Our second attempt to get under the North Pole meets with failure. We retreat to the submarine base in Pearl Harbor Hawaii and wait for a change in the ice conditions so that we can try one more time.
The ice conditions finally change and Nautilus must leave for our next Arctic probe. We need a reason for leaving Pearl Harbor suddenly and the perfect excuse magically appears. A crisis arises in the Mideast! Eisenhower sends the marines into Lebanon. Maybe there's going to be another war. Let's get Nautilus back to New London. How convenient!
Just after midnight, July 23rd we take the reactor critical and get under way from the pier in Pearl Harbor for our third, final and it turns out, successful trip under the North Pole.
But now we have a new problem that no one has anticipated. Unfortunately the Lebanon crises means that the pilots flying the DEW line, the early warning radar system between the US and Russia, are now on a special alert. There are not supposed to be any American submarines in that area. This means that if either the Americans or the Russians detect us, they'll drop depth charges and any other anti-submarine weapons they might have on hand.
Are we concerned? You bet we are! Nautilus is not a quiet submarine. Our reduction gears make a lot of noise. Diesel submarines use quiet electric motors when they're submerged. We depend upon huge reduction gears and varying turbine speeds. Since we're not as silent as we would like to be we depend upon our ability to go deep and move fast. The seas are often rough in this part of the world and since waves are a surface phenomenon we can run any attacker into a following sea and cause him all kinds of grief. We also have a smaller turning radius than the surface vessels because we operate in three dimensions and heel in like an airplane when we make a tight turn.
The deeper you go in the ocean, the more layers of varying water temperature you run into. These isothermal layers distort the sonar signal and make submarine detection very difficult. They know you're there, but they're not sure exactly where you are.
Add all of this to the fact that we're not going to run out of fuel or oxygen and it makes Nautilus a very difficult prey. But we're still concerned! Even difficult prey sometimes gets caught. Especially in shallow water!
Here is a picture I took from the stern of Nautilus showing her tied up to a pier at the submarine base in Pearl Harbor shortly after we arrived from the Aleutian Islands.