It’s National Nuclear Submarine Building Month! (NaNuSuBuMo)
Everyone has at least one submarine inside them
The Event
National Nuclear Submarine Building Month began in 1953 as a daunting but straightforward challenge: to build a nuclear submarine in just thirty days.
Each year, in November, thousands of people around the world begin to hammer aluminium, determined to end the month with a fully armed, Typhoon class nuclear submarine, or bigger. They start the month as elementary school teachers, mechanics, or stay-at-home parents. They end it as freelance defence contractors. Well, maybe a few of them do. I mean someone has to actually manage it, no?
Getting Involved
Why join in? One word: motivation.
Perhaps you have seen a submarine and thought ‘I can do better than that!’ Or maybe you can feel a submarine inside you, bursting to get out. Perhaps, like so many of us, you have an embarrassing half-built tail fin left in a warehouse and forgotten.
That’s where NaNuSuBuMo comes in! Participation means giving yourself the whole month to work on that nuclear sub of your dreams. You won’t be alone either. You will have the support of a community of like-minded amateur submarine builders. You can make that promise to yourself and them (but no one else, especially no one in the police or intelligence agencies) to go for it and just maybe build the damned thing.
Rules
We keep the rules simple and straightforward:
- Welding starts at 12:00: a.m. on November 1 and ends 11:59:59 p.m. on November 30, local time.
- All submarines must be powered by a nuclear reactor and capable of firing nuclear warheads.
- Tell as few people as possible that you are participating. Try and build quietly, in a shed, at night. If anyone asks, just say you’re working on a large bucket. In most cases this will likely turn out to be true, anyway.
Hints and Tips
Drafts
Remember that the first draft of a nuclear submarine always looks bad. Most builders never let other people see it, for fear of being laughed at. After week one, you will probably end up with a vague, tube-shaped thing that glows at night. That’s fine! Everyone has to start somewhere. Take a break. Go for a walk. When you come back you might have some idea about where to put the launch pipes.
Strategies
There are two main types of people that you find in the world of amateur weaponry: planners and pantsers.
The Planners are those that come up with a plan for their submarine in advance. They will start with full crew manifests, architecture plans and warheads sourced. They will have a beginning, a middle and an end. They’re on a war footing from the off. NaNuSuBuMo gives them that little push they need to go further than that and actually fail to make something.
The Pansters are those that tend to go in with a vague notion. Maybe they have a sort of cigar shape in mind, or the name of the captain. They kind of just figure out the rest along the way, and hope that nothing explodes. Even if that happens, with NaNuSuBuMo, it doesn’t matter. You can just get creative, pick up the glowing shrapnel and start over!
So which are you? Planner or pantser? Both are valid, but whichever you are, the important thing is to just get the work done, quickly, quietly and without the wrong people knowing about it.
Getting Your Submarine Published
Of course, it would be somewhat unrealistic to think you could go straight from building your first submarine to getting it published in the global registry of dangerous weapons, and then maybe even getting paid to use it to obliterate a city.
You might well end up not so much with a ‘submarine’ as a ‘sub-par-ine’. But that’s fine. Even if it looks like giant robot Dachshund that’s been run over by a bus, it’s still yours. Your very first home-made nuclear submarine. And you will have learned a lot on the way. You can use this knowledge to build your second, your third and who knows, maybe even a whole fleet!
There are markets for your work right now in Russia and North Korea, not to mention on the dark web, so why not see how far you can take things? Who knows, maybe you could wake up tomorrow (if you’re lucky) and be the next surprise headline!
3,2,1 … Fire!
So, what are you waiting for? Grab some plutonium and get ready to own that first blank sheet of metal.
Good luck and up periscope! Remember: if you believe you’re building a nuclear submarine, then we believe you’re building a nuclear submarine too.
