On the surface, submarines drawn like the Albacore do not steer very easily because this rounded bow rather pushes the water than it carves its way through it. In diving, it's a different story and, as one of the first American nuclear submarine commanders said, "The only thing we haven't done is come full circle!". .in a vertical plane, that is.
The first atomic submarine was the American Nautilus, which was completed in 1954, too early to have benefited from the lessons of the Albacore. It is only fair to say that the appearance of the Nautilus was a revolution in naval warfare comparable to that produced almost fifty years earlier by the Dreadnought with all its big guns.
Here we finally had a real submarine, able to stay submerged, but there, totally submerged, indefinitely, because its endurance was limited only by that of its crew.
The Nautilus reactor was cooled by a pressurized water system. Due to the novelty and, to some extent, uncertainty of atomic propulsion, the US Navy developed a liquid sodium-cooled reactor which it installed on the completed Seawolf in 1957. But this type of reactor was not a total success and it was removed after two years to be replaced by a pressurized water cooling system similar to that of the Nautilus. But before that, the Seawolf had nonetheless broken a record by continuously sailing underwater for 60 consecutive days during which it covered 13,000 miles. That record was broken in 1960, when the nearly 8,000-ton nuclear-powered Triton submarine—which was considered a giant at the time:twice the Seawolf and the Nautilus—dived around the world, covering 41,500 miles in 83 days at an average speed of 18 knots.
The expeditions to the North Pole of these first nuclear submarines, which led them under the Arctic ice, demonstrated vividly that the Americans were ready to revolutionize naval warfare. Indeed, by surfacing in the middle of the pack, these submarines were unlikely to encounter opposition except from one of their fellows.
In the Soviet Union, it seems that the first nuclear submarine was completed in 1958. Surprisingly, there were apparently no prototypes and the first series, the "Novembers", comprised 13 Nautilus-sized vessels. One such unit, the Leninsky Komsomol, was photographed in the middle of the ice, supposedly at the North Pole.