding of the nuclear navy, the idea of a nuclear-powered submarine had been batted around within the navy since 1939. His immediate superior, Admiral Earle Mills, was in favor of it, as were others. In 1946 Rickover was sent as one of a team of engineering officers to Oak Ridge, Tennessee, to learn about nuclear technology. Rickover then served as Mills' assistant for nuclear matters until 1948 when the navy made a firm commitment to develop nuclear propulsion. Rickover then received two choice assignments: head of the Nuclear Power Branch of BuShips and, in 1949, chief of the newly established Naval Reactors Branch of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC).
These dual posts gave Rickover a great deal of autonomy in that he could initiate action from either his naval billet or from his post in the civilian-run AEC chain of authority. He gathered around him a group of bright and loyal officers who worked diligently to overcome the myriad problems in harnessing a nuclear reactor for shipboard power. By the early 1950s Rickover, still a captain, had succeeded in making himself known to the media and to influential congressmen as an officer who got things done, presumably indispensable to the navy's nuclear propulsion program. Although he was twice passed over for promotion to rear admiral—meaning that by navy regulations he would have to retire—pressure from congressional leaders led the secretary of the navy to order a reconsideration of Rickover's status, and he was promoted to rear admiral in 1953. Two years later Nautilus, the world's first nuclear submarine, was launched, and Rickover was about to become a living institution, compared most frequently to J. Edgar Hoover of the Federal Bureau of Investigation as a master of bureaucratic ways.
As the navy added more nuclear submarines to the fleet, and then surface ships, Rickover was retained on active duty through a series of special two-year re-appointments that allowed him to serve long past the mandatory retirement age of 64. He was promoted to vice admiral in 1963 and a decade later to admiral. By insisting that safety considerations required him to personally approve officers of all nuclear-powered ships Rickover exerted influence far beyond his official position. As later assignments took these officers throughout the navy, Rickover's impact was felt in many quarters.
By no means was his reputation confined to the navy. His organization, with some private funding, developed the nation's first nuclear-powered electrical generating facility at Shippingport, Pennsylvania, in 1957. Rickover himself had little more to do with it following completion, but many men who learned their trade with the Naval Reactors Branch went on to become major figures in the growing nuclear power field in the 1960s. After the launching of Russia's Sputnik satellite called into doubt America's supremacy in science, Rickover for a while also gained recognition as an authority on American education. He wrote several books criticizing what he considered its shortcomings and calling for standards of excellence like those he had always imposed upon himself.
Not until 1981 was he retired from active duty, and even then he remained well-known, ironically making the news several times in 1984 when it was revealed that he had received—indeed requested—expensive gifts from many contractors he had dealt with. Regardless of those accusations—and Rickover did not deny them in their entirety—his naval career will rank as one of the most important and controversial of all time.
His detractors claim that by the 1960s Rickover had become a conservative force in the navy, hindering both innovation in submarine design and the adoption of gasturbine technology for surface ships by placing excessive emphasis on a comparatively few costly nuclear-powered ships at the expense of more numerous, less expensive, conventionally-powered ships which could perform many missions just as well. His admirers, however, were numerous and pointed to his role in ushering the navy into the nuclear age and his stress upon excellence at a time when laxness seemed to be pervading the armed forces and society as a whole. He summed up his own philosophy in the saying, "The more you sweat in peace the less you bleed in war."

Further Reading on Hyman George Rickover
Clay Blair, Jr.'s, The Atomic Submarine and Admiral Rickover (1954) is an interesting biography of Rickover, in part because it was written with his cooperation and because it presents an early version of what became the Rickover mystique. Other studies of Rickover, more balanced in approach, are Norman Polmar and Thomas B. Allen, Rickover (1982) and Eugene Lewis, Public Entrepreneurship: Toward a Theory of Bureaucratic Political Power (1980). For the navy's move into the nuclear age see Vincent P. Davis, Postwar Defense Policy and the U.S. Navy, 1943-46 (1962) and Richard B. Hewlett and Francis Duncan, Nuclear Navy, 1946-1962 (1974). The problem of gifts from contractors is discussed by Patrick Tyler in Running Critical: The Silent War, Rickover and General Dynamics (1986). Rickover authored several books. Perhaps the best known are the ones that deal with education: American Education (1963), Education and Freedom (1959), and Swiss Schools and Ours: Why Theirs Are Better (1962)."

FYI COL Mikel J. Burroughs SMSgt Lawrence McCarter LTC Greg Henning SGT Gregory Lawritson SP5 Mark Kuzinski CWO3 (Join to see) PO1 William "Chip" Nagel SSgt Terry P. Maj Robert Thornton SFC (Join to see) SGT Steve McFarland MSG Andrew White CWO3 Dennis M.TSgt David L. Cynthia CroftSPC Nancy GreeneSSG Franklin Briant1stsgt Glenn Brackin Sgt Kelli Mays

The significance of his contributions and commands are unmeasurable.