AN-1: America s Plan for Submarine Aircraft Carriers
America would ultimately invest heavily in massive supercarriers that, while unable to hide from enemy missiles, offer a great deal more capability and versatility than the AN-1 submarine aircraft carrier ever could.
Today, America’s nuclear-powered aircraft carriers and ballistic missile submarines represent two of the most potent forms of force projection wielded by any force in military history. For a short time in the late 1950s, America had plans to put them together into a single GI Joe style superweapon: A submarine aircraft carrier.
The nuclear days before we got MAD
For a short four years after the United States dropped the only atomic bombs ever used in anger on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, America enjoyed a monopoly on the destructive power of splitting the atom. But on August 29, 1949, America’s former World War II allies in the Soviet Union conducted their own nuclear test at the Semipalatinsk
Original Artwork, CLICK for HIGH RESOLUTION: In the late 1950s the US Navy experimented with the concept of aircraft carrying submarines armed with jet fighters. Several submarines capable of carrying aircraft-sized cruise missiles had been built as a stop-gap and contingency to ballistic missile submarines: converted fleet boats USS Tunny and Barbero were fitted with external hangars on the aft deck for trials, each carrying two Regulus-I missiles. These were followed by two diesel-electric cruise missile submarines of the Grayback Class were put into service, each with four missiles, and one submarine of the Halibut Class with five missiles. If these boats could carry such large missiles, then the US Navy supposed that they could alternatively carry manned aircraft.