USS Nautilus hydrogen cracking

The Nautilus was the first ship that had HY-80 in it, sometime in the '50s. They had all kinds of hydrogen cracking problems, such that some of the first subs they actually welded with austenitic stainless steel, because they couldn't solve the hydrogen cracking problem. It took them about 10 years to really get their arms around that, and then they had the Thresher problem and they had Subsafe. They didn't actually start putting HY-100 into ships until the late '80s. There were two ships before the Seawolf that they put modules — cylinders in the center of the ship — with HY-100. I'm familiar with that because my first student ever still works at Electric Boat as a welding engineer. He was in charge of welding up those HY-100 cylinders. When the Seawolf had all its cracking problems, the two captains who were in charge of the ships came to me and said, well, what about our two ships with the HY-100 that are out there? I said, don't worry about it, just inspect them when they come back in. They're not going to fall apart tomorrow — but they could fall apart if you didn't inspect them properly.